On Tuesday, a U.S. district judge had to order ICE to provide the bare minimum to detainees held at a federal building in downtown Manhattan.
During a hearing regarding conditions at the building — 26 Federal Plaza — a government attorney admitted that detainees did not have access to sleeping mats, medication or more than two meals per day, CBS News reports.
In a temporary order, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan ruled that ICE must provide clean bedding mats for each person after videos revealed that immigrants were sleeping directly on the floor. Kaplan also stated that each detainee should have an area of at least 50 square feet in floor space as well as access to soap, towels and toilet paper, among other fundamental necessities.
Kaplan’s order follows a lawsuit from civil rights organizations, including the ACLU, which raised concerns about “inhumane” conditions at the federal facility, including that people were forced to sleep on concrete next to toilets, packed tightly in overcrowded cells and deprived of medication.
A reported video of the facility obtained by the New York Immigration Coalition that was published in July also captured numerous detainees jammed inside one of the building’s rooms and sprawled on the ground with nothing but aluminum blankets.
Tricia McLaughlin, the DHS assistant secretary of public affairs, has pushed back on the order, describing it as “driven by complete fiction,” despite the government lawyer’s description of the facility’s conditions.
“26 Federal Plaza operates as a processing center, brief intake for illegal aliens, and then transfer to an ICE detention center meeting national standards for care and custody, which are in most cases better than facilities which detain Americans,” McLaughlin said in a statement.
That a judge had to require ICE to provide essential supplies and humane treatment to detainees underscores how the agency has reportedly skirted these obligations in multiple detention facilities.
While detention spaces in 26 Federal Plaza, which also houses an immigration court, weren’t typically used to hold people for long periods, advocates say that people have been held there for more than a week and denied basic services in the interim.
Kaplan’s order added that detainees should be able to request medical care and to access prescription medications that they had at the time of detention or that family members bring for them.
It also stated that detainees should have the means to make confidential calls to legal counsel, something that advocates said they had been barred from doing previously.
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