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The city was accused of unlawfully holding more than 20,000 people beyond their scheduled release dates between 1997 and 2012 to comply with ICE detainer requests.
Dec. 18, 2024Updated 2:56 p.m. ET
For years, federal immigration agents had a reliable place to find undocumented immigrants they wanted to deport: New York City jails.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers would target immigrants in police custody or serving short jail sentences and request that the city hold them for up to 48 hours after they had served their time. The agents would then pick them up to place them in deportation proceedings.
The city’s cooperation — which sometimes resulted in immigrants being detained well beyond a day or two — led to a class-action lawsuit that was resolved by a judge on Wednesday, with the city agreeing to pay up to $92.5 million in damages.
The plaintiffs, who filed the lawsuit over a decade ago, argued that the city unlawfully detained more than 20,000 people after their scheduled release dates — for days, weeks and even several months, between 1997 and 2012 — after receiving requests from ICE to temporarily hold them.
Those immigrants will be able to claim a share of the $92.5 million — one of the city’s largest class-action settlements, according to the city comptroller office — with payouts of up to tens of thousands of dollars.
The city’s Law Department said in a statement that city officials had “operated with the assumption that compliance with ICE detainers was mandated under federal law.”
