A 16-year-old public high school student in the Bronx was arrested at a check-in with ICE agents in Lower Manhattan on Thursday — marking the latest in a growing number of children and young adults swept up by the Trump administration’s deportation dragnet.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security confirmed the teen’s arrest in a statement Friday. Joel Camas, a student at Gotham Collaborative High School, was being held at an Office of Refugee Resettlement youth shelter in The Bronx, his attorneys said.
Joel, who immigrated to the U.S. from Ecuador in 2022, had been living with relatives after his mother recently self-deported, according to his attorneys.
The New York Times, which wrote about Joel’s case ahead of his appointment this week, first reported his arrest at that appointment.
Joel and his mother came to the U.S. fleeing gang violence with his mother in 2022, according to the habeas writ. The two didn’t have a lawyer, and lost their asylum cases and were ordered removed by an immigration judge in February of 2024, his attorneys said. Joel was later connected to legal resources, who applied for other relief as he was still a minor, which he was granted in family court this past April.
Despite that protection, however, ICE still required him to report to the agency for a check-in where he was arrested on Thursday.
“His mother self-deported to Ecuador, and Camas remained in the USA alone as a minor. Fortunately, now Mr. Camas will be reunited with family,” Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement confirming his arrest.
When THE CITY then asked about Joel’s SIJS status, McLaughlin replied only that “he has a final deportation order.”
According to Joel’s lawyers at the NYCLU and The Door, who filed an emergency writ of habeas corpus Friday seeking to have a federal judge halt his deportation and order his release, Joel had qualified for Special Immigrant Juvenile status in April. That means a state family court judge and the federal government had agreed he had been “abused, abandoned, or neglected” by one or both parents and thus might qualify for lawful permanent residency.
“ICE’s actions of arresting a child – with legal status reserved for particularly vulnerable minors – at a routine check-in is breathtakingly cruel and a clear violation of U.S. immigration law and the Constitution,” said Elizabeth Gyori, senior staff attorney at the New York Civil Liberties Union. “When the Trump administration punishes children with lawful status for following the rules, it turns our justice system into a farce.”
Once a person qualifies for SIJS, it can take years to secure a green card due to a backlog tens of thousands of people long, and a limited number of these types of visas issued each year.
The Biden administration had halted deportations of these young people saying DHS’s resources were better spent on “higher priority cases, such as noncitizens who pose a threat to national security, public safety, and border security.” But the Trump administration withdrew that directive in June, prompting immigrants rights groups to sue, in a case that is ongoing.
“Many young people with special immigrant status are getting detained all over the country,” said Beth Baltimore, the Deputy Director of Legal Services Center at The Door. “It’s not something we’ve seen before.”
The Trump administration, Baltimore said, is effectively “ saying they don’t have any protection — that’s it. Sorry.”
Nicole Brownstein, a spokesperson for the city’s Education Department, said the agency was “very saddened” about Joel’s arrest. “This is a student who should be at school today with his classmates,” she added.
An Expanding Dragnet
While immigration courthouse arrests in New York City have targeted adults and unfolded in public courthouses often in view of court watchers and photographers, ICE agents have arrested dozens of children behind closed doors at ICE check-ins, which occur either inside the agency’s offices at 26 Federal Plaza, or at one of three satellite offices ICE operates through a subcontractor.
ICE data from the Deportation Data Project shows federal agents in the New York City area arrested 48 children in June and July as part of a wave of immigration arrests across the country. Of those children, 32 have already been deported. More than 60 children born after 2008 between late January and late July. More recent data is not yet available, in part because of the government shutdown.
Among them have been a number of public school students including Mamadou Mouctar Diallo, Joselyn Chipantiza-Sisalema, Dylan Lopez Contreras.
In August, the summer THE CITY reported on the case of a 6-year-old and her mother who were arrested at an ICE check-in at 26 Federal Plaza. The mother and daughter were swiftly sent to a family detention in Texas before they were deported to Ecuador days later.
The Trump administration has announced other efforts to target young immigrants, including a new effort targeting unaccompanied immigrant youth turning 18, encouraging them to leave the country with cash payments of $2,500.
Related