ICE's Squalid Holding Cells: Aluminum Foil on Concrete, Two Sanitary Pads for an Entire Room: Judge Kaplan Steps In

Foreword

"There's nothing you can do about it anyway." Hardly a sentence gets thrown at our feet more often. It sounds like common sense, but it's really just exhaustion disguised as wisdom. For months, we've been fighting back with everything we've got. There's always something you can do. It takes effort, a whole lot of it. Sometimes it also means showing your teeth. Clicking "Like" has never saved the world. 82 percent of the lawsuits brought against the Trump regime have been won. 65 percent of the rulings have now been implemented. Why does hardly anybody know that? Because most people get their picture of the world from social media. If something doesn't show up there, as far as they're concerned, it never happened.

We fight this battle every single day, against government agencies and against this regime. And then there's another opponent, one that doesn't wear a uniform: a way of reading that sits around waiting for Facebook to deliver something. That habit makes our work harder than any government agency ever could. Go to the magazines. Go straight to the newspapers, to the people standing on the front lines for you and for democracy. Stop clinging to a platform that couldn't care less about democracy, or about you, for that matter. There's no need to waste a single word on what these platforms stand for. It's pathetic. And now, on to the article.

A waiting room promises a short stay. The holding cells on the 10th floor of 26 Federal Plaza, ICE's headquarters in Manhattan, were designed for stays of no more than 12 hours. They have no showers, no beds, and no windows, either. We know the conditions there well. Our investigations and repeated contact with people detained there paint a horrifying picture of humiliation and conditions that border on torture. In the summer of 2025, hours turned into days, and for one man, nearly three weeks. On Thursday, federal Judge Lewis A. Kaplan issued a permanent injunction prohibiting those conditions. ICE had locked up many detainees in "overcrowded, filthy, and degrading rooms" for far too long, he writes. The lawsuit was brought by Sergio Alberto Barco Mercado, who was arrested in August 2025; the defendants include Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin.

Kaplan starts with the administration's promise to carry out the largest deportation operation in the country's history. To deliver on that promise, it arrests as many people as possible and insists on locking up nearly all of them until their often lengthy proceedings are over, in violation of existing law. There isn't enough room for that many people. Most of the witnesses in the case had been arrested after routine hearings in immigration court, in the very same building. They showed up for their hearings and never left. Before the summer of 2025, ICE usually held fewer than 10 people at a time on the 10th floor. By late May, the number was generally between 40 and 70, and on some days later that summer, more than 150.

On June 24, 2025, ICE extended the limit from 12 to 72 hours, subject to "extraordinary circumstances." From then on, just about everything became extraordinary. If you had people in custody and nowhere to put them, well, that was an extraordinary circumstance, testified William Joyce, then deputy director of the New York field office. Many stayed far longer than 72 hours. One man had spent 9.5 days in a room with around 70 other men, packed so tightly together that they were "crammed in." Joyce acknowledged that the rooms were "not quite as crowded as a subway car." Nancy Zanello, who oversaw the 10th floor every day, refused to call it overcrowding until the number reached 154 people, the fire department's limit for all 4 rooms combined. The court calls that ridiculous and finds her testimony not credible. Supervisory officer Lige Hampton even suggested in early August 2025 that arrests at the courthouse be suspended for a few days.

Read also our investigation: The New Deportation Machinery in New York – Trump’s Second Offensive and the Return of Fear

Read our investigation as well: One Block from the Abyss - How Trump Is Rebuilding America’s Immigration Justice. An Investigative Report from Hell

ICE provided no cots. No pillows, either. No blankets. People slept on thin aluminum foil or emergency blankets, the kind runners wear after a marathon, spread over bare concrete. The lights stayed on around the clock. Many didn't even have enough room to lie down. One called the room an "icebox." Another said the cramped space felt "like an oven." Same cells, two climate zones. ICE insists it served three meals a day. Detainees described getting one meal a day, sometimes none, along with hunger that never went away. Investigations reached the same conclusion. Kaplan accuses ICE of trying to make the record look better after the fact. Water was just as scarce: One guard allegedly held up a bottle and squirted water into the mouths of those waiting, "as if we were animals."

There was no washing. The detainees reportedly spent days in the same clothes they had been wearing when they were taken into custody, without a toothbrush, without a shower. The toilet stood behind a half wall in the same room where they ate and slept. One woman reported that she had her period for 5 days; her entire room received 2 sanitary pads during that time. Women had to wear clothes stained with their own blood. Despite some attempts by ICE personnel to clean up the record, conditions throughout the summer had been anything but clean, Kaplan concludes. They had been utterly inadequate, and the detainees had been denied any privacy whatsoever.

The judge calls the medical care inadequate. One man spent six days in the overcrowded rooms before later testing positive for tuberculosis. Access to an attorney had been severely obstructed. Phone calls reportedly lasted only a few minutes, often late at night. Guards stood nearby. Some detainees were told that a lawyer couldn't do anything for them anyway. Guards ate pizza and hamburgers in front of people who were going hungry. Several detainees say they witnessed fellow prisoners being beaten. Posters hang on the walls. Voluntary departure comes with a reward: $2,600 per family member, plus a free flight home. Some took the offer. One man said that after 26 Federal Plaza, he had lost the will to keep fighting while in detention. Another, who wanted to pursue his asylum application, was allegedly told by an officer that he would simply remain locked up until his hearing in 2029. Perhaps, Kaplan writes, that was at least one reason for the miserable conditions and the cruelty.

At the same time, Kaplan has certified the case as a class action, which was the goal of the lawsuits, covering all detainees in the building. That hardly inspires confidence. Unless fewer people are arrested or more suitable detention facilities are created, overcrowding and abuses will return, he warns. The ruling should resonate all the more loudly now that ICE has decided to stop disclosing the whereabouts of thousands of people with final deportation orders. A waiting room promises a short stay. This government no longer even promises an address.