Last summer, as federal agents were grabbing immigrants moments after they left their court hearings, officers crammed as many as 100 people at a time into a makeshift detention facility on the 10th floor of a Manhattan skyscraper.
After covertly recorded video footage showed detainees lying on cement floors with nothing but emergency blankets, steps away from a toilet separated only by a waist-high partition, a spokesperson for Homeland Security flatly denied any allegations of “overcrowding or subprime conditions” as “categorically false.”
But newly released emails, text messages and testimony from Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers themselves suggest that they not only knew that conditions were deteriorating but were also repeatedly raising red flags to their colleagues.
One official said that they were “concerned about the safety of everyone there.” Another called conditions at the facility “insane,” while a third said they were “creating an unsafe environment.”
ICE officials insist conditions have improved since then, but a federal judge who presided over one of the first-ever trials against immigration detention under Donald Trump’s administration this week has raised the idea of shutting it down altogether.
In another email, an ICE official admitted that the facility was holding at least 200 people and counting, with an estimated additional 60 arrests each day. “Hopefully we don’t wait until something negative happens,” Lige Hampton wrote.
ICE is a “victim of our own success,” wrote New York ICE official Ladeon Francis, who noted that officers were arresting more people “than bedspace can be found locally.”
The makeshift detention space was “never designed for such an operation,” he wrote.
“This is insane,” another official wrote in an email. “We desperately need to get some detainees out of 26 Fed. … Something has to get done.”
Following this week’s one-day trial on conditions at the facility, a spokesperson for Homeland Security again told The Independent that “any claim that there is overcrowding or subprime conditions at ICE facilities” is “categorically false.”
“All detainees are provided with proper meals, medical treatment, and have opportunities to communicate with their family members and lawyers,” the person said. “As we arrest and remove criminal illegal aliens and public safety threats from the U.S., ICE has worked diligently to obtain greater necessary detention space while avoiding overcrowding.”
The documents were released as part of one of the first-ever trials over ICE detentions during Trump’s presidency, with the 10th floor holding rooms at 26 Federal Plaza emerging as a flashpoint for ICE arrests.
The building, which also houses Manhattan’s largest immigration court, includes four cells that are designed for only short-term stays. In practice, detainees are held there while waiting for their transfer to larger immigrant detention centers.
Those “hold rooms” are not intended to hold people for longer than 12 hours, according to ICE’s own internal guidance. But immigrants testified that they’ve spent days at a time inside. The cells do not have beds or showers.
Nuvia Ventura Martinez was abruptly detained after her ICE check-in appointment last summer and hauled to the makeshift holding room, where conditions were “dreadful,” she wrote in testimony to the court. Women who were menstruating were bleeding through their clothes, food was “almost non-existent,” and she didn’t have access to her diabetes medicine, she wrote.
“I was just a body that they crammed into a room, almost as if to be forgotten,” she said.
Officers grabbed Carlos Lopez Benitez after his immigration court hearing, which he attended with his two U.S. citizen sisters, he wrote in a declaration to the court. One officer held up his phone to show Lopez Benitez a photo of himself weeping, he wrote. The officer laughed, he said.
“I asked why they were doing this and an ICE officer said ‘it’s a new government,’” Lopez Benitez wrote.
Similarly grim accounts from people inside the facility emerged last summer. Detainees said they were fed inedible “slop” and were forced to sleep in cells surrounded by the “horrific stench” of sweat, urine and feces in rooms with open toilets, and others reported spending as much as three weeks inside the facility without a chance to bathe or brush their teeth.
In August, Judge Lewis Kaplan ordered the administration to improve conditions — and banned ICE from detaining people in spaces with less than 50 square feet per person, which shrinks the capacity of the largest hold room to roughly a dozen or so people.
ICE officials were failing the court order within days after it was issued, newly released messages show.
“We are in violation of the [temporary restraining order],” wrote Nancy Zanello, an official with ICE’s New York City Field Office of Enforcement and Removal Operations. There were 48 people in the holding spaces and more were coming, she said.
The restraining order is “crippling,” another official wrote.
ICE officials were also aware of “serious medical needs” among detainees but ignored them, according to the lawsuit.
Zanello exchanged text messages about several medical emergencies, including a detainee with monkeypox and reports of another person having a “seizure” and one person referred to as “cardiac lady.”
“This week has been one gross contagion after another,” she wrote in an email last July.
“We don’t have her meds it’s becoming an issue,” one text message reads. “And we have a guy with monkeypox.”
Immigrants’ rights groups, lawyers and lawmakers warned for weeks about deteriorating conditions inside the building, sparking a lawsuit at the center of the case.
Thousands of people across the country have faced arrest after showing up for court-ordered ICE check-ins and immigration court hearings as part of Trump’s campaign to rapidly arrest and deport at least 1 million people each year.
The Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review also instructed immigration judges to immediately dismiss immigrants’ cases, making them easy targets for arrest and removal once they leave the courtroom.
A federal judge overseeing a separate case ripped into the “arbitrary” practice of arresting immigrants as they leave their hearings, creating what he called a “game of detention roulette” that violates due process.
ICE has allegedly withdrawn the policy, but another federal judge has blocked the agency from arresting most immigrants while they’re inside New York City’s immigration courts.
Evidence in the case over conditions at Federal Plaza reveals ICE officials “confirmed that this crisis was a predictable and foreseeable consequence” of those moves, lawyers for detainees wrote Wednesday.
“In other words, this crisis was of defendants’ own making,” they said.
