ICE wants an office inside NYC's notorious Rikers Island jail. A judge might end those hopes

Independent

03-06-2025

A state judge in New York will continue to block Donald Trump 's administration from opening an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office inside Rikers Island jail, one of the largest and most notorious detention facilities in the country, plagued by decades of reports of widespread abuse and violence.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams gave ICE permission to operate inside the jail earlier this year, drawing lawsuits from city officials accusing Adams of crafting a 'corrupt bargain' with the president to expand his anti-immigration agenda in exchange for dropping a criminal corruption case against the mayor.
On Tuesday, New York Supreme Court Justice Mary Rosado extended her temporary restraining order as she considers a more permanent injunction to keep federal immigration authorities from entering the city-run jail.
'The argument that this is not part of a quid pro quo or there's no politics at play here is absurd,' New York City Council member Alexa Aviles, chair of the council's immigration committee, told reporters after Tuesday's hearing in Manhattan.
'We cannot trust this administration to follow the law,' she said.
New York officials banned ICE from city jails in 2014 after the passage of so-called sanctuary laws intended to block the transfer of undocumented immigrants to ICE custody, where they are placed in deportation proceedings.
But Adams — following his meetings with Trump border czar Tom Homan — granted ICE permission to return to the troubled facility with an executive order issued by one of his deputies. A subsequent lawsuit from the Democrat-controlled New York City Council called the order 'illegal, null, and void.'
A coalition of civil rights and legal aid groups and public defenders along with New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams filed briefs supporting the lawsuit.
The order from the Adams administration is in 'clear violation of New York City's sanctuary protections and it invites a new era of racial profiling, wrongful deportations, and constitutional violations,' according to Meghna Philip with the The Legal Aid Society.
'The Trump administration has shown it will use any pretext to carry out mass deportations — even in defiance of our Constitution and federal court rulings — and this executive order gives ICE direct access to New Yorkers in custody, their information, and their families,' she said in a statement.
Last month, after a years-long court battle, a federal judge stripped New York City of its control over Rikers Island and ordered a third-party monitor to take over.
That ruling — the culmination of roughly 14 years of litigation — followed years of reports detailing the conditions, abuse, violence and death inside the jail.
At least 19 people died inside Rikers in 2022 — the highest number of deaths since 2013. At least five people have died inside the jail in 2025 so far.
After years of public pressure, the jail is legally required to close by August 2027. That detention space — where more than 7,000 people are jailed — is set to be replaced with smaller borough-based jails.
But the Adams administration is reportedly considering scrapping those plans altogether.
Federal immigration officials maintained an office at Rikers in the years before the city's sanctuary policies, leading to 'countless violations of detainees' rights,' according to law professor Peter Markowitz, co-director of the Kathryn O. Greenberg Immigration Justice Clinic at Yeshiva University's Cardozo School of Law.
ICE had access to detailed information about anyone entering the jail with 'on-demand access' to interview them, he wrote in court documents. 'Detainees were often misinformed that they were being taken for legal visits, only to then be presented to plain-clothed ICE agents who would question them and attempt to extract legal admissions,' according to Markowitz.
Immigration officers used the jail to 'surveil, intimidate, and conduct uncounseled interviews in an inherently coercive setting, allowing them to extract admissions about nationality and immigration status and then use those statements to justify detention and deportation,' he wrote.
If ICE returns to the jail, Rikers will return to the 'widespread violation of detainees' constitutional rights and due process of law, albeit in an even more aggressive posture than during the first Trump administration,' according to Markowitz.
The city's arrangement ostensibly only allows for ICE to launch criminal investigations, not for routine enforcement of largely civil federal immigration law.
But civil rights groups and immigration attorneys fear that federal officers — empowered by Trump's use of the Alien Enemies Act to target alleged gang members — will bypass due process and summarily deport immigrants using only spurious evidence against them.
'The assertions that returning ICE to Rikers Island is necessary to advance criminal investigations of dangerous gangs reeks of pretext. I know of no specific instance where ICE's lack of physical presence at Rikers Island has stood as, or even been claimed as, an obstacle to a criminal investigation,' according to Markowitz.
The Independent