There were masked agents in the Ted Weiss Federal Building, which houses immigration court proceedings, in late May, but no one knew why or who they were.
Michael Nigro, an independent photojournalist, had seen them there and felt compelled to find out. He called up some fellow photographer friends to join him, including Stephanie Keith, who has shared her photos with Documented. With some tenacity and luck, Nigro and Keith were among the first photojournalists allowed into the federal buildings in lower Manhattan to cover ICE arrests taking place outsisde immigration courthouses there, paving the way for what later became a barrage of mainstream outlet coverage of the issue.
“It was so opaque at first: something was going on in the buildings, but we didn’t know what it was, and we didn’t know to whom,” Keith recalled.
Though Nigro had been stopped by building security on his first attempt to enter the federal building, he had a hunch that journalists should be allowed to gather news inside just as they do on public sidewalks. He called his lawyer, the veteran civil rights attorney Wylie Stecklow, who happened to be just around the corner leading a group of high school students on a civics class excursion to the courts.
“It was kismet timing – I’m right here; they need help right now,” said Stecklow. He sprang into action, leaving the high schoolers at their pizza lunch and hustling over.
Officials who denied the journalists entry soon crumbled after Nigro and Wylie pointed out a bronze plaque in the building’s own lobby that declared their presence legal. Reporters were allowed to photograph “building entrances, lobbies, foyers, corridors or auditoriums for news purposes,” it said.
For Stecklow, it was an exciting moment to “convince people on the ground that this is what the Constitution says.”
“It’s rare for a lawyer to see the fruits of your work so quickly,” he admitted.
Initially, Nigro, Keith and their friends were the only photojournalists there. Nigro described the process of trying to cover ICE activities on multiple floors across three different buildings as being “like whack-a-mole.”
“You’re standing there for two hours, and it could happen in 30 seconds, and that’s your shot and then they disappear,” he said.
The federal agents almost never identified themselves by their name or their agency, and most were masked, Nigro said. He would arrive early to get full body shots of them as they arrived in the morning before they put their masks on, making sure to include their shoes so that he could identify them later.
For Keith, who spent time in the 26 Federal Plaza building, her days were also made up of long, monotonous stretches of waiting punctuated by flurries of action.
“There’s very little talking in the halls,” she said. “You’re just there, waiting, waiting, waiting and watching. You’re standing around all day long — there’s nowhere to sit. There’s no sunlight in there.”
ICE agents held big stacks of papers with the names and photos of particular immigrants they were seeking to apprehend — a “master list” of people, many of whom had not been in the country for very long, typically under two years, and were therefore eligible for expedited deportation, Keith said.
“When the people get off the elevators, they’re always looking, watching to see who’s who,” she said.
Each day Keith would monitor the dockets to see which judges had the most cases and then wait outside their courtrooms to see if ICE was present.
Most people on the list were likely seeing a judge or entering a courthouse for just the first or second time and had no idea that they were walking into a sort of trap, she said. She even witnessed many asking Spanish-speaking ICE agents for directions on the way to their hearing.
“I remember being like, oh my god, what are they doing? Why are they talking to these people? Don’t they know that they’re about to destroy their lives?”
If a case was dismissed, ICE agents would apprehend the immigrants involved immediately as they walked out of the courtroom.
“It’s really awful,” she said. “The immigrants come in. They think they’re doing the right thing by interfacing with the government, and, boom, they get grabbed ICE and taken to a migrant detention center. I’ve seen families separated – dads taken away from the moms and the kids.”
She continued: “People think they’re doing the right thing, so their first reaction is either being startled or shocked. Then it sinks in — what’s happening. They either get angry or super sad.”
The hardest moments, she said, were those in which a family was torn apart – a husband being led away from his crying wife, who wouldn’t let go of his hand, or a woman being led away while yelling in Spanish about her small child at home who no one would be there to take care of.
“One guy tried to run away. Some people are stoic but they get this sort of sad resignation to the fact that they’re being detained and probably deported.”
One day during her lunch break she witnessed a scene that, juxtaposed with those of families being separated, emotionally struck her: a Dominican couple with their kids, all holding the American flags they’d just received after becoming citizens.
“I just started crying, because that’s how it should be: Families should be together,” she said. “I just felt so happy for them, but it just felt so arbitrary. Why do they get their citizenship and other people get these absolutely hideous experiences?”
She added: “It just doesn’t really matter if it’s a good person or a bad person, a family man or a good worker. There’s just a different criteria, which is if you came to America more recently than other people, then you gotta go. Boom. They’ve got a quota.”
Photos by Stephanie Keith for Documented. Reporting by Rebecca Davis.
