Detention Watch Hudson Valley #6 – The Ulster Immigrant Defense Network

17 August 2026
Media monitoring compiled by Susan Manuel

Few are legal. The New York Times on August 16 had a gripping piece on the airport arrest of a green card applicant, married to a three-time Trump voter. In addition to the description of her wretched treatment and detention conditions, the most critical quote is this statement by DHS: “To be clear, work authorization or a pending application do NOT confer legal status in the US.”

Detention archipelago. Over the past year, the federal government has set up a “detention archipelago,” sending dozens of immigrants to far-flung countries where “they remain…stuck in a kind of purgatory—a new class of prisoner created by America’s widening crackdown on immigration.” (The New York Times). At least 35 countries have made deals with the U.S., receiving millions of dollars to take deportees. Some countries are so unstable or autocratic that they lack basic legal protections. “And because [deportees] are foreign nationals with no legal status in the countries to which they have been sent, the deportees generally remain under indefinite detention abroad, without charges and with little or no recourse in American courts.”

The Times follows the case of Roberto Mosquera, originally from Cuba, who has been detained in Eswatini, formerly Swaziland, for more than a year. He, like others sent there, had a criminal record but had served time and restarted work and family. Others are under court protections not to be returned to their homelands because they faced threats there. Mosquera is “one of a growing number of people whom the Trump administration has put into a global administrative limbo.” The Times didn’t give numbers, but human rights lawyers interviewed have identified at least 25 cases of people in long term detention, mainly in Eswatini and South Sudan, where they can disappear from external view for months.

Arrests increase. Media have been reporting over the past few weeks on the increase in ICE arrests. For instance, the New Jersey Monitor, 10 August, “Federal immigration agents are employing new tactics — from arresting academics at airports to setting up a checkpoint at a popular creek in a National Forest — to boost their arrest numbers…” More arrests won’t necessarily translate into more deportations, said Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. “The focus is so much on the arrest numbers that the mission seems a little confused to the general public.” Many of the new arrests catch non-criminals in a legal “gray area,” such as having an expired visa while applying for another legal status. DHS said that last month it arrested 20-40 people per day at airports, mostly passengers with expired visas.

ICE NY detains everyone. The ICE New York field office continues to detain virtually everyone they arrest even those who are eligible for release while their immigration cases proceed, according to the NYCLU: “people languish in immigration detention for weeks or months before they can see an immigration judge and asked to be released.” NYCLU is asking a federal court to abide by the terms of a 2022 settlement that required the field office to consider release in every arrest, including alternatives to detention like bond or remote monitoring.

NYCLU is fighting to support the previous policy by which officers have to analyze whether the detainee poses a flight or safety risk. In the recent past, ICE changed its Risk Classification Assessment Tool to essentially prevent “it from every recommending release.” Despite the settlement, the numbers of detainees released or granted bond in 2024-2025 dropped to just over one percent. NYCLU is now asking the court to require changes to the field office’s policy, requiring ICE to consider each person’s individual circumstances. Read more at NYCLU.

NY officials tackle ICE. Top NYS officials met to discuss ways to “fight against federal and ICE overreach” on August 13. On the agenda: $7.25 million for legal services for an estimated 1400 unaccompanied minors in removal proceedings. They also addressed compliance with the new state law banning contracts between local law enforcement and ICE. Only five of 12 NY law enforcement agencies have agreed to end 287(g) agreements with ICE, PIX11 reported on 14 August. Gov. Kathy Hochul says they must comply by August 26 when the new law goes into effect. She warned of legal consequences to those not complying.

News12 interviewed U.S. Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (NY-11), who said she will not support the new law or funding for children, as “It makes it even harder for any type of cooperation between local and federal law enforcement and that’s wrong. I don’t think we should be providing legal services to anyone who is in the country illegally.” The group also condemned the electric shock gloves proposal, which, “appears to be in violation of a number of laws, including our constitution,” according to NY Attorney General Letitia James.

