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Carlos Anibal Chalco Chango, 40, was released on Monday from an upstate New York jail where he had been held without his cane. It was a surprising move by an agency that rarely frees detainees.
Nov. 18, 2025, 5:08 p.m. ET
For at least five days, a blind Ecuadorean man who was arrested this month in New York City by U.S. immigration authorities was held in isolation at a county jail, locked in his cell for 24 hours a day and deprived of his cane.
“I feel so terrible I cannot see and that I cannot walk, read or do things on my own,” Carlos Anibal Chalco Chango, 40, said last week in a declaration prepared by his lawyers based on their conversations with him.
On Monday night, after days of pressure from the lawyers, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency relented: Mr. Chalco Chango was released from the Orange County jail in upstate New York. It was a surprising move by an agency that rarely releases detainees under President Trump.
The two-week effort by his lawyers to free him came amid pitched legal battles playing out across the United States, as lawyers file emergency motions to have ICE release migrants who are being subjected to mandatory detention.
Unlike Mr. Chalco Chango, many of the more than 60,000 immigrants in detention don’t have lawyers. Most are forced to fight deportation alone, leaving many to consider the Trump administration’s offers to leave the country voluntarily to avoid months in jail.
What distinguished the Ecuadorean man’s case was his disability.
ICE agents arrested Mr. Chalco Chango on Nov. 4 as he was leaving his home in Corona, Queens, an immigrant-rich neighborhood where advocates and local officials have documented an increase in arrests of mostly Hispanic men this month.
