On May 6, 2026, three ICE officers went to a block in the Bronx looking for two men. They arrested two men. Neither was the person they were looking for. One was a U.S. citizen, and he left with stitches in his head.
Then, a federal judge has now ruled, the agents wrote up false paperwork to make it look like they'd done nothing wrong.
On Monday, October 5, Judge Gary R. Brown of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York issued a 28-page ruling finding that the arrest and detention of one of those men "were illegal." Brown was appointed by President Trump.
The wrong man
The agents said they were looking for a man wanted on a deportation order who, they said, had a criminal record, plus a second man with no criminal record who had missed an immigration appointment. They arrested Angel Jesus Almonte, 26, saying he was the second man.
Almonte is five inches taller and 80 pounds heavier than the man they said they mistook him for, according to the ruling. Shown the target's photo under cross-examination, the ICE team leader admitted: "It's very easy to see they're two different people."
The agents claimed they had watched Almonte make a drug deal outside a Bronx building. But their own records showed he had no drugs and no money on him when they arrested him. Only after he was detained did an ICE supervisor run him through five federal databases, and all five came back with nothing.
The false warrant
That's when, the judge found, the agents went to work on the paperwork.
"ICE agents prepared a substantially false administrative warrant in an attempt to rationalize their actions," Brown wrote. Their claim that they'd seen a drug sale, he wrote, bears "all the hallmarks of coordinated fabrication."
"The evidence suggests that ICE attempted to support their unsupported misidentification argument through false or misleading documentation and testimony," the ruling says.
Read that again. This is not an activist's accusation. It's a finding by a federal judge Trump put on the bench, after hearing the officers testify under oath.
The U.S. citizen
On the same block, the same officers made a second arrest. They said they'd found the first man on their list. They hadn't.
Jeury Concepción is 19 years old and a U.S. citizen. He says the officers never asked to see his ID before taking him to the ground. He got a deep cut on the side of his head that needed stitches.
The agents called that one a case of mistaken identity too.
"What happened to him should not happen to anybody … let alone a U.S. citizen," his lawyer, Joshua Dayan, told The New York Times. "All they did was run up to Jeury and attack him." Dayan said he plans to sue ICE and the agents.
Not one bad day
Brown wrote that all three officers were relatively new to their jobs. And what happened to Concepción isn't rare.
ProPublica found more than 500 U.S. citizens who had been held by immigration agents, including at least 70 children, while the administration insisted it wasn't detaining Americans. And when an ICE agent shot a man through a closed door, the prosecutor on the case says the Justice Department overruled him to block civil rights charges.
This isn't the first time Brown has caught the government, either. In 2025, he threatened the Department of Homeland Security with contempt after it refused to give his court photos of a Long Island holding room he said had been kept "in a manner that shocks the conscience," according to his ruling.
In this case, Brown gave ICE 21 days to tell the court what steps, if any, it will take to make sure its arrests are lawful, and what it proposes to do about what he found — including, if it chooses, disciplinary measures. After that, he wrote, he will consider sanctions, referring the matter to other authorities, or using his contempt powers.
What the court found
A Trump-appointed federal judge ruled that ICE agents illegally arrested the wrong man in the Bronx — a man five inches taller and 80 pounds heavier than the man they claimed to have mistaken him for — then prepared "a substantially false administrative warrant" and gave testimony with "all the hallmarks of coordinated fabrication" to cover it up. On the same block, the same agents took down a 19-year-old U.S. citizen without checking his ID, leaving him with a head wound that needed stitches.
Source
- Judge Accuses ICE of Falsifying Documents to Cover Up Illegal Arrests — The Washington Sun
