As volunteer book coordinator for Justice for Migrant Families WNY, Abigail Cooke coordinates with a rotation of volunteers to send 10 to 20 books per month to people held in the Buffalo Federal Detention Facility in Batavia.
The Buffalo Federal Detention Facility in Batavia, where detainees have been denied packages containing books sent to them by outside sources. Detainees are typically migrants in pretrial detention as they await developments in their immigration proceedings.
The texts requested touch a wide range of literature: religious and self-help books, science fiction and romance novels, guides to learning languages and Sudoku puzzle books. The requests are sometimes for English translations, but also commonly Spanish and a host of other languages.
Beginning in late July, however, Cooke learned from her volunteers that their orders – completed online through Barnes & Noble, packaged and delivered from a warehouse directly to the detention center – were being returned to the warehouse and not reaching their destination.
People are also reading…
She decided in September to personally submit an order for 10 books to be sent to the detention facility to see if there was an error in the process.
She received refunds for all 10.
“They’ve just been refusing them outright and sending them back,” Cooke said Thursday, later adding: “It’s cruel, and it just feels to me like a sort of arbitrary exercise in power.”
Justice for Migrant Families, the New York Civil Liberties Union and a slew of other activist and advocacy organizations on Wednesday sent letters to the regional U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Field Office to allege that ICE officials for months have violated detainees’ First Amendment rights by refusing to accept personal packages of books delivered to the Batavia detention center.
“Having access to a book is a lifeline for a lot of people,” said Megan Porter, staff attorney for the NYCLU. “It’s not just having something to do to spend the time, but to also participate in what seems like a small act but connects people to feeling more human.”
Detainees at the Buffalo Federal Detention Center are typically migrants in pretrial detention as they await developments in their immigration proceedings, Porter said.
An ICE official, when asked to address the book banning, pointed to a new safety policy as the driving force.
“The Buffalo Federal Detention Facility recently reviewed its mail-handling procedures and, in July 2025, discontinued the practice of accepting personal book shipments for detainees. During that review, officials identified security risks associated with the direct-mail program,” said the spokesperson, who requested not to be identified, in an emailed statement.
“Although ICE’s Performance-Based National Detention Standards do not require facilities to accept books mailed to individuals, Batavia had voluntarily provided that option for several years.”
The ICE spokesperson would not identify the risks associated with accepting books for detainees.
”We don’t discuss topics of operational security,” the official said.
ICE’s explanation of safety risks has not satisfied any of the senders.
“Just the idea that there could be some kind of conspiracy to get contraband in through this process, I honestly cannot imagine how that would actually happen,” Cooke said. She emphasized that her volunteers never even come into contact with the books.
The Batavia detention center has several in-house resources for literature, the ICE spokesperson said. Detainees may access law and recreational libraries, request religious texts from the center’s chaplain and read e-books on tablets.
The ICE spokesperson said the new policy regarding mail-handling procedures is specific to Buffalo and not indicative of ICE’s national policy. The regional section of ICE’s official website does not reflect the Batavia center’s new direct-mail policy, although the webpage notes that, “due to the lapse in federal funding, this website will not be actively managed.”
Porter, the NYCLU attorney, said detainees in Batavia struggle with other factors, including a lack of access to translators and severe overcrowding. Media outlet the Investigative Post last week reported that an average of 727 migrants occupy a facility that holds 600 beds, and Republican leaders since last winter have urged the development of a larger facility to house the targets of the federal government’s immigration crackdown.
The NYCLU official believes that barring detainees from receiving books from outside sources is strategic.
“It’s part of a broader culture of trying to isolate people on the inside from folks who can be their advocates on the outside,” Porter said. ICE “makes it so they can disappear, so they’re out of sight and out of mind for the general public.”
Ben Tsujimoto can be reached at btsujimoto@buffnews.com, at (716) 849-6927 or on Twitter at @Tsuj10.
