ICE Moved Detainees to Previously Undisclosed Floor of 26 Federal Plaza
Damn!!
Federal agents block a door to an immigrant-detention center inside
26 Federal Plaza, Sept. 18, 2025. Credit: Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY
ICE Moved Detainees to Previously Undisclosed Floor of 26 Federal Plaza
A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to reduce overcrowding and squalid conditions at a Manhattan holding room. Months later, he finds ICE merely shifted floors.
https://www.thecity.nyc/2026/02/09/26-federal-plaza-jail-conditions-ice-judge-kaplan-ruling/
Gwynne Hogan Updated Feb. 10, 2026, 8:34 a.m.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials under a judge’s order to clean up overcrowded and squalid conditions on the 10th floor of 26 Federal Plaza detained migrants on a separate, secret floor where they decided that ruling didn’t apply, attorneys for the Trump administration admitted in federal court Monday.
A judge’s order last summer mandated capacity restrictions and improved conditions at the federal building, which has been a focus of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement efforts in New York City. The order applied to any “person detained by ICE at 26 Federal Plaza,.”
But ICE has interpreted the order as applying to just one floor of the building, while conceding it has been detaining some immigrants on a separate floor.
The revelations emerged during a hearing over an ongoing lawsuit about conditions inside ICE’s holding areas inside 26 Federal Plaza, where immigrants arrested around New York City are often taken before being shipped off to detention sites across the country.
......................
Immigrant rights group Make the Road New York sued on behalf of people held there, and Judge Lewis Kaplan ordered ICE to make immediate improvements by providing meals, sanitary products, clean bed mats and access to confidential calls with attorneys for prolonged stays................................