Judge Rules ICE Held Immigrants in 'Inhumane and Unconstitutional' Conditions in Manhattan
In a 127-page final ruling, Judge Lewis Kaplan found ICE packed detainees into squalid hold rooms at 26 Federal Plaza to push them to self-deport, and imposed a permanent injunction with strict limits.
NEW YORK — A federal judge ruled Thursday that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement held immigrants in "inhumane and unconstitutional" conditions at its Manhattan field office, and he imposed permanent rules on how the agency must treat the people it locks up there.
"The conditions of confinement to which ICE subjected immigration detainees at 26 Fed during the summer of 2025 were inhumane and unconstitutional," U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan wrote in a 127-page opinion. He also certified a class covering everyone held at the building now and in the future.
Kaplan found that ICE packed people into holding rooms at 26 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan "far beyond capacity" and kept them "far longer than ever was intended." Detainees often had to try to sleep sitting upright, and some slept next to toilets behind half-wall partitions. Internal ICE emails cited in the case showed monkeypox and tuberculosis spreading. "This week has been one gross contagion after another," one ICE official wrote.
The judge said the conditions were not an accident. By overcrowding the rooms, he wrote, ICE "objectively deprived detainees of sleep, sanitary living conditions, basic personal hygiene needs, sufficient food and water and adequate medical care," and acted "to inflict punishment on detainees and induce them to self-deport." He described the rooms as "overcrowded, squalid, and degrading."
Kaplan also said ICE had ignored his earlier orders and misled the court about whether it was following them. Officials sometimes "intentionally concealed or recklessly disregarded the truth," he wrote. "The court's orders to some extent have worked," he said, but the government "complied with its orders only when convenient for them and persistently have disregarded them in certain ways."
The permanent injunction requires at least 50 square feet of floor space per person and hold rooms kept between 68 and 74 degrees. ICE must provide three meals a day with bottled water, hygiene supplies, clean bedding mats and pillows for people held overnight, and dim the lights from 9 p.m. to 7 a.m. A licensed medical professional must be on site at all times, and detainees must be able to make a confidential call to a lawyer within an hour of being detained.
The case was brought more than a year ago by immigrant advocates, including Make the Road New York, with the American Civil Liberties Union among the lawyers bringing the case. "The horrific detention conditions inside 26 Federal Plaza are emblematic of this administration's contempt for the rule of law and hostility toward immigrants," said Harold Solis of Make the Road New York. The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The ruling comes as ICE faces scrutiny across the country. White House border czar Tom Homan said this week the agency is "not going anywhere." DHS also confirmed that a Guatemalan man who died in a Michigan car crash on Sunday after ICE agents chased him was not the person they were looking for.
