Tag: ICE

Dec 31

2025

Covering ICE in Western NY throughout 2025

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Until January 20, it was easy to forget that Buffalo is a border town. If you thought about the border at all it was probably because you were traveling to Canada or coming back home — one of the best perks of living in the Queen City. The only time it was really front of mind was when you were showing your ID to an agent on the Peace Bridge. But Buffalo is a border town, and that means it’s home — and has been for years — to all the federal infrastructure a border entails: immigration agents and court[...]

Posted 1 month ago

Dec 12

2025

Cops shouldn’t cooperate with ICE, advocates say

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A panel of law students and advocates presented the report Wednesday. Photo by J. Dale Shoemaker. A handful of local law enforcement agencies turn migrants they encounter over to federal immigration agencies like the U.S. Border Patrol — a practice some now say should end. In a report released Wednesday, professors and graduate students with the Buffalo Human Rights Center — part of the University at Buffalo’s law school — detailed the cooperation between local and federal agencies, criticized the practice and called on state lawmakers to ban it. “Our conclusion across many contexts and many actors is that cooperation[...]

Posted 2 months ago

Dec 9

2025

Local police who cooperate with ICE

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The Cheektowaga Police Department heads the list of a half-dozen local law enforcement agencies that are cooperating with federal agencies to detain and deport migrants. So far this year, police in the Buffalo suburb have turned over at least 21 people to federal immigration agents after detaining them for low-level offenses like shoplifting. Sheriff offices in Erie and Niagara counties are also working with U.S. Border Patrol and ICE. So are police in Lewiston, North Tonawanda and Amherst, though to a lesser extent.  Buffalo police do not appear to collaborate with immigration authorities. Mayor-elect Sean Ryan said it’s not the[...]

Posted 2 months ago

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 3 months 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 3 months 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 months 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 months 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 3 months ago
Investigative Post