ICE has temporary holding rooms in New York City at 26 Federal Plaza, a federal office building. The location is intended for brief custody, generally 12 hours or less, while people are processed or transferred to a detention facility. The rooms have no beds, cots, showers, or windows.

In Sergio Alberto Barco Mercado v. Markwayne Mullin, et al., Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled on September 24 that even after temporary orders improved conditions, ICE exceeded room capacities, failed to provide confidential legal calls and used other floors to hold detainees contrary to the court’s orders.

Page 108 of the opinion:

“The conditions of confinement to which ICE subjected immigration detainees at 26 Fed during the summer of 2025 were inhumane and unconstitutional. 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. ICE prevented detainees from accessing counsel, who might have stood in the way of what it was doing. Some of these deprivations impacted detainees immediately; others only after longer periods. 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. The [Temporary Restraining Order] and [Preliminary Injuction of Sept 17, 2025] abated ICE’s constitutional violations, but ICE’s ongoing noncompliance and the cognizable danger that it, amid rising immigration arrests, again will use 26 Fed as the “give” in the system prove that a permanent fix is needed to protect the Constitution against the administration’s mass deportation program.”