11/22/2025 – Just Talk (Bill Martin)
ICE is back in the local news: Binghamton and Long Island communities and media are now responding to last week’s revelation that the Broome County Jail is caging a Long Island teenager, Gendri Ortiz Paredes, for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). How does Ortiz end up in Binghamton? Well the Broome County Sheriff, an ardent Trump supporter, has a formal agreement to house ICE and Federal detainees, signed and paid for without consulting County legislators. So Gendri was transported from Long Island to overnight in an ICE Manhattan center and then onward to the Broome jail where he has been for over four weeks.
Local newspapers in Binghamton and Long Island are picking up the story. Gendri is uncertain about what is going on, anxious, puzzled, and visibly shaken. Not a single staff person can speak his language. His school superintendent wants him back in school.
His mother is distraught. His soccer teammates miss him (he is a midfielder, wearing number 17). His teachers speak admirably of his work and want him back in school. His English teacher simply states “To be honest with you, he’s a great student…very respectful, honest, hardworking,” someone who “got along great with everybody, even with the other teachers, too …. I consider him a friend.”
In one sense he is not alone: he is just one of scores of persons captured from around the state and then bundled in and out of the Broome jail for days, weeks, months. Like others he was kept incommunicado, in this case in solitary, for the first two weeks. How many more are there? What are conditions inside? ICE doesn’t easily reveal who these people are, where they are captured, or where and how long they are in our jail. The Sheriff doesn’t provide any details either. Their names and numbers are not listed on the Sheriff’s app’s inmate roster. Local and regional farm workers and roofers are often only discovered when persons visit the jail. Jailing Ortiz is of course part of wider drive to capture and hide ICE detainees of all ages.
Where are your family from?
Hidden away, its easy to pretend this a distant problem. Most people presume ICE detainees are from faraway Mexico or central America. Don’t believe it. It’s a much wider sweep ranging across Africa, the Caribbeean, Europe and Latin America. Here are a few of the locations represented by people held for ICE in the county jail (list below). Where are your family from?
While Gendri and other teens and kids fester in ICE detention centers, an organized campaign is growing to expand the number of all teens, citizens or not, tried in adult courts and held in adult jails. It’s worrisome: there is a long history of abuse of youth in the Broome jail. The County lost successive lawsuits over the beating of Black teen (see here) and the tear gassing and housing of a naked youth (see here). The County no longer houses people under 18. The Sheriff along with others—including District Attorneys around the state and NYPD Chief Tisch under NYC Mayor Adams and soon to be mayor Zohran Mamdani—would like to change this by rolling back the “raise the age” law, bringing teens less than 18 back into adult courts and presumably the jail. This battle is accelerating into the new legislative year.
Note
*Albania, Angola, Bangaladesh, Brazil, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Czech Republic, D.R. Congo, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Ghana, Guatemala, Guinea, Haiti, Honduras, Hungary, India, Iran, Israel, Liberia, Malawi, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Romania, Russia, Spain, St. Lucia, Taiwan, Tajikstan, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkiye, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Venezuela.
This map was generated from government data provided by ICE in response to a FOIA request to the Deportation Data Project and analyzed by Justtalk. The dataset on detentions (here) is incomplete. The dataset runs only to September this year, missing continual flows since then. It excludes lists of persons who had detainers requested by ICE. And some people who are held in the jail aren’t recorded under ICE but under other Federal charges (even if held only on deportation charges). So the numbers and countries are assuredly more numerous than this map suggests; Jamaica and Eritrea for example also likely belong to the list.
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