Media monitoring compiled by Susan Manuel
ICE activities increase in NY State
New York state media, citing immigration activists, reported an increase in ICE activities in the state— in particular in New York City and the Albany area. The number of ICE sightings around Albany, Schenectady, and Troy increased from eight in June to 33 in July, according to the Capital Region Sanctuary Coalition. In Utica ICE agents wearing vests branded as ERO (Enforcement and Removal Operations) and “Police” detained at least one man on August 5, local media reported. Nationwide, arrests rose to about 1,474 per day in late July, according to Syracuse University professor Austin Kocher, an immigration expert cited by the Gothamist.
On July 26 at an ICE field office in Malta, 20 miles north of Albany, some 12 immigrants were seized. Jesus Carrion, 63, an asylum seeker born in Peru, thought it was odd that his latest ICE check in was scheduled for a Sunday. At the office, he was detained and transported to Batavia. Upstate immigration lawyer Matthew Borowski has been filing habeas corpus petitions for Carrion and others taken at Malta: “This was an orchestrated round up of immigrants. It sows chaos because…it encourages a lot of people not to comply.…Then their noncompliance becomes a valid rationale for their subsequent detention.”
These actions are “playing out as the Trump administration issued new policy guidance that changes the process for asylum proceedings…including an increase in less overt operations such as detentions at check-ins,” wrote the Albany Times-Union on 4 August.
Kingston area
On July 30, ICE agents attempted to detain three men in Eddyville near Kingston. Two fled and one was arrested, according to Ulster Rapid Response responders cited by the Kingston Daily Freeman and Albany Times Union. The detained man is now being held in Delaney Hall in Newark. (See UIDN’s August 11 posts on Facebook and Instagram for action you can take about conditions at Delaney Hall.)
A Daily Freeman photograph showed agents wearing masks, a practice Gov. Kathy Hochul attempted to outlaw. A federal judge for the Northern District in NY ruled on August 4 that the state can’t ban federal agents from wearing masks or require that they wear identification. The Times Union reported that “New York state officials have not yet filed an appeal, but…are ‘reviewing all legal options’.”
Ulster police and sheriff’s deputies arrived at Eddyville, reportedly to locate injured people, as some observers said the men fled over a cliff. They left after failing to find them. “I have nothing to do with ICE,” said Ulster supervisor James Quigley.
Immigrants nearby told media that communities in the area were living in fear. “We had similar cases before but the common denominator was that it had been people that ICE was looking for because they had a deportation order or had committed a crime. Yesterday that wasn’t the case,” an unnamed bystander told the Freeman.
Rhinebeck fights for resident detained. The Guardian on 9 August published a long story about the ongoing campaign to help local resident Gerson Turcios, 24, who came from Honduras as a child and was arrested more than a year ago. He is currently detained in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn while lawyers challenge his prolonged detention and pursue his asylum claim. The article was written by Rhinebeck resident Alex Hannaford.
More votes against Newburgh facility. The Orange County Legislature on August 6 voted to oppose development of an immigrant detention facility in Newburgh. “However, the move is mostly symbolic,” WAMC reported. Chair Laurie Tautel said that under New York’s home rule law, the county legislature cannot legally prevent a private entity, such as a warehouse owner, from entering into a contract with the federal government. Nor can the county dictate what the Town of Newburgh decides. On July 13, the town board voted to oppose a detention center at the warehouse, under contract with Leverage Enterprises to operate a warehouse for ICE.
Profits for prisons soar
NPR covered soaring quarterly revenues of two major prison companies, disclosed in earnings calls to investors on August 6. CoreCivic and GEO Group (GEO manages Delaney Hall cited above and below), reported a combined $1.4 billion in revenue over the spring. This does not include proceeds of $1.6 billion made by CoreCivic after it sold four facilities to DHS (which CoreCivic will continue to operate). The companies hope to build more as the anticipated detainee population nears Trump’s stated goal of 100,000 at one time.
GEO Group CEO George Zoley said that total revenues were up by 15 % from last year, now $732.1 million. CoreCivic’s revenue went up 27 % to $684.9 million. Patrick Swindle, CoreCivic’s president/CEO, said that the income works out to about $307,000 per bed. In addition to growing numbers of immigration detainees (some 66,000 currently), the companies are lowering operating costs and expanding into related products and services. “The business of detaining people is becoming cheaper,” NPR reported. “Both companies are becoming one-stop shops for holding people,” including by selling GPS ankle monitors, which Haitians in Ohio are already wearing following immigration check-ins after their Temporary Protected Status was rescinded.
The GEO Group’s Intensive Supervision Appearance Program provides ICE with monitors, smartwatches, and the SmartLink phone app to keep tabs on immigrants outside detention. GEO also received income from transportation contracts with the government which are increasing with deportations. And CoreCivic bought a mail order pharmaceutical company targeting corrections facilities. The ties between the companies and Trump administration are tight. Acting ICE director David Venturella is a former GEO executive. Border czar Tom Homan was a consultant for GEO, as was former AG Pam Bondi. President Trump’s brokers made 29 trades of private prison stocks since he returned to office, media reported.
