On May 19, 2026, a witness at 26 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan tried to hand a group of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents a copy of a federal court order — an order issued just the day before, barring arrests at that exact location. The agents refused to take it. One told the witness that the agency did not care.
Then they made the arrest anyway.
The man detained, 21-year-old Vinely Alexander Castillo-Norales, had entered the United States with his father, expressed a desire to apply for asylum, and had simply shown up to his immigration court hearing — the same thing the entire court system asks people to do. Federal Judge P. Kevin Castel had ruled on Monday that immigration courthouses were off limits for arrests except in narrowly defined emergency circumstances. None of those circumstances applied.
His lawyers called the arrest "a direct violation of an order in this court — issued just yesterday." By Tuesday evening, after The New York Times made repeated inquiries, the government released Mr. Castillo-Norales. It then claimed he was a dangerous criminal. His lawyers said he has never been convicted of a crime.
What happened at 26 Federal Plaza is not a gray area. Federal agents were told — to their faces, with a document in hand — that what they were about to do was prohibited by a court order. They said they did not care. They proceeded anyway.
If federal law enforcement agents can ignore court orders without consequence, then court orders mean nothing. That is not a technicality. That is the end of the rule of law.
We are calling on the Department of Justice Inspector General and the United States Congress to investigate the agents involved in the May 19 arrest, identify who authorized it, and pursue disciplinary and legal consequences for everyone responsible.
Sign to demand that no federal agent — from any agency — is above the law.

Photo Credit: Andrea Renault/Star Max/IPx