There are four more symbols of the inhumanity erupting in New York's federal courthouses.
The New York Daily News made headlines last month after a reporter discovered an abandoned bike in Lower Manhattan that belongs to a worker who was last heard asking for directions to the immigration court inside the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building.
He never came out. The bike remains chained to the same pole weeks later, still adorned with a small teddy bear labeled “Love” and now featuring a taped-on message, "MY OWNER WAS KIDNAPPED BY ICE!"
He's obviously not the only victim of President Trump's crackdown on immigrants, nor is he the only person stuck inside the federal building's makeshift, "inhumane" holding cells.
But the bike is only one of a few physical tokens of the tactics that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents use across the country to meet the agency’s staggering daily quotas.
Three more bicycles and a moped — the tools of the city’s delivery workers — are also chained up and seemingly abandoned outside the federal immigration courthouse. Streetsblog has noticed and documented them over the last three weeks.
Their owners? Gone without a trace, likely after attending a scheduled court hearing in the federal building, casting a long shadow over America's city of immigrants.
The bikes, as one onlooker noted, are reminders of the people who go in — but who aren't lucky enough to come out.
"It's like a tombstone," said Joe Williams, who volunteers outside the courthouse connecting immigrants with legal support in their uphill battle against the Trump administration to stay in the country.
"Guy parks his bike and never comes back for it. It's harrowing," he added. "You see guys like them get abducted right in front of you. Then you walk out and there's the bike."
Around the corner, a blue moped leans against a fence at Foley Square, showing evidence of prolonged wear and tear, rust and missing parts. Just across the street from the federal building, a blue bicycle — which someone had covered with a bedsheet before it blew away — is similarly abandoned and missing its seat.
And in a dimly lit corner near the Chambers Street subway stop, a black bicycle — spray-painted with blue stripes, in a style common for deliveristas — collects dust, with a flat tire and empty delivery bags stacked in its bike basket.
The abandoned vehicles give only a hint of what's happening a dozen stories above street level. Undocumented immigrants, attending regularly scheduled court hearings inside 26 Federal Plaza to petition their legal status, are, at alarming rates, detained by ICE agents stalking the hallways of the federal building.
City Comptroller Brad Lander, who has regularly escorted undocumented immigrants for their court hearings, sees the bikes as a symbol of everything wrong with the current process.
“The fact that ICE feels so empowered to abduct them from their hearing without regard for their rights — or their bicycles — is really quite appalling,” Lander told Streetsblog.
“You bring your bike to a building believing that you will leave that building and go back home," he added. "Of course, that’s what people think. They’ve got a court hearing, they’re doing exactly what they’re supposed to."
From the 12th-floor courtrooms, ICE agents whisk detained immigrants down to makeshift holding cells on the 10th floor, providing them with nothing more than concrete floors, aluminum foil blankets and a few toilets, according to video from inside the building. Packed into overcrowded rooms, some detained immigrants are forced to spend "weeks" in the facility, according to a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.
The detention is part of the Trump Administration's national crackdown, which began in January, on immigrants. Since then, New York City has become Ground Zero in Trump's war on undocumented immigrants, the vast majority of whom are taxpaying New Yorkers who have not committed any crimes. In late May and early June, half of all immigration courtroom arrests nationwide occurred in Gotham, The City reported.
Detaining immigrants in the courthouse is intended to discourage those who seek asylum and legal residency in the country from showing up for their regularly scheduled court hearings, said Ravi Ragbir, executive director of New Sanctuary Coalition of NYC, creating a "traumatizing" situation for migrants.
"People go in [to the court building] to be compliant with the rules and the instructions, because they want to be good residents of the United States until they become citizens," said Ragbir, who himself was once detained by ICE until then-President Joe Biden pardoned him in January. "They want to follow the rules."
ICE creates a "no-win situation," Ragbir added: either show up and risk immediate deportation at the hands of masked agents, or face the same fate for missing a mandated hearing.
Ragbir said he wasn't surprised that delivery drivers, who presumably expect to return to work after their hearings, had left bikes left outside of the courthouse.
More broadly, he lamented the loss of "an integral part" of the city.
“During the pandemic, they were the ones who put themselves at risk, delivering food and other things to New York city and across the country," he said. "A lot of them are non-citizens, and they are just trying to make a living, and to be part of the community."
Williams, the volunteer escort, says he's seen many delivery workers — not to mention countless families with young children — enter the building but not come out.
"It's devastating how many people get taken every single day and having to watch these innocent people getting ripped away from their lives and their families," he said. "No one knows they're going to court. They're here by themselves, and they just disappear."
