Lawyers for a New York City Council data analyst from Venezuela filed a petition in federal court Tuesday demanding his release, a day after agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement took him into custody in Bethpage during a routine immigration check-in.
The analyst, identified by the Department of Homeland Security as Rafael Andrés Rubio Bohórquez, was seized early Monday at a federal building located in a Bethpage office park. Hours later, Council Speaker Julie Menin said at an emergency City Hall news conference that he was legally authorized to work in the United States until October and not a criminal.
“A regular check-in quickly went awry,” Menin said Monday evening at the news conference, where she demanded his immediate release.
“He was taken in and he was removed to a detention center,” she said.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, the parent agency of ICE, said the man entered the country on a tourist visa that mandated his departure from the United States by Oct. 22, 2017, and therefore, is living here illegally. McLaughlin said he has a criminal record, including for assault, but she did not provide details.
Lawyers for the staffer filed the habeas corpus petition at U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, said Chloe Chik, communications director for the New York Legal Assistance Group, which she said filed the petition. Chik declined to respond to Homeland Security’s statement about the staffer and his alleged criminal history, or his alleged presence in the country illegally.
Also on Tuesday, supporters of the city employee rallied outside the federal building on Varick Street in lower Manhattan, some directing profanities at ICE and all expressing outrage at his continued detainment.
“Today, it’s our brother. Today, it’s our colleague. Today it’s our friend,” Councilwoman Mercedes Narcisse (D-Brooklyn) said.
Check-ins, one of the ways the nation’s immigration enforcers monitor immigrants with precarious legal statuses, are mandatory, and failing to show up puts an immigrant in jeopardy of deportation. Under President Donald Trump — who as a candidate promised to carry out “largest deportation operation in American history” — seizing immigrants at check-in appointments is one of the methods his administration has employed to carry out that promise. The number of detained immigrants has hit historic highs.
The council learned the employee had been detained in Bethpage — on the second floor of a nondescript office building the federal government rents — after he used his one phone call to reach the council’s human resources office and ask for help.
The analyst, who as of late Monday was jailed at the federal building on Varick Street, is likely on a path to be removed from the United States “unless it can be stopped,” U.S. Rep. Dan Goldman (D-Brooklyn/Manhattan) said at the Monday news conference. Information about whether the city employee was still being held at the Manhattan jail was not immediately available late Tuesday.
Menin said that when she called the listed phone number for the Bethpage facility, she couldn’t get through.
“I’m an elected official running a body and I cannot contact a federal facility? What kind of accountability or transparency is that? Can you imagine what it’s like for a family whose loved one goes missing? What are his family members going through right now?” Menin said.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani tweeted criticism of the detention.
“I am outraged to hear a New York City Council employee was detained in Nassau County by federal immigration officials at a routine immigration appointment. This is an assault on our democracy, on our city and our values. I am calling for his immediate release and will continue to monitor the situation,” he said.
Menin eventually reached the Homeland Security Department, which provided little information, she said, except that the man would likely be moved to a third location to be detained.
Immigration officers under Trump, in similar circumstances, “try to whisk them down to Texas or Louisiana,” Goldman said, where administration officials “have pretty much total control over the immigration judges.”
Goldman noted some of the judges — who all work for the sitting president and his administration — have been fired for ruling in favor of immigrants.
Newsday’s Bahar Ostadan contributed to this story.
Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.