New York City’s Law Department said it will stand behind a 20-year-old Venezuelan migrant and Queens high school student who was arrested by ICE agents inside a Manhattan courthouse after attending an immigration hearing, arguing in an amicus brief that he is being “detained without cause and in violation of his right to due process.”
Jose Luis Rojas Figuera, who attended the Pan American High School in Elmhurst for roughly a year after arriving to New York in October 2023, has no criminal history and was pursuing a green card, according to the brief filed Tuesday.
Rojas Figuera went to 26 Federal Plaza on June 2, accompanied by his mother, for what he expected would be a routine immigration hearing. He had no legal representation. During the hearing, a Department of Homeland Security attorney moved to dismiss Rojas Figuera’s case — a common tactic used by DHS to strip individuals of their pending status, making them subject to expedited removal if granted by the judge.
The judge denied the motion to dismiss Rojas Figuera’s case and gave him another court date, but ICE agents detained Rojas Figuera anyway.
“Tactics like those used to detain Jose present many City residents with an impossible choice: risk detention by attending court proceedings or run the same risk by failing to attend. Such tactics undermine the public interest,” New York City Corporation Counsel Muriel Goode-Trufant wrote in the brief. “Free access to courts is a pillar of the rule of law. Our judicial system cannot work as it should, as it must, if courthouses are treated as convenient places to spring traps.”
The brief, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, said Rojas Figuera had a pending application for Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS) — a pathway to lawful permanent residency status for children under 21 years old who obtain a state-court order finding they were abused, neglected or abandoned.
Goode-Trufant said Rojas Figuera’s detention has upended his SIJS court proceedings, and sent the message to other SIJS applicants that showing up to court could abruptly upend the legal residency process “they were otherwise willing to follow.”
“I have always said that our immigrant New Yorkers should be able to go to court, send their children to school, seek medical care at our hospitals, and ask for help from our police officers when they are in need,” Mayor Adams wrote in a statement. “That is what it means to be a safe city, and we will continue to fight to ensure that our public resources are safe, and that people who was going through the legal process that we encourage for new arrivals, are protected under the law.”
Paige Austin, an attorney at Make the Road New York who is now repping Rojas Figuera and fighting for his release, said she was “really grateful to the city for weighing in and sharing how harmful this policy is.”
“His dismissal was denied by the immigration judge. At the moment ICE detained him there was absolutely no change in his case, and no grounds to detain him,” Austin said. “This detention served absolutely no purpose. It was cruel and it has deeply traumatized him and his mother.”
After arriving in 2023, Rojas Figuera visited a city asylum help center, according to the brief. He attended public high school for roughly a year before leaving to work in order to support and care for his mother, who has severe diabetes, according to Austin.
Austin said Rojas Figuera has had “a really hard time in detention,” noting that he’d been first held inside 26 Federal Plaza before being shuffled around to a detention facility in Nassau County and another in Texas. He was then returned to New York, where he is being held upstate.
For the first five days he was unable to contact his mother, Austin said. Since returning to New York 10 days ago, he has again been incommunicado, unable to get phone access inside the jail.
“The communication issues have been really hard for him because he really misses his mom and they’re really close,” Austin said. “He’s very worried about his mom’s health. She depends on him both economically and when she’s in a period of really poor health.”
“We hope that more New Yorkers don’t have to go through this because it’s been awful for this family,” Austin added.
Last month the city took similar action in a different case, filing an amicus brief in support of releasing 20-year-old Venezuelan migrant and Bronx public school student Dylan Lopez Contreras, who was detained by federal agents at 26 Federal Plaza after a judge dismissed his asylum case on May 21.
