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Published Aug. 3, 2025Updated Aug. 4, 2025, 1:35 p.m. ET
This has become the new normal in America’s immigration courts.
In New York City, especially, courthouse arrests have driven a spike in detentions of undocumented immigrants without criminal records.
Immigration authorities used to stay away from courthouses. They were aware that their presence could scare migrants from engaging with the legal system.
That changed in May when the Trump administration began arresting some immigrants showing up for mandatory court dates so that their deportations could be expedited. The arrests turned the courthouses into places to witness Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown unfold in real time every day.
Masked agents stand sentry outside the courtrooms. Migrants show up for their hearings, not knowing if they’re walking into a trap. The arrests sometimes devolve into volatile tussles in hallways also crowded with news photographers, activists and politicians.
Family members are often left reeling.
“His arrest was like the show of the day,” Porfiria Lopez, one of Mr. Lopez Benitez’s sisters, said. “The question we were left with is: How do they decide who to arrest? Is it chance or just theater?”
Mr. Lopez Benitez, who is from Paraguay, crossed the southern border in May 2023. He was briefly apprehended by border patrol agents in Arizona, placed in deportation proceedings and released into the United States as his case wound through the courts. He traveled to New York, where he reunited with his two sisters, who are U.S. citizens. He lived in Queens, worked in construction and did not have a criminal record, according to his family and his lawyers.
