A federal judge was blindsided on Monday upon learning that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been storing detainees on floors of a Manhattan facility that it hadn’t disclosed to the court prior.
According to Courthouse News, “U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan slammed ICE for ‘stalling’ the production of discovery related to how immigrants are treated at 26 Federal Plaza, a short-term ICE jail in downtown Manhattan that has been subjected to claims of overcrowding, unsanitary living conditions and violations of detainees’ civil rights.”
In particular, per the report, ICE has already been under an order to limit the number of detainees stored on the infamous 10th floor of the facility, so to get around that, they started storing people on the ninth floor as well.
“The makeshift jail is just two floors below immigration courtrooms, where many of the detainees were abruptly detained by ICE following routine court appearances,” said the report. “Despite claims from the Department of Homeland Security that the facility is merely a short-term processing center, many noncitizens claimed in court filings that they were held for days at a time and lacked access to clean clothes, edible food and calls with their attorneys.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Oestericher “tried to clear things up for the bewildered judge. He explained that, since Kaplan ordered that no more than 22 inmates may be detained in the building’s 10th-floor jail at a time, ICE has started using holding cells on the ninth floor as they wait for space to open up on the 10th,” said the report. When Kaplan then asked, “Are there toilet facilities in each room?” Oestericher conceded he didn’t know.
According to the report, Kaplan then invited plaintiffs in the case to apply for an injunction that applies to the entire building, rather than just the 10th floor.
Kaplan, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, is well known for having presided over Trump’s civil defamation case brought by writer E. Jean Carroll, who accused him of raping her in a New York City department store in the 1990s. Trump, then a private citizen, blurted out that Kaplan was a “nasty guy” in the courtroom after he scolded Trump’s attorney for her behavior.
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