A NY Teen Illegally Detained by ICE is Now Home

Oliver Mata Velazquez played by all the rules. The 19-year-old Buffalo resident entered the country legally to seek asylum, as is his right under the law. He has no criminal history and has followed all government orders.

Yet when he showed up for his mandatory immigration court hearing in Buffalo in June, ICE agents illegally snatched him. It didn’t matter that Oliver hadn’t broken any laws. ICE was determined to arrest and jail him anyway.

But the NYCLU, Prisoners’ Legal Services of New York, and Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights sued. And we won his release.

A federal district court ordered ICE to let Oliver free. Now he’s back in Buffalo, reunited with his family and community while his asylum case continues. In its order forcing ICE to release Oliver, the court wrote that the Trump administration “cannot make up new rules as it goes along when the new rules abridge constitutional rights.”

We couldn’t agree more. The arrest of law-abiding people like Oliver is a result of Trump’s promise to oversee the largest mass deportations in U.S. history. To this end, ICE is staking out courthouses and abusing the legal process by detaining immigrants when they show up at their scheduled court hearings. It’s happening all over New York and across the country.

We are thrilled that Oliver is free, but ICE never should have detained him in the first place. We will continue to fight the Trump administration’s attempts to arbitrarily arrest people en masse when they are simply doing what they government has asked of them by showing up to court.