For almost two decades, United States Customs and Immigration Enforcement has maintained a practice of confiscating passports, birth certificates, visas, and other essential documents from immigrants seeking to enter the United States resulting in a pattern of abuse.

Over the past two decades, debt buyers—companies that buy old debts for pennies on the dollar—have filed millions of debt collection lawsuits and obtained millions of default judgments, against low-income New Yorkers, mostly those in predominantly Black and brown neighborhoods.