On Monday, New York’s Law Department filed an amicus brief supporting a Bronx high school student who was detained by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement on his way out from a scheduled immigration hearing at a federal building in downtown Manhattan last week. The document marks the most significant rift between City Hall and the White House on immigration, as Mayor Adams had frequently spoken favorably of Trump and “border czar” Tom Homan’s policies prior to the student’s arrest.
Last week, Adams had distanced the city government from the situation and emphasized that the detainment “did not happen in the school,” which he had repeatedly said was a safe place for the city’s new migrants. “Children should be in school. I told parents that, and I lived up to that. We have had no raids in our schools.” Whether or not schools are indeed sites where migrants might be targeted, reporting has emerged showing that many are staying home due to a climate of fear caused by Trump’s mass deportation policy.
Speaking at a press conference on Tuesday, after the amicus brief from the city’s Law Department was filed, Adams appeared to draw a harder line against the federal government’s actions. “I don’t want people to be deterred from going to court, because if you deter people from following out the process then you can create a level of people being fearful of our court system,” he told reporters at his weekly briefing in City Hall’s Blue Room, later adding that “we are going to continue to make this a safe place for all residents of the city.”
The detained student, 20-year-old Dylan Lopez Contreras, fled his home country of Venezuela and turned himself in at the US border last April through a Biden-era entry program that allowed him to reside in the country as his asylum case progressed in US immigration court. Now living with his mother and younger siblings, who were already in the city, Dylan showed up for his hearing to check in with immigration officials on Monday of last week as part of this process, only to find himself the target of a new strategy by the Trump administration and ICE that results in their immediate detainment.
In New York and across the country, government lawyers have asked judges to dismiss migrants’ immigration court cases so that they can be immediately reopened as “expedited removal” cases, putting them through a swift deportation process that bypasses the immigration court system. Asked what he thinks migrants should do as they head into these hearings, Adams said they “should seek their counsel, that’s what lawyers are for.” Migrants are not provided counsel for immigration proceedings in the same way that those accused of crimes can benefit from a public defender, and the number of migrants showing up without representation is the highest it’s been in nearly two decades.
Dylan Lopez Contreras remains detained in western Pennsylvania, over 300 miles away from his family.
