Immigration and Customs Enforcement will be forced to defend its detention practices inside holding cells at 26 Federal Plaza in a trial slated for the end of May.
Immigrant advocates from Make the Road New York and attorneys from the law firm Wang Hecker and the NYCLU have argued that migrants were held there in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions and denied access to lawyers.
Their detention violated First Amendment rights because they couldn’t speak to lawyers, and Fifth Amendment rights because they were subject to “punitive conditions of confinement” without due process, the suit alleges.
The trial, before federal judge Lewis Kaplan, will kick off on May 26.
The groups filed a class action lawsuit last August, as ICE arrests in New York were surging, on behalf of anyone who was or will be detained inside 26 Federal Plaza.
At the time, ICE was cramming people arrested in and around New York City inside the holding cells on the 10th floor in dire conditions, with limited access to food and water, according to detainees and corroborated by video evidence obtained by THE CITY.
As part of the lawsuit, advocates submitted first-hand accounts of immigrants detained there, including a 20-year-old who spent days covered in menstrual blood because agents had given a room full of women just two menstrual pads. In another case, one detainee said a guard forced men to line up for water while they squirted drops in their mouths.
The video obtained by THE CITY showed the men cramped together laying down on the floor, within view of a toilet.
At the time, THE CITY also conducted an analysis of ICE’s own data, finding the average time people were spending inside holding cells has surged up to more than four days, though the cells, which have no beds, were intended to hold people for less than 12 hours. On one night in early June, ICE kept as many as 186 people overnight, THE CITY found.
Judge Lewis Kaplan stepped in swiftly last summer, putting a temporary restraining order and then a preliminary injunction, that dramatically restricted capacity on how many people ICE could hold at once inside its holding cells and required ICE to provide food, water, sanitary products and access to legal counsel.
In the months since, immigrant advocates and Trump administration attorneys have gone back and forth in discovery, deposing top-ranking ICE officials and seeking records on immigrant detainees.
THE CITY recently reported that during one such deposition, William Joyce, ICE’s New York Deputy Field Office Director, had admitted it was holding detainees on a previously undisclosed 9th floor.
On that floor the agency hadn’t been abiding by all the rules set out in Judge Kaplan’s preliminary injunction, a government attorney admitted.
Both parties subsequently signed an agreement that ICE would apply Kaplan’s ruling to any, “any room, cell, or other space where individuals are detained for any length of time by Defendants at 26 Federal Plaza.”
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