No blankets. No legal calls. No showers or clean clothes. Barely any food. Federal agents squirting water into open, thirsty mouths. Over a hundred people crowded into a room meant to hold a dozen, at most.
These are some of the conditions that immigrants being held on the 10th floor of 26 Federal Plaza have been subjected to this summer for days or weeks at a time, according to a new federal lawsuit, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement has made New York City the courthouse arrest capital of the nation during the Trump administration's rampage against immigrants. Immigrants are held at 26 Federal Plaza before they're sent elsewhere, often far across the country, to other detention sites being run by ICE.
On Tuesday, a federal judge in Lower Manhattan ordered ICE to clean up their holding cells on the 10th floor by Thursday, and to give immigrants access to three meals a day and confidential legal calls with their lawyers, and to drastically reduce the number of people being held in each holding cell. He also ordered the government to have detainees appear immediately in ICE's online detention locator system.
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