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new york police department
Over 70 Arrested, Including City Officials, During Protests Against ICE Detention in NYC
"We are talking about people fleeing violence and terror, and we are subjecting them to violence and terror," said New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, who was arrested for the second time this summer for attempting to block ICE.
Sep 19, 2025
Department of Homeland Security police arrested 11 New York state lawmakers on Thursday as they demanded access to a secretive immigrant detention facility in Lower Manhattan.
As The City reports:
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.
The lawmakers were among at least 71 people arrested at the facility, according to a statement from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Others included immigrants’ rights activists and religious leaders who held a sit-in to block Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) vans from entering and exiting the facility with detainees.
The agency has previously denied that an immigrant detention site exists at 26 Federal Plaza, a federal building that contains DHS and FBI offices as well as one of New York City's main immigration courts.
But in July, videos obtained by the New York Immigration Coalition confirmed accounts that it was confining people in wretched conditions.
(Video: The Guardian, via the New York Immigration Coalition)
Those clips, first reported by The City, showed around two dozen men in a fluorescent-lit room without beds. Several of them were shown lying on the ground under aluminum emergency blankets. The camera showed two toilets in the same room, separated from the living quarters by nothing but a short wall.
One of the men described the conditions: "They haven’t given us food, they haven’t given us medicine. We’re cold. There are people who’ve been here for 10, 15 days inside. We’re just waiting.”
New York City public advocate Jumaane Williams, who would become the first person arrested on Thursday, explained why he was helping to block the driveway to the facility.
"I think everybody can now see that everything going on behind us is not only illegal, it's inhumane, and has nothing to do with public safety," he said, with chants echoing behind him. "Those of us who have a little bit more privilege have to step up and do our best to protect those who have even less."
New York City Comptroller Brad Lander—a top ally of the Democratic nominee for mayor, Zohran Mamdani—was arrested for the second time at 26 Federal Plaza this summer. In June, he was grabbed by masked agents there while he escorted a defendant out of immigration court.
"I've been here more than a dozen times, and every single time, I have seen a lawless abduction," Lander said while sitting in a circle with protesters inside the building. "We are talking about people fleeing violence and terror, and we are subjecting them to violence and terror."
In a statement responding to the protests, Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the DHS, accused the immigrants inside the facility of being gang members, possessing fentanyl, or having a gun, though she did not identify any of the detainees.
According to the most recent immigration data, about 71% of those held in ICE detention have no criminal convictions, while most of those who do have committed only minor offenses. Data from June showed that just 7% of those taken into custody have violent criminal convictions.
McLaughlin blamed Lander for starting the "chaos" at the facility, which she said led to the arrest of "71 agitators and sanctuary politicians.”
Long known as a "sanctuary city," New York City has laws on the books forbidding agencies, including the New York Police Department (NYPD), from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement unless the person ICE seeks to detain has been convicted of a serious crime and ICE officials present a judicial warrant.
However, facing a lawsuit and aggressive pressure campaign from the Trump administration, Mayor Eric Adams has sought to loosen that policy and increase collaboration with federal authorities.
Thursday's protests come as ICE ramps up arrests and detentions to record numbers across the state of New York, which the protesters argued the state legislature has done little to combat.
Among the protesters' demands was for the legislature to pass the New York For All Act, which would limit state agencies' ability to collaborate with ICE and other federal agencies. They also called on the city council to pass the NYC Trust Act, which would allow individuals to sue the NYPD and the city's Department of Corrections for collaborating with ICE in violation of the city's sanctuary laws.
Tiffany Cabán, a city council member who was arrested outside the plaza, addressed the press while being led away by a pair of police officers.
"We need to get ICE out of New York," Cabán said. "We need to make sure that every detainee in Federal Plaza is released. There is a humanitarian crisis. They're being tortured. We need to, at the state and city level, pass laws to make sure that we remain a sanctuary city."
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Trump Admin 'Reviewing' Visas After Arrest of Dozens of Pro-Palestinian Protesters at Columbia
"Repression breeds resistance—if Columbia escalates repression, the people will continue to escalate disruptions on this campus," wrote Columbia University Apartheid Divest.
May 08, 2025
The New York Police Department arrested dozens of pro-Palestinian protestors on Columbia University's campus on Wednesday evening—prompting U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio to announce on X that the federal government is reviewing the visa status of those involved in the action.
On Wednesday afternoon, masked protestors, many wearing keffiyehs, gathered in Columbia's Butler Library. Video of the protest posted to social media shows demonstrators inside the library chanting "free Palestine."
Columbia has been under intense scrutiny from the Trump administration in recent months over the school's alleged failure to protect Jewish students. Critics say the administration is weaponizing antisemitism to attack Palestinian rights advocates. In March, the school faced backlash for making policy changes in line with demands from the Trump administration following the administration's decision to freeze $400 million in federal grants for the school.
