One day inside the deportation machine at a federal immigration court in New York

A brother is torn from his sister. A father arrives for his immigration hearing with his family, only to find that they will be leaving without him. A woman, seemingly relieved after emerging from her hearing, finds that her life is about to change when she is apprehended by federal officials waiting just outside the door.

These are just some of the moments that happened on a single day in the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building at 26 Federal Plaza in New York City, the largest federal immigration courthouse in Manhattan.

Courthouse detentions have been one of many flashpoints in the Trump administration’s expanding crackdown on immigration, as federal authorities seek to arrest 3,000 people a day. There have been reports of arrests at courthouses across the country, from Phoenix to Los Angeles to Chicago, turning routine hearings into scenes fraught with anxiety and fear. A recently filed class-action lawsuit against the Trump administration seeks to bar the practice of courthouse arrests.

Immigration court presents an especially precarious situation. Not showing up for a hearing can have serious consequences, but as The Guardian observed in the hallways outside courtrooms in New York, showing up also has serious consequences. Even though some people had been granted follow-up hearings, they were detained by federal officials in the hallway and rushed to a stairwell for holding elsewhere in the building. On June 18, representatives Jerry Nadler and Dan Goldman attempted to conduct oversight on the building’s 10th floor, where people have been held, sometimes for days at a time, but were rebuffed by federal officials. Recently released footage shows the harsh conditions faced by people held on the 10th floor.

What follows is a visual timeline of a single day inside the halls of the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building, where some people found their lives forever changed. 

This photo essay originally appeared in The Guardian.

Julius Constantine Motal

Julius Constantine Motal is a photographer, photo editor and writer in New York whose photographs have been published in The Guardian, EPA Images, Associated Press, New York, The New York Times and NBC News, among many others. He attended the Eddie Adams Workshop in 2018, and works as a photo editor at The Guardian.