The number of detained immigrants who are leaving the country voluntarily, instead of fighting their deportation cases in New York and New Jersey courts, has exploded 1,373% this summer, federal data shows.
This trend has been growing steadily over the past year, but the departures ramped up after July 8, when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) issued a new policy that vastly revoked eligibility for bond for many undocumented immigrants — consigning them to incarceration for months or possibly years as they await final rulings on their removal cases.
Scores of federal judges have ruled that the policy violated the due process rights of individual detainees. That, however, has not deterred the Trump administration from continuing to hold that immigrants who entered the country without a visa are not entitled to even request a bond hearing in immigration court.
From July through October of this year, there was over a 14-fold increase in detained immigrants being granted voluntary departure over the same period last year. Last year, in the period of time between July and October 2024, the Varick Street court in Manhattan and the Elizabeth immigration court in New Jersey saw 128 voluntary departures granted to detainees. This year, that number was 1,885.
This trend is also national. Across the country, voluntary departures for detainees are up 363 percent for July through October, compared to the same period last year, according to data from Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), the Justice Department unit that runs the immigration courts.
“The increase in voluntary departures comes directly from the erosion of due process that we are seeing in our immigration system,” Shayna Kessler, director of the Vera Institute of Justice’s Advancing Universal Representation Initiative said. “People are being forced to make incredibly hard choices about their families, about their jobs.”
Those hard choices flashed across the worried face of an Ecuadoran woman who appeared before Immigration Judge Ramin Rastegar on the morning of Nov. 10. The 30-something woman — Documented is withholding her name for her safety — appeared by video from the Delaney Hall Detention Facility, three miles away from the Newark courtroom.
Her case had been transferred to New Jersey from New York. She’d been seeking asylum, but now that she was jailed, she wanted voluntary departure.
She began crying, and cried more when the judge said she needed to pay for her own travel to get a voluntary departure. She didn’t have the money.
Voluntary departure is considered a benefit under immigration law because it allows the recipient to avoid a formal deportation order, which could prevent them returning to the United States for at least 10 years. But there are pitfalls, starting with having to give up any claim to asylum or other relief from deportation; immigration lawyers say it’s very important to consult an attorney.
Judge Rastegar told the Ecuadoran woman — who had no lawyer — that he would have to order her removal since she couldn’t pay for her own travel. Then he asked her if she would like to reserve an appeal.
“Yes,” she answered, shakily.
“You will have to remain in detention for at least a few more months,” the judge told her. “Do you understand that?”
“No, no, no, please,” she responded, crying again, clearly terrified at the prospect. Then, she decided that she would not reserve her right to appeal.
Unmentioned during the hearing was that since the woman’s case had been transferred in from New York, she might have qualified for pro bono counsel through New York Family Immigrant Unity Project, a city-and-state funded project that handles detained New Yorkers’ cases in New Jersey — when their attorneys know about them.
ICE and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment, but in general, they’ve framed the level of departures as a sign of their success.
The drastic increase follows the Trump administration’s new reading of federal law that insists that ICE detain undocumented immigrants if they’d entered without a visa – exposing millions more people to mandatory detention provisions in federal immigration law if arrested.
“That has really made it difficult because there’s no hope of getting out,” Sharone Schwartz Kaufman, deputy attorney-in-charge of the Legal Aid Society’s immigration defense said. “It’s kind of shocking to people and they are scared to stick around, and that’s the point of this, also.”
Immigration attorneys say conditions in the crowded lockups are also prompting desperate detainees to request voluntary departure.
Luke Millar, an attorney for the Legal Aid Society, recalls a Venezuelan client held last summer at Delaney Hall in Newark. F.J.S., as he identified him, was a carpenter from Queens in his late 20s who had a “very, very strong asylum claim,” he said.
Arrested in May, F.J.S was held without opportunity for bond. “Any time previous, he would have been in and out” of detention, Millar said.
Millar said his client is a gay man who had been active in political protests against the Maduro government in Venezuela. Arrested there in 2022, he was “was singled out for a particular torture based on his sexuality,” Millar said, adding that he had medical records to support his account.
But conditions at Delaney Hall were, by many accounts, unraveling: reports of insufficient meals, unsanitary conditions, crowding. A riot over the conditions and the escape of four detainees (subsequently recaptured) prompted a crackdown inside the facility. Outside, a member of Congress was arrested while trying to inspect the situation.
F.J.S. couldn’t take it anymore. In the midst of his asylum proceedings, he opted to request voluntary departure after three months of confinement.
“To me, it’s one of the bigger parts of the story, how bad Delaney Hall was for him,” Millar said, adding he realized that even if his client were granted asylum, ICE would appeal and he’d be detained for months longer.
Still, he said, it took about six more weeks in detention for his client to be able to leave the country after getting a voluntary departure order.
It’s an especially painful part of the process that is often overlooked. Veronica Cardenas, a Newark immigration attorney, said she’s had clients sit in jail for another three to four months after being granted voluntary departure. “I wish people would know that,” she said.
Cardenas, who served as a lawyer for ICE in New York and New Jersey for nearly 13 years before leaving in 2023 to become an attorney and advocate for immigrants, said that in the past, voluntary departure was not used as much because there was more of an opportunity to win relief from a deportation order.
New York’s immigration court granted 129 voluntary departures to detainees from July to October, but that tells less than half the New York side of the story. That figure more than doubles when it includes the New Yorkers whom ICE suddenly moved to the Elizabeth jurisdiction after sending them to jails in Pennsylvania and New Jersey – another 132 people.
Of the 132 transferees, 89 were people who’d previously had cases at 26 Federal Plaza and who were not detained, according to EOIR data. Marlon Garcia Morales was one of them.
Living in the Bronx with his partner and their two children, he was working construction while his immigration case was pending at 26 Federal Plaza for nearly a year and a half. When he went to a hearing on July 3, the immigration judge scheduled his case for February, 2026. But as he left the hearing, federal agents handcuffed him and brought him to a chilly room where the conditions horrified him, he said in an affidavit filed at federal court in Manhattan.
The notorious conditions he and other detainees described prompted a federal judge to find the government’s use of the holding facility unconstitutional. In a Sept. 17 decision, Judge Lewis Kaplan suggested this was designed to coerce the detainees to give up their defense against deportation.
Also Read: ICE Has Done ‘Irreparable Harm’ to Federal Plaza Detainees, Judge Says
你知道吗？非公民办理驾照时的这个错误可能会导致选民欺诈
After five days, Garcia was transferred to Delaney Hall, where he at least was able to change his clothes and get a place to sleep. The food in the Federal Plaza lockup had been inedible and in Delaney Hall, he had to struggle to eat what was served. His weight dropped from 160 to 142 pounds, he wrote.
“I have decided to be deported when I cannot take the conditions in detention,” he said in an affidavit dated July 25. “I cannot take the injustice that I have suffered here.”
Within days, his attorney said, he asked for and received a grant of voluntary departure.
