ICE arrests a man in a Manhattan immigration court a day after a judge barred such arrests

On the morning of May 19, 2026, agents of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Vinely Alexander Castillo-Norales, a 21-year-old Honduran man, at the immigration court inside 26 Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan, taking him into custody shortly after he appeared for a scheduled hearing. The arrest came roughly a day after U.S. District Judge P. Kevin Castel of the Southern District of New York issued an order barring ICE from arresting most immigrants inside three Manhattan immigration courthouses — 26 Federal Plaza, 201 Varick Street, and 290 Broadway — except in narrow circumstances involving imminent public-safety or national-security threats. Castillo-Norales, whom his attorneys described as having no criminal convictions and a record of attending his required hearings, was released from custody hours later, after legal aid lawyers filed a habeas petition on his behalf.

This entry records the arrest under defying-court-orders: an enforcement agency carrying out, within roughly 24 hours, conduct that a binding federal court order had just prohibited. The Department of Homeland Security, ICE's parent agency, denied that the arrest violated the order. DHS asserted that Castillo-Norales is an active member of a street gang — a characterization that, if accepted, could place the arrest within the order's exception for imminent public-safety threats. As reported, DHS cited no criminal convictions in support of that assertion, and Castillo-Norales's attorneys disputed it, with one saying the arrest showed ICE's "utter contempt for the rule of law." Whether the arrest fell inside or outside the order's narrow carve-out is a contested question that subsequent editorial review and any litigation will weigh.

The order said to have been defied is the same ruling The Standing records separately — in its archive entry drawn from monitoring issue #30 — as the judicial stay halting ICE courthouse arrests at the three Manhattan locations. That entry documents the year-plus practice of courthouse arrests and the court's finding that ICE lacked internal legal authority for it; this entry records the distinct follow-on event: an apparent breach of the resulting order almost immediately after it took effect. Consistent with The Standing's broken-windows approach, the arrest is logged as a discrete, documented action; the contested question of whether it satisfied the order's public-safety exception is left to editorial review and to any court that takes it up.