On September 24, 2026, after a bench trial, U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of the Southern District of New York made permanent the limits he had placed on ICE's holding rooms at 26 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan. “The conditions of confinement to which ICE subjected immigration detainees at 26 Fed during the summer of 2025 were inhumane and unconstitutional,” he wrote in a 127-page opinion. He found the conduct deliberate: “ICE knew, or should have known, that how it was treating detainees was wrong, yet it continued to do it anyway. It did so to inflict punishment on detainees and induce them to self-deport.” Kaplan, a Bill Clinton appointee, also certified a class covering everyone held there now or in the future.
The tenth-floor rooms, built without beds or showers, were meant to hold people for “12 hours or less” before transfer. Before the summer of 2025 ICE generally held fewer than 10 people there at a time; by late May it “typically was holding between forty and seventy detainees in the hold rooms at any given time,” Kaplan wrote, as arrests outran the available detention space. The building also houses an immigration court where ICE officers have arrested people coming to their hearings. “By detaining far more persons in the hold rooms than ever was intended and for far longer than ever was intended, ICE objectively deprived detainees of sleep, sanitary living conditions, basic personal hygiene needs, sufficient food and water, and adequate medical care,” he wrote. “Detainees often had to try to sleep while sitting upright given the overcrowding.”
The trial record is specific. One man was held for nearly three weeks in a room with up to 90 people; another spent 19 days in the same clothes without bathing; a room of women was given two menstrual pads. At the peak of the overcrowding in early July 2025, a detainee who tested positive for tuberculosis was held there for six days. ICE's own staff saw it. “This is insane,” one ICE employee wrote to another, and, “We desperately need to get some detainees out of 26 Fed.” An assistant field office director wrote, “This week has been one gross contagion after another.”
Kaplan found that ICE exceeded his capacity limits on at least 84 days after he imposed them and failed to provide confidential legal calls, and that its disregard of the limits was “persistent, egregious, and, at a minimum, reckless, if not willful.” He said ICE personnel had tried to “sanitize the record.” He made the standards permanent because ICE seemed unlikely to reduce arrests or add beds in appropriate facilities.
The permanent injunction requires at least 50 square feet of floor space per detainee, not counting space within eight feet of a toilet, and adds pillows, dimmed lights from 9 p.m. to 7 a.m., the chance to call a lawyer within one hour, on-site medical services and screening, and temperatures between 68 and 74 degrees. A DHS spokesperson told Axios, “Detainees are only at 26 Federal Plaza for a short period while they are being processed and awaiting transfer.” The plaintiffs are represented by the ACLU and Make the Road New York, among others. For related detention cases, see ICE Quietly Stopped Listing Detainees With Final Removal Orders in Its Public Locator, Leaving Lawyers Unable to Find Their Clients and A Federal Judge Voids ICE's Courthouse Arrest Rules and Its Six-Fold Detention Extension, Finding the Arrest Rules 'Devoid of Rational Explanation'.