Tag: ICE

Nov 18

2025

Deportee: “I shouldn’t have lost my fingers”

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The federal ICE detention center in Batavia. Photo by J. Dale Shoemaker. Military-style raids by U.S. immigration agents — many of them filmed and glossily produced for television and social media — have become a hallmark of President Donald Trump’s second term. Early raids involved the capture of nearly 600 migrants in New York, New Jersey and other states. The government released images of migrants in shackles, marching toward a military plane that would deport them. Chidi Nwagbo, 58, a Nigerian man who’d lived in the United States since 1988, saw those raids unfold in real time from his home[...]

Posted 2 weeks ago

Nov 13

2025

Bills custodian, a migrant, jailed by ICE

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For two months, a young Venezuelan woman who had been hired to clean the Buffalo Bills’ Highmark Stadium has been detained by ICE. The woman, Yusgleidy Villa Alvarez, 18, has no criminal history. Until September, she’d been a legal resident of the United States, was on the path to obtaining a green card and had been granted a work permit. Yet without warning, a federal lawsuit alleges, ICE agents arrested her after a shift Sept. 19, the day after the Bills beat the Miami Dolphins at Highmark Stadium. For more than a month, she was held at the Niagara County[...]

Posted 2 weeks ago

Nov 7

2025

The consequences of Trump’s immigration crackdown

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From left: Jennifer Connor, Brittany Triggs, Pam Kefi and Ba Zan Lin. Photo by I’Jaz Ja’ciel. Ba Zan Lin spent his first 18 years living under authoritarian regimes in his native Burma before coming to Buffalo in 2006 seeking political asylum. He says he and others in the region’s immigrant community recognize the Trump administration’s heavy-handed tactics in pursuit of detainment and deportation of non-citizens it characterizes as “illegal.”  The raids, the street grabs, family members disappearing into a byzantine network of federal detention centers — “the masked men waiting for them at night” — all these feel traumatizing and[...]

Posted 3 weeks ago

Nov 6

2025

Detainees allege shoddy medical care at ICE Batavia

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U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and staff have administered what experts say was shoddy medical treatment to at least a dozen detainees at its Batavia facility in the past two years, Investigative Post has found.  Serious injuries went untreated, medications were denied or scaled back, and needed medical appointments were delayed at the ICE detention center.  In one case, a Nigerian migrant arrived in February at the detention facility suffering frostbite. A doctor who provided emergency care ordered that he see a specialist within a week before releasing him into immigration custody. Agents in Batavia never took him to[...]

Posted 3 weeks ago

Oct 22

2025

Migrant family flees after pursuit by ICE

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Anderson Contreras-Hernandez leaves Cheektowaga Town Court. Photo by J. Dale Shoemaker. After months of uncertainty — and detention for a father and son — a family of asylum seekers that briefly called Buffalo home has resettled in their native Venezuela. The Contreras-Hernandez family spent just 18 months as U.S. residents before finding themselves caught in the maw of President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigrants. Over the summer, as arrests and detentions spiked across Western New York, both 20-year-old Anderson Contreras-Hernandez and his father ended up in ICE detention, facing the prospect of deportation.  His mother subsequently elected to self-deport with[...]

Posted 1 month ago

Oct 21

2025

ICE: Unfettered and unaccountable

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Federal agents stand guard outside an ICE detention facility in Newark, N.J. Photo credit: Victor J. Blue/The New York Times/Redux This story is republished from ProPublica, a nonprofit, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom.  When Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers stormed through Santa Ana, California, in June, panicked calls flooded into the city’s emergency response system. Recordings of those calls, obtained by ProPublica, captured some of the terror residents felt as they watched masked men ambush people and force them into unmarked cars. In some cases, the men wore plain clothes and refused to identify themselves. There was no way to confirm[...]

Posted 1 month ago

Oct 3

2025

Overcrowding rampant at ICE facility in Batavia

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J. Dale Shoemaker summarizes the story. The ICE detention center in Batavia is bursting at the seams. Data obtained by Investigative Post shows an average of 727 migrants have been held at the 650-bed facility daily since early June. “We’ve heard reports of people sleeping on the floor of the gymnasium of the facility, given only individual workout mats to sleep on, not even mattresses,” said Aaron Krupp, regional coordinator for Justice for Migrant Families, an advocacy group that works with detainees. In mid-August, the number of people held in the detention center peaked at nearly 800. The count dropped[...]

Posted 2 months ago

Sep 12

2025

A potential boost to ICE deportation efforts

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U.S. Rep. Tim Kennedy. Amid the backdrop of the Trump administration’s mass deportation program, Congressman Tim Kennedy, a Democrat, has sponsored a bill that would mandate the hiring of thousands of U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers. Kennedy’s staff says the new hires would be used to facilitate people and goods crossing the borders. But data shows the Trump administration is using the class of officers covered by Kennedy’s bill to arrest and deport immigrants. The bill — dubbed the “Securing America’s Ports of Entry Act of 2025” — would require the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection to hire[...]

Posted 3 months ago
Investigative Post