Efrain Rodriguez showed up at 26 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan on July 17 for his court-scheduled immigration check-in on his asylum application. It was supposed to be a routine hearing — but then masked ICE agents pulled him away.
Though he didn’t expect to be detained that July afternoon, Rodriguez found himself in familiar territory. He had been detained once before in February 2020, during the start of a global pandemic and the last year of the first Trump administration. That experience has lived with him ever since.
Rodriguez’s detainment in July 2025, during the second Trump term, was far shorter — just 39 days. But it brought to mind the terrible conditions he witnessed while detained for more than a year, between two presidencies, describing them as inhumane and psychologically terrifying.
Kept in ICE isolation
He claimed that his food was rotten and that the staff would retaliate against him if he spoke out about the living conditions.
“There is psychological abuse, physical abuse, verbal abuse, and emotional abuse. If you don’t agree with what the institution entails, they isolate you in a cell within another cell where you have no access to television, no access to calls, no access to lawyers, no access to three regular meals, no access to medication, no access to anything,” Rodriguez told amNewYork.
Over the course of his detention, he was held in solitary confinement three different times, which is what he believes first triggered his depression symptoms. Growing more furious over both the conditions and treatment, in May 2020, Rodriguez and 25 other detainees decided to band together and perform a hunger strike demanding improvements.
He claimed the guards looked to tempt them to stop the strike by passing a steak in front of their faces.
“We managed to get the director of the ICE New York Movement to be in jail and get us a monthly commissary of $25 and 500 minutes of phone time,” Rodriguez says.
He also noted that another change they observed after the strike was an increase in their out-of-confinement time, from 30 minutes to 45 minutes.
He was finally released one year later under the Biden administration through a program that allowed people diagnosed with depression to leave the detention centers. Even so, he was forced to wear an ankle monitor and have his travel confined to a 70-mile radius of his home for the next 14 months.
Witnessing a suicide attempt in ICE custody
Fast forward to July 2025, and the visit to Federal Plaza that found him back in ICE custody a second time — despite doing everything right, according to his lawyer.
“He went to every check-in. He kept the ankle monitor on and didn’t miss anything, and it seemed the ICE agents, for some reason, took a dislike to him while he was in line. There was no real reason for him to be re-detained. Nothing has changed in his case,” 26-year-old Miriam Mars, Rodriguez’s attorney at the Legal Aid Society, told amNewYork.
His second time detained brought even more and very different horrors. While held in 26 Federal Plaza before being transported to Pennsylvania, he stated that he witnessed a fellow detainee try to comment suicide after attacking ICE officers before being beaten for his trouble.
“He cut himself six times, I counted them,” Rodriguez said. “When they tied him up, you could hear the beating.”
Even though Rodriguez’s second stint was shorter, he said it was far more emotionally devastating — primarily because he had two children, a five-year-old and a 15-year-old, waiting at home.
“This time everything exploded,” he said. “In 2020, it was just my wife and me. Now, we have two children, and I am the only one who works. When I was detained, my family had nothing, no income,” Rodriguez said.
‘They don’t care’
Rodriguez’s attorney explained that much like immigrants, lawyers are also left trying to navigate the new ways in which the second Trump administration is ruthlessly pursuing its deportation agenda and how, as legal representatives, they can defend their clients.
“The difference between the first time [is] we all knew detention centers were terrible and conditions were terrible, but it felt like there were some things we could do about it. But now that they’re using federal buildings and detaining people basically incommunicado, we can’t even reach people to talk to anyone about it or to talk to our clients about what they’re experiencing. It is incredibly frustrating,” Mars said.
Rodriguez was finally released on Aug. 25 with the help of an attorney, but not before he was forced to pay over $5,000 to secure his release – something he could only pay with the help of the Envision Freedom Fund.
It was similar to the plight of an Ecuadorian man who told amNewYork that he was forced to pay an eye-watering $20,000 for him to only be released with an ankle monitor. The monitor requirement has left many attorneys and immigrants to feel as though the detentions are less about immigration policy and more about ICE reaping revenue.
Rodriguez’s case remains pending. His next court hearing is once again scheduled for June 2026 at 26 Federal Plaza. But ICE, in his view, seems to care only about one thing.
“They turned us from immigrants into criminals. This administration has placed an economic value on each immigrant,” Rodriguez said. “They came in with more violence. In 2020, they came in armed. Now they’re brandishing their weapons. They don’t care if you’re an American citizen. They don’t care if you’re on a student visa, or a child, or a woman. They only care about money, money, money.”
