The two men had just attended a scheduled hearing when plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, some wearing black face masks, grabbed them.
The immigrants were then whisked away into an elevator on the 12th floor of the Jacob K Javits Federal Building in Manhattan.
AFP was on hand to witness these events because there was a similar arrest at the same courthouse earlier in the week and the agency suspected more might be imminent.
Trump was elected to a second term largely on a promise to crack down hard on the entry and presence of undocumented migrants and Americans largely support the idea.
In recent weeks ICE agents have intensified operations like this in and around American immigration courts.
One of the men arrested was a 34-year-old Dominican named Joaquin Rosario who arrived in the United States a year ago, registered with authorities as he came in, and had his first immigration hearing Friday, said a relative of his, Julian Rosario, who declined to say how they were related.
Rosario was so unworried he did not even bother to have a lawyer with him, the relative said.
This time the volunteers screamed out as the agents arrested the two men but this did nothing to halt the raid.
A pair of Venezuelans who refused to give their names were jubilant because their next appointment is not until 2027 -- that’s how backlogged the US immigration court system is.
Human rights groups are outraged by these operations, arguing that they sap trust in the courts and make immigrants wary of showing up for appointments as they try to gain US residency.
“We need to sound the alarm and show the public how serious this is and one way we can do that is actually physically putting ourselves between a masked ICE agent and someone they’re trying to detain and send away,“ Ortiz told AFP.
Since returning to power Trump has dramatically tested the limits of executive power as he cracked down on foreigners without papers, arguing that the United States is being invaded by criminals and other undesirables.
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