The Adams administration announced on Tuesday that it has filed an amicus brief in support of Derlis Snaider Chusin Toaquiza, an Ecuadorian migrant attending Grover Cleveland High School in Ridgewood, who was arrested after attending a routine immigration hearing at a Manhattan courthouse on June 4th. He filed a habeas corpus petition with the Southern District of New York on June 6th, and is currently being held in a Texas detention center. According to Gothamist, Derlis went without a change of clothes for two weeks behind bars before his family was able to deposit funds into his commissary account.
Derlis and his family arrived in the United States in March 2024 through California and immediately applied for asylum, citing racial discrimination in their native Ecuador for being members of an indigenous tribe. He and his parents were meant to meet outside their respective courtrooms after they attended their separate hearings at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan on June 4th, but they were never reunited after Derlis was arrested by immigration authorities, despite his case being postponed to October.
“Every day, our administration is working to make New York City safer and the best place to raise a family, but we know that when immigrant communities are not able to use city services, it makes us all less safe,” Eric Adams said in a statement. “Once again, we are taking legal action in support of another young, New York City student, who was doing what he was supposed to do in attending a mandatory, routine immigration hearing.”
The mayor has consistently encouraged migrants to continue going about their daily lives in the face of the Trump administration’s strong-arm immigration policies, emphasizing that they should continue to send their children to city schools, call 911 for emergencies, and go to hospitals when needed. Nonetheless, a climate of fear has descended upon immigrant communities, with reports indicating that some are keeping their children out of schools, and neighborhoods losing once-vibrant public life. Immigrants make up forty percent of the New York City’s population, and half of the Big Apple’s nine million residents live in mixed-status households.
Corporation Counsel Muriel Goode-Truffant excoriated federal immigration authorities for their methods. “Tactics like those used to detain Derlis present many City residents with an impossible choice: risk detention by attending court proceedings or run the same risk by failing to attend. Such tactics undermine the public interest,” she writes in the city’s amicus brief in support of Derlis. Free access to courts is a pillar of the rule of law. Our judicial system cannot work as it should, as it must, if courthouses are treated as convenient places to spring traps.”
ICE arrests at immigration courts have become a national political flashpoint, and in New York City is not exempt, with former mayoral candidate and current City Comptroller Brad Lander being arrested as he tried to accompany a migrant out of the building after a hearing. The Department of Homeland Security initially stated that Lander had assaulted one of its officers, a claim the federal agency made against Derlis as well – both were later retracted.
The city government has filed amicus briefs in at least two other cases, those of Dylan Contreras and Jose Luis, who, like Derlis, are high school students who were taken by ICE after attending immigration hearings.
