Immigration and Customs Enforcement will be compelled to defend its detention practices at 26 Federal Plaza in a federal court trial scheduled for the end of May. Immigrant advocates from Make the Road New York, attorneys from law firm Wang Hecker, and the New York Civil Liberties Union have argued that migrants were held in overcrowded and
unsanitary conditions inside the facility’s holding cells and were systematically denied access to lawyers.
The lawsuit alleges that the detentions violated First Amendment rights by denying access to legal counsel, and Fifth Amendment rights by subjecting detainees to punitive conditions of confinement without due process. The trial will be heard before Federal Judge Lewis Kaplan and is set to begin on May 26.
The class action lawsuit was filed last August, at a time when ICE arrests across New York were sharply surging, and covers anyone who was or will be detained inside 26 Federal Plaza. At the time of the filing, ICE was cramming people arrested in and around New York City into holding cells on the 10th floor under dire conditions, with severely limited access to food and water — accounts that were corroborated by video evidence.
First-hand testimonies submitted as part of the lawsuit paint a disturbing picture of life inside the facility. One account describes a 20-year-old woman who spent several days covered in menstrual blood because agents had provided a room full of women with just two menstrual pads. In another account, a detainee described a guard forcing men to
line up while dropping water into their mouths one at a time. Video evidence showed men lying cramped together on the floor, within direct view of a toilet.
An analysis of ICE’s own data revealed that detainees were spending an average of more than four days inside holding cells that have no beds and were originally designed to hold people for fewer than 12 hours. On one night in early June, as many as 186 people were kept there overnight.
Judge Kaplan intervened swiftly last summer, first issuing a temporary restraining order and then a preliminary injunction that dramatically capped the number of people ICE could hold in its cells at one time and required the agency to provide food, water, sanitary products, and access to legal counsel.
In the months since, immigrant advocates and Trump administration attorneys have been engaged in an ongoing back-and-forth through the discovery process, deposing senior ICE officials and seeking records on immigrant detainees. In one such deposition, William Joyce, ICE’s New York Deputy Field Office Director, admitted that the agency had been
holding detainees on a previously undisclosed 9th floor — a revelation that added fresh urgency to the upcoming trial.
