The admission by President Trump’s Justice Department this week that Immigration and Customs Enforcement provided false information to justify mass arrests at immigration courts has sparked fury among attorneys and advocates, and demands that those detained in the crackdown be freed.
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan told a judge on Tuesday that an ICE memorandum they had repeatedly cited to defend the agency’s immigration court arrests in an ongoing lawsuit did not, in fact, justify the practice. They said the office had been repeatedly told otherwise by ICE.
The New York Civil Liberties Union, one of the firms that brought the underlying suit challenging the lawfulness of courthouse arrests, is slated to formally address the revelation in the coming weeks. In a filing Wednesday, lawyers told the court the implications would be “far reaching.”
“Every single person who has been impacted by ICE’s erroneous interpretation of their own policy should be made whole,” Murad Awawdeh, the president and CEO of the New York Immigration Coalition, told The News Friday. “That means reopening their cases, freeing them if they’re being detained, and if they’ve been deported, allowing them back to continue their cases here in the United States.”
Barry Williams/New York Daily News
Federal law enforcement officers take an immigrant into custody inside the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in Manhattan on July 23, 2025. (Barry Williams/New York Daily News)
Lower Manhattan’s 26 Federal Plaza has served as an epicenter of immigration court arrests since Trump’s return to power, with chilling scenes of families torn apart playing out in the building’s windowless hallways almost daily last summer.
More than half of those detained in the city last year were swept up by agents at the 46-floor facility towering over Foley Square, including more than 1,000 people and at least 150 children, according to ICE figures obtained by the Deportation Data Project and analyzed by The CITY.
“We’ve witnessed thousands of New Yorkers showing up to 26 Federal Plaza going to court for their check-in,” Awadeh said. “These are individuals who are literally following the process by the letter of the law, and instead of having the opportunity to fight their cases, they were trapped and detained,”
Beth Baltimore from The Door, a nonprofit that provides support to young New Yorkers in need and one of the suit’s plaintiffs, told the Daily News she was still assessing the potential ramifications.
“It is such a shock,” Baltimore said. “The last year has been very frightening for so many people impacted.”
In apologetically alerting Manhattan Federal Judge Kevin Castel to the “material mistaken statement of fact” Tuesday, prosecutors said they would withdraw four briefs that relied on revised policy guidance issued by ICE’s acting director, Todd Lyons, in a May 2025 memo.
The prosecutors said Castel would need to revisit his September ruling that allowed immigration court arrests to continue and rejected the civil rights groups’ argument that the practice violated the Administrative Procedure Act. Castel’s opinion relied on guidance ICE issued in a 2021 memo and in the superseding May 2025 memo, finding arrests were permitted at or near immigration courts.
In the decision prosecutors now say he must receive new briefing on, Castel wrote, “The 2025 guidance was more expansive and permissive,” and found the groups had failed to show they would succeed in proving ICE’s courthouse arrest policies were “arbitrary, capricious or otherwise not in accordance with law.”
While Castel allowed the immigration court arrests to continue in his September decision, he granted a victory to the plaintiffs by halting a directive by the Justice Department that had ordered immigration judges to quickly dismiss cases to ease agents’ ability to make arrests.
Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
Federal agents detain a woman leaving a court hearing in immigration court at the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building on March 4. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
The judge has now given lawyers for the groups party to the suit, The Door and African Communities Together, two weeks to respond to the government’s admission that it muddied the record.
Castel has also ordered federal prosecutors and ICE to preserve all past, present, and future communications about the memo. Democrat officials have also sought answers from ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, including Rep. Dan Goldman (D-Manhattan/Brooklyn), who wrote the agency heads Friday demanding a full accounting of everyone targeted under the erroneously applied policy.
Alison Cutler, the supervising attorney from the immigration protection unit at NY Legal Assistance Group, which is not involved in the underlying suit, was hopeful the acknowledgment would aid people arrested in immigration courts across the U.S. fighting deportation.
“This is only going to be helpful in that we can now cite this and say, ‘Look, ICE has admitted that these detentions were not authorized,’ and then that will allow us to further that argument,” Cutler said.
The attorney said while the admission may have been startling, it wasn’t surprising.
“I think all of us who have been going to court from day one of the court detentions, this isn’t shocking to any of us, because we’ve been seeing ICE actively not following the law. Not only have we been seeing physical violence in the hallways, but there’s been institutional violence, as well as them circumventing folks’ due process rights and their constitutional rights,” Cutler said.
In response to the development this week, a DHS spokesperson said ICE agents would not be deterred.
“There is no change in policy. We will continue to arrest illegal aliens at immigration courts following their proceedings,” an agency spokesperson said in a statement to The News. “It is commonsense to take them into custody following the completion of their removal proceedings.
“Nothing prohibits arresting a lawbreaker where you find them.”
Many of those taken into custody after immigration court hearings in lower Manhattan, as the Daily News observed last year, were not positioned at the completion of removal proceedings. They were targeted seconds after appearing with asylum applications before judges who gave them dates to return to court, appearing to indicate they were not at imminent risk of deportation.
DHS did not respond to The News’s follow-up inquiries about what authorizes ICE to target people in immigration court as they pursue claims.
While saying its arguments on one of the lawsuit’s claims would need to be re-submitted, the DOJ in its Tuesday filing said the error had no bearing on its legal positions on ICE’s right to arrest people in other courthouses. In New York’s state courts, people are protected from being detained by ICE under New York’s sanctuary policies, which the Trump administration has sought to punish New York over by interfering with billions in federal funding for critical infrastructure projects.
Judges and prosecutors in immigration court are part of the executive branch, answerable to the Trump-appointed heads of the Justice Department — unlike in the federal court system, in which judges work for the judicial branch.
Cutler said that Tuesday’s bombshell would further erode the Trump administration’s credibility in the courtroom. Judges across America have in recent months taken it to task, like Minnesota Judge Michael Davis, who in January said the administration had stretched the legal process to its breaking point “in an attempt to deny noncitizens their due process rights.”
“This is not business as usual. Our courts and our court system is not functioning as it normally has in the past. I mean, this is an attack on our democracy and an attack on all of our institutions, our entire rule of law,” Cutler said.
“ICE’s actions, the government’s actions, these material misrepresentations, are undermining the trust and credibility, not just in immigration court, but our entire judicial system. And I think federal judges are starting to see this, and this is only going to be further proof of that, and it can help support our work.”