Department of Homeland Security police officers arrested 11 local elected officials inside Lower Manhattan’s federal building after they had demanded access to immigration enforcement’s shadowy holding area on the building’s 10th floor.
The arrests at 26 Federal Plaza happened after an hour-long standoff, with the lawmakers refusing to leave the hallway outside the lockup, banging on the locked doors, and eventually sitting down to chant and sing before they were hauled off in zip ties. All 11 have been released.
Those arrested were city Comptroller Brad Lander along with state Senators Jabari Brisport, Gustavo Rivera and Julia Salazar and Assemblymembers Robert Carroll, Emily Gallagher, Jessica Gonzalez Rojas, Marcela Mitaynes, Steve Raga, Tony Simone and Claire Valdez.
“I’m here for my neighbor Dino,” Gonzalez Rojas said in tears, pointing to the recent arrest of a beloved restaurant worker from The Queensboro restaurant in Jackson Heights, Queens.
“I’m brokenhearted,” she said. “This is just one of the many stories in my community.”
Mitaynes, who represents Sunset Park in Brooklyn, spoke in Spanish.
“I represent an immigrant community and they’re terrified,” she said. “They’re not going out in the streets, they’re not taking their children to school, the businesses are realizing they can’t survive this.”
“Our neighbors are disappearing,” she continued. “We cannot permit this to continue.”
DHS police officers had repeatedly ordered the lawmakers to disperse in the hour before they moved in to arrest them.
Asked about the arrests, DHS assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin slammed Lander, who had previously been arrested inside 26 Federal Plaza while accompanying immigrants leaving their court hearings.
“Another day, another activist politician pulling a stunt in an attempt to get their 15 minutes of fame while endangering DHS personnel and detainees,” McLaughlin wrote. “Here are the facts: Brad Lander showed up to 26 Federal Plaza unannounced with agitators and media and proceeded to obstruct law enforcement and cause a scene.”
She said several people with criminal records were being held inside 26 Federal Plaza, and added the building was briefly on lockdown later in the evening due to a potential bomb threat.
“Brad Lander’s obsession with attacking the brave men and women of law enforcement, physically and rhetorically, must stop NOW,” she said.
Four members of the New York congressional delegation — Adriano Espaillat, Nydia Velasquez, Jerry Nadler and Dan Goldman — whose oversight authority to inspect Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s detention areas unannounced is enshrined in federal law, have been repeatedly barred from inspecting conditions on the 10th floor. Goldman and Espaillat have joined a lawsuit with other federal lawmakers to attempt to gain access.
While members of Congress have the authority to inspect conditions inside of ICE detention facilities, the local lawmakers do not. They were released one by one within an hour of their arrests Thursday afternoon, after being slapped with tickets for having “unreasonably obstructed the usual use of entrances.” They were told to appear in a federal courtroom in Manhattan to answer that charge in November.
Other elected officials including Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and City Council members Sandy Nurse and Tiffany Cabán, who sat outside of the building blocking an entrance to the garage where ICE vans are kept, were also arrested by the NYPD along with dozens of other protesters.
The NYPD did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the number of arrests it made and the charges those people faced.
The local Democrats join a growing list of party lawmakers nationwide who have been arrested in confrontations with the Trump administration over its escalating immigration enforcement efforts.
The arrests come a day after a federal judge sided with immigrant advocates decrying conditions inside the 10th floor and mandating improvements, requiring everyone have at least 50 feet of personal space, access to three meals a day, a clean bed mat for the ground, and the ability to talk to a lawyer confidentially if they’re held there for more than a day.
Those conditions, extended indefinitely Wednesday, first went into effect by way of a temporary restraining order in mid-August. Since then, ICE told a judge just eight people were being held on the 10th floor as of Aug. 18, though no more recent data was available right away.
That was a marked drop from the nearly 200 people who’d been crammed together inside the four holding cells at various points over the summer, THE CITY reported. In sworn affidavits of immigrants held there over the summer described being treated like animals, with limited access to food and water, not allowed to shower, and packed in so tightly they had to try and sleep sitting up.
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