A federal judge in Lower Manhattan is considering whether to further restrict the Department of Homeland Security’s ability to keep detained immigrants inside holding cells at 26 Federal Plaza.
In a two-hour long bench trial Wednesday morning, immigrant advocates laid out their case that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had repeatedly violated the constitutional rights of immigrants inside holding cells last summer at 26 Federal Plaza, where they were kept in cramped conditions for days with limited access to food, water, sanitary products and without a place to sleep.
At the time, DHS had flatly denied any issues at 26 Federal Plaza, saying that “any claim that there is overcrowding or subprime conditions at ICE facilities are categorically false.”
But emails and depositions presented in court Wednesday morning indicate that officials knew otherwise at the time, with ICE staffers raising internal red flags over unsafe conditions. One said that they were “concerned about the safety of everyone there.” Another called conditions at the detention center “insane,” and yet another said overcrowding was “creating an unsafe environment.”
In one email, ICE official Lige Hampton noted that the cells at 26 Federal Place held 200 people with an estimated additional 60 arrests a day in New York City. “Hopefully we don’t wait until something negative happens,” Hampton wrote.
Ladeon Francis, another ICE official, wrote in an email that ICE was a “victim of our own success,” adding that the agency was arresting more people in immigration courts “than bedspace can be found locally.” The holding cells at 26 Federal Plaza were “never designed for such an operation,” Francis wrote.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Rachel Kroll made little attempt to defend the Trump administration’s detention practices last summer, instead asking Judge Lewis Kaplan to consider their attempts at compliance with his orders in the nine months since.
She pointed to improvements the agency has made, like providing clean clothing, sanitary products, bedding, meals either twice or three times a day and a nurse on staff 24 hours a day.
“The facts are the facts,” Kroll said, adding there were “almost no contested exhibits.”
“The cells were overcrowded,” she admitted.
During the proceeding, Judge Kaplan floated an even more drastic remedy than continuing to restrict capacity inside the holding cells, a limit he first put in place with a temporary restraining order last August.
“One of the questions is whether you should be permitted to use those facilities at all,” he stated.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security did not return THE CITY’s request for comment on the arguments made in court.
Over the course of the morning, attorney Heather Gregorio of Wang Hecker LLP, who is working with immigrant advocacy groups like Make the Road New York and the New York Civil Liberties Union, laid out their argument citing depositions with top ICE officials, internal emails and log books of detainees stays, in addition to first-hand testimony of people held there.
Gregorio called it a “crisis of the defendants’ own making that was predictable, preventable and had catastrophic consequences” for people held there.
“The defendants were well aware of this self-made crisis and did nothing,” she said.
The holding cells on the 10th floor of 26 Federal Plaza, are a central location where people arrested in New York City are often taken before they’re transferred to actual detention centers across the country.
They have no beds or showers and were previously used for stays of less than 12 hours. But as arrests surged at immigration courthouses and ICE check-ins last summer, ICE started cramming immigrants inside the holding cells for days at a time.
THE CITY first obtained a video of the inside of one of holding cells that clearly showed overcrowding and paired that with an analysis of ICE’s own data to document that people were spending days inside the cells, instead of the brief stints ICE claimed.
Affidavits from immigrants submitted in court Wednesday described women being humiliated after spending days covered in menstrual blood, the pervasive smell of urine and feces and people attempting to sleep while sitting up.
Over the course of June, July, and August, there were regularly seven or eight times as many people in the holding cells than their stated capacity, and often held more than 100 people a night, Gregorio said, citing the data ICE provided them over the course of discovery in the case.
Eighty two percent of the people who passed through there last summer spent more than 12 hours, she said, with some people spending as many as 20 or 30 days inside.
“I was just a body that they crammed into a room, almost as if to be forgotten,” one woman named Nuvia Ventura Martinez, who was held there last summer, recalled in written testimony presented to the judge Wednesday morning.
“My time at 26 Federal Plaza still haunts me,” said another man who had passed through last summer named Roberto Chilavert Olmedo, also in written testimony. “It is a nightmare and I cannot believe that human beings can be treated like that in a place like the United States.”
Gregoiro highlighted discrepancies between what ICE officials said about the holding rooms directly to Judge Kaplan and what they were saying to each other at the time.
“We are in violation of the TRO [temporary restraining order],” Nancy Zanello, an official with ICE’s New York City Field Office of Enforcement and Removal Operations, wrote in an email shortly after Kaplan’s order came down last summer, saying that there were 48 people in the holding areas last August and 13 more on the way.
At the time, Zanello had signed a sworn statement saying on a particular date in August there were just eight people in the holding room. Gregorio presented the court Wednesday with records from ICE’s log book that showed 60 people were inside holding cells at that time.
Texts messages and emails from ICE agents also described an array of medical issues that detainees experienced from cardiac conditions, seizures, COVID-19 diabetes, heart conditions, panic attacks, withdrawal, kidney failure and tuberculosis.
“Cardiac lady. We don’t have her meds. It’s becoming an issue,” one ICE agent’s text message read.
The one thing the parties disputed was what the holding cells had been like in the months since Judge Kaplan’s order went into effect. Gregorio presented data suggesting ICE was out of compliance with the capacity restrictions on more than 100 nights since last summer.
But while Kroll conceded it had taken ICE several weeks to come into compliance after the judge’s order, she said ICE only exceeded capacity restrictions twice since September.
The confusion was because ICE’s data on the people being held in the “NYC Hold Room” includes people being held in cells on the 10th floor, in addition to ones on the 9th floor, and in the waiting room on the 5th floor where families with children are held when they get arrested by ICE.
“ICE is in compliance with the preliminary injunction,” she said, urging the judge not to implement further restrictions beyond the ones already in place.
Judge Kaplan said he would consider the arguments of both parties and potentially request additional evidence before making a final ruling on the case.
After the bench trial, attorneys gathered outside the courthouse, along with a man who gave only his first name, Carlos, who said he spent several days inside holding cells at 26 Federal Plaza after getting arrested at immigration court last July.
“No one should have to go through what I went through or what thousands of other people who have been arrested and detained in that building have,” he said through a translator.
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