Shocking Gloves. Media reported last week that ICE could spend up to $20 million on gloves that can deliver painful electric shocks, citing a DHS notice from 10 August. According to the manufacturer, Compliant Technologies LLC, “the discomfort associated with the stimulation is usually effective in bringing individuals into compliance in less than three seconds and leaves no burns, marks or scars.” The gloves have previously been used in some jails in the U.S. Civil rights activists are alarmed. ACLU policing expert Jenn Borchetta said, “introducing gloves that can so easily be used to deliver terrible pain…is a recipe for harm to the public.” Compliant CEO Jeff Niklaus wrote The Guardian that “Unfortunately, we are unable to speak on this subject.”

The Great Delegalization. The New Yorker writes that “more than a million immigrants are seeing protections that granted them safe lives in the U.S. suddenly swept away.” The story covers the history of Temporary Protected Status, which initially concentrated on Haitians, many of whom had already been living in the U.S. when Obama gave them TPS following the earthquake of 2010. With work permits and an assurance against deportation, they settled and had children. On June 25, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the administration could strip TPS protections from some 330,000 Haitians along with 4000 Syrians. About 170,000 Salvadorans are to lose their status on 9 September.

“People with TPS were never, precisely, safe. Instead they lived in the chasm between most Americans’ assumptions about immigration status and what the law actually requires. TPS status provides no legal mechanism to apply for a green card, or any other immigration status. Instead, people have to spend time and money just to remain in place.” The New Yorker goes on to describe how difficult it is for anyone arriving here to “get legal.” While people used to ask a judge to confer permanent status based on length of residence and community ties. Changes in policy instituted by Congress in 1996 made it harder for people who had ever been undocumented to attain official status.

“Arguably, the immigration system has been out of equilibrium ever since, with an increasing large and settled population of ‘unauthorized’ immigrants whose chances of becoming ‘legal immigrants’ are dimmer than ever before.” The only remaining options have been forms of administrative discretion, i.e. , TPS, parole (which George W. Bush granted Cubans) and deferred action, which Obama gave the Dreamers. In April, the House passed a bill to restore TPS for Haiti, and a similar bill is pending to legalize TPS holders writ large. But there’s no indication the bills will survive. As for Dreamers, a federal case could make it to the Supreme Court, which might “finally shock Congress into action.” For now, “the administration is slow walking DACA applications, allowing recipients to lose their protections while waiting for their next renewals.” There are 98,250 TPS holders in New York. (Humans of ICE, a Binghamton NY project.)

Detention deadline. Project SaltBox reported that ICE has pushed contractors building new detention centers to work faster, cutting its own two-year timeline in half while keeping the same late penalties. The agency now says the program could be worth $10 billion, and it has lowered the financial bar to compete, cutting the bond from $10 billion to $2 billion, i.e., a bond guarantees that the job will be finished if the builder fails. One grouping of proposed centers, called Mega Hub DC, puts seven sites under one contract so that one company builds simultaneously in Broadview, IL; Oakdale LA; Huntsville, TX; Honolulu, HI; Aguadilla, PR; St. Thomas; and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

A seventh appeals court contests detention without bond. Politico was among the media reporting that the First Circuit Court of Appeals (Boston) became the latest and seventh federal court to reject ICE’s bid to deny detained immigrations the right to a bond hearing. A panel concluded 2-1 that the Trump administration’s massive expansion of immigration without bond was a distortion of decades-old immigration laws that were aimed primarily at recent border-crossers, not those who have resided in the country for years.

Delaney deteriorates. On August 14 The New York Times revisited many of the abuses suffered by detainees at Delaney Hall in Newark where ICE recently admitted to a third detainee death.

Mass hearings. The Guardian reported on 15 August that U.S. immigration judges are increasingly holding mass hearings, on very short notice, issuing removal orders to those who don’t show up, describing it as “the newest frontier in (Trump’s) deportation push. …. That in turn sets them up for arrests and repatriation whenever they stumble into the midst of immigration agents, or increasingly, run into local and state law enforcement personnel from departments that are cooperating with federal immigration enforcement, during something as benign as a traffic stop.”