Over 100 people in the New York City area were detained by federal authorities over the past week, new data obtained by THE CITY reveals, part of a broad, multi-agency sweep that has sent shockwaves across immigration communities nationwide.
A spokesperson for one of the agencies involved, Kenneth M. Heino of the New York Division of the Federal Drug Enforcement Agency, said that teams of federal agents had arrested around 100 people in New York City and the surrounding area by Tuesday evening.
While a handful of those arrests have made headlines, little is known about where many of those arrested are being detained. New York City-based immigration lawyers told THE CITY that they are struggling to locate many of them, and they fear the situation is only going to get worse as the Trump administration begins shipping people to far off sites.
Typically, people detained by ICE in New York City are sent to Orange County jail in Goshen, N.Y. where about 70 ICE detainees have been held in recent months, or the much larger Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Phillipsburg, Pennsylvania, which holds about 1,200 detainees on an average day. Some are also taken to a warehouse-like lockup in Elizabeth, New Jersey.
Federally-funded workers who normally have access to such facilities in order to educate detained immigrants about their rights were temporarily barred from the Moshannon facility on Jan. 22, when Trump’s Department of Justice issued a stop-work order that was lifted days later after legal defense groups sued.
Meanwhile, ICE hasn’t issued a single press release with details about the New York City detentions, and the local field office hasn’t returned repeated calls and emails requesting comment since the raids began.
The information blackout comes as the agency has continued to tweet daily arrest numbers, boasting more than 1,000 arrests a day across the country, about a four-fold increase from September of last year, the most recent data available from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Local Democrats have also been iced out of lines of communication. On Monday, Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, the House Minority Leader, said he’d had no contact with ICE on their recent activity in the region.
In an interview with THE CITY Friday afternoon, the DEA’s Special Agent in Charge, Frank Tarentino, one of the various federal agencies involved in the immigration efforts, acknowledged the joint-agency teams don’t exclusively arrest people suspected of criminal activity.
“The reality in which we are operating is, we target the violent, illegal criminal, but we may encounter people that have immigration status issues,” Tarentino said. “The unintended consequence of going in there is you find others that maybe have immigration issues and it’s our responsibility as law enforcement officers, law enforcement professionals, to ensure that we exercise the rule of law.”
Tarentino’s office was unable to provide a breakdown how many of the around 100 arrests made by the task forces were of people with underlying criminal offenses and how many had civil immigration violations. He said about 30 federal interagency teams are on patrol around the five boroughs, Westchester and Long Island and declined to say how long the operation would continue.
Operating in Darkness
Migrants detained by ICE are first sent to an arraignment type court hearing at one of two sites in lower Manhattan. The court does not provide free representation, so only about 25% of people have a lawyer, according to advocacy groups.
If they remain detained after the hearing, people are typically then sent to Orange County, Moshannon or Elizabeth.
The Trump administration has also begun sending what officials label as “high threat” migrants to Guantanamo Bay, part of a larger effort to ship undocumented immigrants out of the United States using military resources. Officials have also vowed to send detained migrants to mega jails in El Salvador, where thousands of Central American detainees are currently held with no access to outdoors, visitors, or any basic programs.
But even the dispersed locations inside the United States have made it difficult for lawyers to contact their clients.
“With ICE detaining people out in Moshannon — and it will probably be more locations around the country soon — it’s harder for us to know of and get in contact with people to represent them,” said Sharone Schwartz Kaufman, who heads the Legal Aid Society’s Immigration Law Unit.
Detained immigrants don’t have the right to a court-appointed attorney but can retain one on their own. Approximately 25% of all immigrants have lawyers, and those with legal representation have a much better chance of a better outcome, according to research by the Vera Institute for Justice, a New York City based advocacy organization.
New York City public defender organizations have typically relied on tips from family members and so-called Legal Orientation Programs (LOPS) who have direct access to migrants inside detention centers.
But on Jan. 22, the LOPs, funded by Congress since 2003, were temporarily blocked from entering Moshannon and other locations after the U.S. Department of Justice issued a memo ordering them to “stop work immediately.”
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem oversees an operation to arrest and deport immigrants in The Bronx, Jan. 28, 2025. Credit: Secretary Kristi Noem/X
Days later, the DOJ reversed its decision to freeze federal funding due to an executive order signed by Trump. The sudden change also came after the legal defense groups sued, arguing that the work freeze was illegal and would also have “devastating and irreparable affects” on people detained.
The legal case is ongoing.
“We’re still fighting the lawsuit so that they cannot continue to shut down this program in the future,” said Erin Banaby, a spokesperson for Amica Center for Immigrant Rights.
“Despite rescinding the stop-work order, the DOJ continues to attack these legal access programs, making statements that they are ‘ineffective’ or ‘inefficient,’ and we are concerned they will try other tactics to cut these programs,” Banaby added.
Meanwhile, the Legal Aid Society says it hasn’t gotten any new cases referred by LOPs from Moshannan since the freeze was enacted. The group said it would typically receive three of four new cases every two weeks — and that was before the latest ICE blitz.
Moshannan, the largest immigration detention facility in the northeast, is a privately owned lockup run by GEO Group. In July, the American Civil Liberties Union sued over detainees alleging a lack of access to medical care, translation services, and rampant discrimination.
New York City’s rapid response immigration hotline – a collaborative effort with Make the Road New York (MRNY), New York Legal Assistance Group (NYLAG), and UnLocal — has tracked 140 requests for help in January, 35 of which were for people in immigration detention, which is a 68 percent increase from prior months, according to Sarah Rodriguez, a spokesperson for NYLAG.
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