Advocates are demanding the release of a Brooklyn high school student who was arrested by ICE after a routine immigration hearing last week.
Mamadou Mouctar Diallo, a 20-year-old asylum-seeker from Guinea, was detained at 26 Federal Plaza on Aug. 4. Diallo’s asylum case — he is reportedly seeking Special Immigrant Juveniles status, which applies to migrants under age 21 who have been abused or neglected by a parent — was still pending.
He is at least the third New York City public school student to have been detained by ICE since May.
“Mouctar has followed every single rule. He has done things exactly the right way,” said Council Member Lincoln Restler at an Aug. 14 rally. “He is seeking asylum here in the United States. He has become deeply enmeshed in our Brooklyn community … and yet, Donald Trump and his goons abducted him last week when he was doing the right thing by showing up to his immigration hearing.”
Under Trump’s orders, masked federal agents have for months arrested immigrants leaving their court hearings at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan, regardless of their case status.
ICE has held dozens of those detainees in “squalid” holding cells inside the federal court building. Others have been moved to federal prisons, like the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.
Diallo has been moved to a correctional facility in Pennsylvania, ICE records show, nearly 90 miles from New York City.
Trisha McLaughlin, a public affairs office at ICE, said Diallo illegally crossed the border into the U.S. in January 2024, and was apprehended by Customs and Border Patrol agents along with 51 other migrants. He was then released.
“He will remain in ICE custody pending removal proceedings,” she said.
Diallo has been in touch with his lawyer, Restler’s spokesperson confirmed, and DOE chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos said the department was “standing with the students family, working closely to connect them with legal support and other critical services.”
Restler said Diallo, who attends Brooklyn Frontiers High School — which serves students who are “over-age and under-credited” — recently completed a culinary internship and security guard training, and was looking forward to getting to work. He does not have family in the U.S.
“What we don’t allow, what we’re not going to allow, is our young people — the future of this city, kids without their families, trying to make it here — to be abducted by people purporting to be government officials and then to be put in conditions that none of us would tolerate our own children being placed in,” Comptroller Brad Lander said.
The first New York City high schooler to be detained by ICE, Dylan Lopez Contreras, is still in ICE custody nearly three months after his arrest. In July, an immigration judge ruled that the Department of Homeland Security had wrongly moved to dismiss Contreras’ case, leading to his arrest.
Another student, Derlis Snaider Chusin Toaquiza, who was arrested after a court hearing on June 4 and held in ICE custody in Texas for over a month, returned to New York City in July after he was granted bond.
“We continue to see, day in and day out, the lawlessness of the Trump administration executing their family separation and mass deportation agenda,” said Murad Awawdeh, president of the New York Immigration Coalition.
Keith Fuller, an organizer at Make The Road New York, said there is “something truly wrong happening in our city.”
“Our students’ lives, our students’ safety, our students’ freedoms are on the line,” he said. “It is shameful that our federal government is forcing our students to live on a what-if basis. What if ICE is at my train station? What if ICE is at my bus stop? What if ICE is outside my corner store?”
Public Advocate Jumaane Williams said it was “stunning” to see what is happening to immigrants in the U.S., and urged New Yorkers to stand against it.
“To be clear, we are under an authoritarian regime,” he said. “This is an authoritarian president. He hasn’t been able to do all the authoritarian things he wants to yet, but he’s working. To all the people watching, to the people of faith, to the people of good conscience, at some point you have to say ‘God damn it, enough.'”
