A federal judge in New York City has issued a scathing ruling accusing the Trump administration of deliberately holding detained immigrants in “overcrowded, squalid, and degrading rooms for excessive periods of time,” in violation of the Constitution.
In a 127-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, appointed by Bill Clinton, granted a permanent injunction meant to force improvements to living conditions for people held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement at 26 Federal Plaza, the sprawling federal building near Manhattan’s Chinatown.
“ICE objectively deprived detainees of sleep, sanitary living conditions, basic personal hygiene needs, sufficient food and water, and adequate medical care,” the opinion, handed down Thursday, states. “Some of these deprivations impacted detainees immediately; others only after longer periods. ICE knew, or should have known, that how it was treating detainees was wrong, yet it continued to do it anyway. It did so to inflict punishment on detainees and induce them to self-deport.”
Beginning in early 2025, ICE started using the 10th floor of the building as a processing site for detained immigrants.
By August 2025, plaintiffs had filed suit. Their 24-page complaint describes the 10th floor being used in the most literal sense, pointing to multiple accounts of immigrants sleeping directly “on the concrete floor.” At least one government official is quoted acknowledging that detainees were, in fact, sleeping on the floor.
The following month, Kaplan handed down a preliminary injunction laying out strict rules for the facility. At the time, the court found that ICE was “failing to comply with the Constitution and their own nationwide standards governing detention facilities.”
Little has improved since, according to the court. After a full trial on the merits, Kaplan concluded that the mistreatment at the Manhattan site mirrors problems found at other ICE detention facilities now facing similar lawsuits around the country.
“This much now is clear: Unless the number of persons arrested is reduced or the number of empty spaces in more appropriate detention facilities increased so that detainees can be housed properly in appropriate facilities — and neither seems likely in any reasonable span of time — the overcrowding and other abuses of the hold rooms at 26 Fed will resume,” the opinion states. “Accordingly, the Court grants permanent relief.”
What has shifted since last year, the court found, is a surge in detentions that has only deepened the problems.
“ICE kept more and more detainees in the hold rooms for longer and longer periods because its own policy — a policy ultimately found to be illegal by almost every court to consider it — precluded their release, and it had nowhere else to put them,” the ruling continues.
Much of the lengthy opinion walks through specific, disturbing details of what Kaplan calls the “inhumane conditions of confinement” inside the Manhattan building, and he accuses ICE of showing “deliberate indifference” toward those conditions.
The opinion lays it out this way:
The hold rooms have no showers, no beds, no cots, no windows, and lack many other things found in prisons and detention facilities. But ICE has been arresting as many people as it can — more people than it can accommodate in appropriate detention facilities or remove from the country. ICE has dealt with those resource constraints by misusing the hold rooms. It has overcrowded severely the 26 Fed hold rooms, subjecting detainees for extended periods to inhumane conditions that violate the Constitution, not to mention any decent concern for the Golden Rule or the demands of humanity.
The judge acknowledges that ICE has made “some improvement in conditions,” but says the agency has kept violating prior court orders by packing the facility beyond its capacity, blocking detainees from speaking privately with their lawyers, and using other floors of the building in what appears to be an effort to dodge its legal obligations.
“ICE’s ongoing noncompliance and the cognizable danger that it, amid rising immigration arrests, again will use 26 Fed as the ‘give’ in the system prove that a permanent fix is needed to protect the Constitution against the administration’s mass deportation program,” the opinion continues.
Kaplan also uses the ruling to weigh in on the broader balance of power between the branches of government when it comes to immigration policy.
“Make no mistake, decisions about immigration and related enforcement policies are largely committed to the political branches of our government — Congress and the Executive, not the courts,” the judge writes. “But there are limits. The Constitution demands humane treatment of everyone in government custody. It requires that they receive due process of law. And it limits the Executive to enforcing the laws that Congress has enacted rather than doing whatever it wishes.”