Late Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote on X: "We are reviewing the visa status of the trespassers and vandals who took over Columbia University's library. Pro-Hamas thugs are no longer welcome in our great nation."
In January, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order with the professed aim of rooting out antisemitism at higher education institutions, and vowed to target foreign-born students who have engaged in "pro-jihadist" protests.
Acting university president Claire Shipman authorized the NYPD to enter campus around 7 pm on Wednesday in response to the rally in the library, according to the Columbia Daily Spectator. The student paper reported that the NYPD arrested roughly 75 protesters and began leading them out of the library shortly thereafter.
The Daily Spectator also reported that there were altercations between the police and protestors after the arrests made in connection to the library protest.
Eighty people "who did not comply with verbal warnings by the NYPD to disperse" were taken into custody, according to the NYPD, per reporting from CNN. Seventy-eight of those taken into custody were arrested and two others were issued summonses, the NYPD told the outlet. CNN noted that it's not clear how many of those arrested came from the protest inside the building.
The group Columbia University Apartheid Divest wrote on Substack on Wednesday that the protestors renamed the library in honor of Palestinian activist Basil al-Araj.
The organizers said that the action at the library "shows that as long as Columbia funds and profits from imperialist violence, the people will continue to disrupt Columbia's profits and legitimacy. Repression breeds resistance—if Columbia escalates repression, the people will continue to escalate disruptions on this campus."
In May of last year, the NYPD swept an occupation of Hamilton Hall and arrested dozens of student protestors.
Wednesday's events come not long after arrests by federal immigration agents of multiple noncitizens who had been active in pro-Palestine actions on Columbia's campus.
In March, federal immigration agents arrested pro-Palestinian activist and former Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil, who is currently languishing in an U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Jena, Louisiana. Another Palestinian green-card holder active in Columbia's student protest movement, Mohsen Mahdawi, was also arrested by federal immigration agents, but last month was released on bail.
Both of those cases have generated significant national attention.
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Arrests of US Journalists Surged in 2024 Amid Crackdown on Gaza Protests
Police use of "catch-and-release" tactics is particularly worrying for press freedom advocates, according to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker.
Dec 12, 2024
Arrests and detainments of journalists in the United States surged in 2024 compared to the year prior, according to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, a project of the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
The tracker reports that journalists were arrested or detained by police at least 48 times this year—eclipsing the number of arrests that took place in the previous two years combined, and constituting the third highest number of yearly arrests and detentions since the project began cataloging press freedom violations in 2017. 2020, however, still stands as far and away the year with the most arrests and detentions.
The 48 arrests and detentions this year is also part of a larger list of "press freedom incidents" that the tracker documents, including things like equipment damage, equipment seizure, and assault.
While a year with a high number of protests typically leads to more arrests, "it was protests in response to the Israel-Gaza war that caused this year's uptick," according to the tracker.
The vast majority of the arrests and detainments out of the total 48 were linked to these sorts of demonstrations, and it was protests at Columbia University's Manhattan campus that were the site of this year's largest detainment of journalists.
The report also recounts the story of Roni Jacobson, a freelance reporter whose experience on the last day of 2023 was a harbinger of press freedom incidents to come in 2024. Jacobson was on assignment to cover a pro-Palestinian demonstration for the New York Daily News on December 31, 2023 when she was told to leave by police because she didn't have city-issued press credentials with her. She recounted that she accidentally bumped into an officer and was arrested. She was held overnight at a precinct and then released after the charges against her, which included disorderly conduct, were dropped.
Even five arrests that the tracker deems "election-related" took place at protests that were "at least partially if not entirely focused on the Israel-Gaza war." Three of those election-related arrests took place at protests happening around the Democratic National Convention in August.
One police force in particular bears responsibility for this year's crackdown: Nearly 50% of the arrests of journalists this year were at the hands of the New York Police Department (NYPD). Many of those taken into custody had their charges dropped quickly, but the tracker notes that the NYPD's use of "catch-and-release" tactics was particularly worrying to press freedom advocates.
Two photojournalists, Josh Pacheco and Olga Federova, were detained four times this year in both New York City and Chicago while photographing protests. They were both "assaulted and arrested and [had] their equipment damaged" while documenting police clearing a student encampment at Manhattan's Fashion Institute of Technology; however, they were released the next day and told their arrests had been voided.
"While [we are] glad that some common sense prevailed by the NYPD not charging these two photographers with any crime, we are very concerned that they are perfecting 'catch-and-release' to an art form,” Mickey Osterreicher, general counsel for the National Press Photographers Association, told the tracker.
"The fact that they took two photojournalists off the street, preventing them from making any more images or transmitting the ones they already had on a matter of extreme public concern, is very disturbing," he said.
Besides covering protests, 2024 also saw the continued practice of "criminally charging journalists for standard journalistic practices," according to the tracker. For example, one investigative journalist in Los Angeles was repeatedly threatened with arrest while attempting to cover a homeless encampment sweep in the city, and then was detained in October, though he was let go without charges.
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