In a rare win against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement last month, a judge ordered that a detained 19-year-old asylum-seeker be released back to his family.

Oliver Mata Velasquez’s arrest outside a Buffalo, New York, court hearing on his asylum process was unlawful, U.S. District Judge Lawrence Vilardo wrote.

“Mata Velasquez followed all the rules,” Vilardo wrote, “On the other hand, the government changed the rules by fiat, applied them retroactively, and pulled the rug out from under Mata Velasquez and many like him who tried to do things the right way.”

In the weeks since, lawyers for Mata Velasquez said Vilardo’s order could influence similar cases and, they hope, lead to ICE releasing others arrested in immigration court.

Now, the New York Civil Liberties Union and other organizations have sued the Trump administration, seeking to end the practice of courthouse arrests nationwide.

“The court was rightfully outraged at the detention to begin with.”

Mata Velasquez was one of hundreds of people taken by ICE during its new practice of stationing agents outside of immigration courts around the country to make arrests when people show up for routine hearings. While judges have released several people arrested in the stakeouts on bond, few have ordered their outright release.

That’s what makes Mata Velasquez’s case so unique, said attorney Amy Belsher, who worked on the case and is the director of Immigrants’ Rights Litigation at the New York Civil Liberties Union.

“Outright release is really rare in an immigration case,” she said. “The court was rightfully outraged at the detention to begin with.”

The order could open the door for other defendants to find similar relief, said Sarah Gillman, director of strategic U.S. litigation with Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights and one of Mata Velasquez’s attorneys.

“We hope the decision sends a strong message about the actions of the government here,” she said. “I think that this ruling could definitely have an impact on these cases.”

“What’s going on with this administration is that they are testing the limits of everything,” Gillman added. “I think in Oliver’s case, the court sent a resounding message back, saying, ‘No.’ ”

The NYCLU, representing New York City-based immigrant advocacy organizations African Communities Together and The Door, is now asking a federal judge to overturn the Trump administration policies allowing for arrests in immigration court. They cite the cases of 10 people they allege were detained after showing up for otherwise routine immigration hearings.

“These policies are unlawful,” the lawsuit, filed in the Southern District of New York, argues. “Such arrests chill access to the courts and impede the fair administration of justice.”

The parties are due for an initial hearing on October 10. (The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.)

New ICE Tactics

In the lawsuit, the NYCLU attorneys argue the Trump administration changed two key policies that have laid the groundwork for the arrests in immigration court.

First, they say, ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection rescinded a Biden-era policy that formalized a long-standing practice, banning so-called courthouse arrests.

Second, the attorneys argue, the Executive Office for Immigration Review issued a new policy that empowered immigration judges to dismiss a broader category of cases than before.

Those two changes, the lawsuit alleges, have put in place a new practice where the government’s immigration lawyers move to dismiss cases verbally, a judge grants the dismissal, and then a migrant is detained shortly thereafter while still in the court building.

“ICE officers — in coordination with DHS attorneys — station themselves in immigration court, including in the hallways or even in courtrooms, so that they can immediately arrest and detain individuals upon conclusion of their court hearings,” the lawsuit says.

That’s exactly what happened to Mata Velasquez.

On the morning of May 21, Mata Velasquez showed up for a routine immigration hearing in downtown Buffalo. The courthouse, located at 130 Delaware Avenue, is in a nondescript office building located near Niagara Square and Buffalo City Hall.

Born in Venezuela, Mata Velasquez arrivedin the U.S. in September 2024 after waiting for an appointment via the CBPOne application, a process put in place by the Biden administration. Once in Buffalo, he lived with an uncle and, like other migrants in the city, found work in a local hotel as a housekeeper.

Following his court hearing, his lawyers later said, he took the elevator down from the third floor. Waiting for him in the small lobby were four ICE agents.

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Mata Velasquez speaks only Spanish, but the agents had paperwork in English and demanded that he sign it, according to both Mata Velasquez’s lawyers and his uncle. His uncle described them as wearing civilian clothes, not ICE uniforms.

Mata Velasquez was then detained and sent to the ICE detention center located in Batavia, about 40 miles east of the courthouse.

“He was really scared when they pressured him to sign this form,” his uncle, who requested anonymity for fear of being targeted by ICE, said in an interview. “My nephew is a good person. He doesn’t have a criminal record or any tattoos. He’s a good person, he’s a kid.”

Mata Velasquez’s lawyers, in their successful petition to have him released, said he was afraid while in the Batavia facility and routinely harassed by others.

“Oliver is terrified and experiencing the harms of being in a carceral setting for the first time,” that petition said. “He has experienced harassment from at least 10 other detainees, many of whom are much older than him. Officers threatened to place him in solitary confinement and Oliver is very scared of being put in such isolating conditions.”

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Solitary confinement is a standard practice at the Batavia facility, which uses the isolated cells more than all but four other ICE facilities in the country. Prior reporting by The Intercept and its partners found that solitary confinement is a frequent tool used by ICE, and occasionally results in detainees taking their own lives.

Mata Velasquez ultimately spent 26 days in the Batavia facility before Vilardo,the federal judge in Buffalo, ordered him released.

“Rarely do we ever get somebody’s outright relief granted,” said Jillian Nowak, managing attorney at Prisoners’ Legal Services of New York. “And I’m hoping we can use this as a foundational decision to pump the brakes on some of these detentions.”

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Bid to End Court Arrests

Facing an uphill battle in getting all courthouse arrestees released, the legal advocacy organizations are shifting their strategy to challenge as a system what they argue are unlawful policies. Belsher, of the NYCLU, said doing so is necessary to combat the Trump administration’s crackdown on migrants.

“This is a broader strategy of the government’s, right? Just flood the system,” Belsher said. “They are causing enormous harm by just doing unlawful things at scale.”

Every individual case requires intensive resources.

“They are doing this to hundreds of people,” she said, “and thousands of people are terrified to go to their hearings because of it.”

The lawsuit argues that allowing the courthouse arrests to continue will only enableICE to detain more people, putting more strain on detention centers that are already at or over capacity. Through June, data shows that ICE has doubled arrests compared to 2024. The majority of those arrested have no criminal record, despite the rhetoric published by ICE and the White House.

“Due to the increase in arrests and related overcrowding at many of its detention facilities, ICE has been detaining noncitizens swept up in immigration courthouse arrests in transitional holding facilities for prolonged periods — in some cases over a week — where they lack access to counsel and are in conditions wholly inadequate to safely and humanely detain people,” the suit alleges.

In Western New York, CBP offices at the Peace and Rainbow bridges as well as other CBP stations have been used to detain migrant families including toddlers and those with life-threatening diseases.

Statewide, four county sheriffs have newly agreed to allow ICE to detain migrants in their jails. In New York City, arrests and detentions in the federal building at 26 Federal Plaza have raised alarm among immigration advocates.

Gillman, one of Mata Velasquez’s lawyers, said she hopes the Vilardo ruling and subsequent NYCLU lawsuit shifts the tide.

“As the judge wrote in his decision, the government … can’t just kind of change the goalpost and say, ‘Now we’re just going to go out and arrest people without any type of process, without any type of due process,’” she said. “As a lawyer, the legal decision that the judge made is very, in my mind, impactful.”

The post Teen Immigrant’s Release Propels Lawsuit to End ICE’s Courthouse Arrests appeared first on The Intercept.

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