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ICE arrested a Bronx asylum seeker at a Manhattan immigration court in continued defiance of a judge's order barring such arrests

On July 16, 2026, ICE agents arrested Bronx resident Matar Ndiaye immediately after his hearing at the immigration court at 290 Broadway in Manhattan, at least the sixth such courthouse arrest since U.S. District Judge Kevin Castel's May 18, 2026 order barred them absent a national-security or public-safety threat. Ndiaye's attorneys, who say he has no criminal record and was never deemed a flight risk, filed a habeas corpus petition after he was transferred to Delaney Hall, New Jersey.

Part of: Trump ICE Defiance of the Manhattan Immigration-Court Arrest Ban, Trump ICE Defiance of Federal Court Orders

Jurisdiction
Federal
Location
New York, New York

Abuses documented

Actors

On July 16, 2026, agents of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Matar Ndiaye, a Bronx resident, at the immigration court at 290 Broadway in Manhattan immediately after he appeared for a scheduled hearing on his asylum claim and was given a new court date. The arrest came roughly two months after U.S. District Judge Kevin Castel barred ICE from making arrests at Manhattan immigration courts except where a national-security or public-safety threat is shown, and is at least the sixth such arrest since Castel's May 18, 2026 order.

This entry records the arrest under defying-court-orders: an enforcement agency again carrying out, within the window of a binding federal order, the very conduct that order prohibits. ICE has sought to justify its continued arrests by claiming that "alternative locations" in New York are unsafe due to the possibility of anti-ICE protests — an argument the agency says falls within the order's narrow exceptions, but which the Department of Homeland Security has not substantiated for Ndiaye's arrest specifically. Ndiaye's attorneys say he had no criminal record, had never been deemed a flight risk or danger to the community by an immigration judge, and received no warning before he was detained and transferred to Delaney Hall, a scrutinized New Jersey facility. His lawyers filed a habeas corpus petition on his behalf the same day, arguing he was denied due process before his detention.

The pattern continues the conduct this archive has documented under the manhattan-immigration-court-arrests and ice-court-order-defiance episodes, including prior dated instances on May 19, June 26, and June 30, 2026. This entry is distinct from those by detainee and date, consistent with the archive's practice of logging each instance of a court order's defiance as a discrete, documented event.

Why we recorded this

Courts are the branch that decides what the law requires, and their orders bind the government whether or not officials agree with them; obedience to judicial rulings is what separates a constitutional system from rule by raw executive will. Two months after a federal judge barred ICE from arresting people at Manhattan immigration courts outside narrow exceptions, the agency has continued making such arrests — this is at least the sixth since the order issued. We record each instance because a court order the executive treats as optional offers no real protection to the people it was meant to shield, and ICE's blanket invocation of an "unsafe alternative locations" exception, unsubstantiated for this arrest, is the kind of justification meant to be tested before the court, not assumed unilaterally.

Sources

  1. ICE makes arrests at NYC immigration court despite court ban — Courthouse News Service primary accessed July 19, 2026

See also