A federal judge admonished the Trump administration's immigration enforcement efforts Thursday, writing that arrests of alleged illegal immigrants in New York City had led to overcrowded, degrading conditions at a key U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) site, which effectively cut them off from attorneys. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, a Clinton appointee, said that conditions at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan violated the Constitution, in part because arrests had increased so rapidly that appropriate detention facilities were not available.
The site, which houses federal government agencies including ICE and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), has come under intense scrutiny during the second Trump administration, with local Democratic leaders leading court watches and seeking greater oversight of conditions. In his ruling, Kaplan said he believed ICE had created poor conditions at Federal Plaza in an effort to force immigrants to self-deport.
"ICE knew, or should have known, that how it was treating detainees was wrong, yet it continued to do it anyway," the judge wrote. "It did so to inflict punishment on detainees and induce them to self-deport." Kaplan ordered the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to make immediate changes to the site, and said all future detainees there must be held in better conditions. "We are pleased that the judge issued such a thorough, detailed opinion confirming the harms from the overcrowding and abuses people have suffered at 26 Federal Plaza and the need for a permanent injunction to prevent our government from inflicting that same harm in the future," Carmen Iguina Gonzalez, deputy director of immigration detention at the ACLU’s National Prison Project, told Newsweek in a statement.
"Defendants in this case already demonstrated how important it will be for us to monitor compliance closely to protect class members rights, and we will be ready to do so with respect to this permanent injunction." Newsweek reached out to DHS and the New York Civil Liberties Union for comment via email Thursday afternoon. The original case was brought by one ICE detainee, Sergio Alberto Barco Mercado, an asylum seeker who said he had been attending his immigration court hearings and complying with immigration requirements when he was detained at Federal Plaza. He had lived in the U.S. for more than three years before his arrest.
While he was being held at the site, he claimed he was held in overcrowded conditions with inadequate food and water. One of the major concerns raised by Kaplan stemmed from another allegation from Barco Mercado—that he was only allowed brief phone calls and was not informed of his right to legal counsel. Kaplan wrote Thursday that, despite insistence from DHS that detainees were given numerous opportunities to contact legal counsel, "the evidence proves otherwise." "26 Fed essentially was a black site before this Court issued the [Temporary Restraining Order and Preliminary Injunction]," Kaplan said, referring to previous orders in August 2025.
"Attorneys had no way to get in touch with detainees other than through ICE staff, who persistently delayed scheduling attorney-client calls by erecting procedural roadblocks, claiming that 26 Fed was too busy (again, a problem of ICE’s own making), failing to update the location of detainees in its online tracker such that attorneys were unable to find their clients, or lying and saying that a detainee currently being held at 26 Fed was 'in transit.'" Even after his initial orders, Kaplans said, ICE continued to keep detainees from contacting attorneys. The judge accused the government of violating the First and Fifth Amendments, and pointed to similar rulings around the country. Since the initial ruling in August 2025, ICE had argued conditions had improved and said it was complying with Kaplan's original order.
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