Three dead at Delaney. The City Reporter of NYC reported that a third detainee died at Delaney Hall, according to Rep. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) who said ICE did not disclose the late July death due to a change in reporting methods. A GEO staff member confirmed the death to Menendez during an unannounced oversight visit on 3 August. The unnamed man had a seizure at the prison before being taken to a hospital where he died shortly thereafter. As the detainee was “no longer in ICE custody,” Menendez said, citing ICE, “there is no notification.
More on conditions at Delaney and elsewhere
Last week’s death of Edwin Lopez Cornejo renewed scrutiny of conditions at Delaney Hall, the New York Times reported on August 5. The 1000-bed facility has been an ICE detention center since 2025, run by the GEO Group on a $1 billion, 15-year federal contract. Detainees there have a mix of immigration statuses: some entered illegally; others overstayed a visa; some are awaiting outcomes of their asylum or citizenship cases. Government data in June indicated that 13 % had criminal convictions and about 21 % had charges pending.
Public records validate some complaints about unsafe meals, dirty quarters, and poor medical care, the Times reported. One inmate diagnosed with tuberculosis was returned to Delaney from a doctor’s office with no follow up plan to contain the infection. The NYT and Fox Local reported on 7 August that the New Jersey attorney general has opened a civil rights investigation into Delaney Hall to determine whether employees had violated detainees’ civil rights as the state has been blocked from performing health inspections.
The family of Lopez-Cornejo has demanded to see his medical records from Delaney to no avail as they suspect he was not treated for his illnesses. ICE has not responded, and DHS referred questions to hospital officials and the state medical examiner. New Jersey immigration lawyer Joshua Bardavid said that next of kin have a right to access medical records of detainees under federal and New Jersey law.
Meanwhile in Pennsylvania, three Congressional representatives have demanded an overhaul of the privately run Moshannan Valley Processing Center citing systemic failures.
The Guardian on 10 August described the plight of a Kurdish hunger striker, filmmaker Gabar Choli, arrested during an ICE check-in in February 2025. He endured force feeding over eight months while on hunger strike in detention in Texas until he was deported to Canada. “Much of what happens in ICE detention has been hidden from public view over successive administrations,” the Guardian wrote. The federal judge presiding over his case denied him legal assistance and extended the force feeding order several times at ICE request, according to government records. “That’s not just medical care, that is torture,” said Dr. Chanelle Diaz of Columbia University’s medical center.
How to close a camp
Immigration reporter John Washington’s new book How to Close a Camp: Dispatches from the Fight Against Immigrant Detention, was covered by The New Republic (Closing a Detention Center is Rarely a Single Strike. It’s a Siege). “All of the pomp and terror in the streets during Trump’s second administration—the prowling agents in military gear, the mass arrests, the stalking of schools and courtrooms—depends on the government having somewhere to detain the people they arrest,” he wrote.
The author is “deeply aware that the problem (of immigrant detention) did not originate—and won’t end—with our current president,” TNR wrote. Ronald Reagan initiated the idea of detention as deterrence, while Bill Clinton nearly tripled the number of immigrant detainees from 1994 to 2001, when 19,500 were held daily. Obama appointed Tom Homan to a senior ICE position, then gave him a distinguished Service award in 2015, the year ICE opened the “baby jail” in Dilley, TX to house families. “This is Clinton, Obama and Biden’s immigration policy legacy: building out the camp infrastructure to humiliate, starve, abuse and lay the groundwork for their virulently anti-immigration successors,” Washington wrote.
Washington advises activists to think about “potential pressure points,” such as services, contracts, zoning permits, tax breaks, licenses and utility hookups.” He gives practical advice and checklists on how to organize on licenses, zoning permits, etc. Closing a center requires a range of different tactics, often over an extended period of time, he writes. “Each tool on its own is probably insufficient, but together they can make operating a camp more expensive—both politically and financially—and ultimately untenable.”
Post deportation dunning
For those who think being deported is preferable to prison, the USG has a surprise. Project Salt Box reported (4 August) that Customs and Border Patrol is seeking a private contractor to collect fines from those it has deported to Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala.
Contractors for the CBP “tracing and payment recovery services” will locate each deportee and deliver a printed notice of debt owed to the USG. The CPB estimates that 66,387 deportees owe about $423 million in penalties and fees, imposed on those who stayed past a deportation order or failed to leave under a voluntary departure agreement.
The daily charge for defying a removal order, which was $500 in 1996, is now $998 per day.
CBP already pays three collection agencies to chase that debt. “As of July 2026, those agencies have not located a single person outside the US,” as CBP has had no collectors working abroad, Saltbox reported.
www.projectsaltbox.com/p/us-border-patrol-wants-a -contractor
Madhuri Shukla, Detention Watch Network, via JustSeeds.org