NEW YORK — A federal judge in Manhattan on Thursday ordered the Trump administration to permanently improve the “overcrowded, squalid and degrading” cells where undocumented New Yorkers are detained at 26 Federal Plaza, and said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had inflicted cruelty and “appalling conditions” to induce people to self-deport.

In a blistering 127-page opinion, Federal Judge Lewis Kaplan said the inhumane treatment violated the Constitution, “not to mention any decent concern for the Golden Rule or the demands of humanity."

“Make no mistake, decisions about immigration and related enforcement policies are largely committed to the political branches of our government – Congress and the Executive, not the courts. But there are limits. The Constitution demands humane treatment of everyone in government custody. It requires that they receive due process of law. And it limits the Executive to enforcing the laws that Congress has enacted rather than doing whatever it wishes,” Kaplan wrote.

“Whether the current administration has violated the limits placed upon it by the Constitution in turn is a question that emphatically is within the province of the courts.”

Kaplan in May considered testimony at a bench trial from former 26 Federal Plaza detainees who reported humiliating treatment by guards, appalling hygiene conditions, cells packed way beyond capacity, and other troubling circumstances, like being denied medical treatment for tuberculosis, monkeypox, diabetes, and seizures.

One woman reported her pants being stained with “a lot of blood” after she was unable to get a menstrual pad from guards during the five days she had her period.

Kaplan said the disturbing and detailed accounts upended claims to the contrary made by ICE officials, staff, and contractors.

“If the hold rooms regularly were cleaned and new clothes regularly provided, why did the hold rooms reek of sweat, urine, and feces? If feminine hygiene products readily were available, why did female detainees wear clothes stained with their own menstrual blood? No one rationally would choose to live in such conditions,” the judge wrote.

Referring to one asylum seeker who chose to leave the country rather than remain held prisoner at the troubled complex, Kaplan wrote, “Perhaps that was at least one reason for the appalling conditions and the cruelty.”

“ICE knew, or should have known, that how it was treating detainees was wrong, yet it continued to do it anyway,” he later wrote. “It did so to inflict punishment on detainees and induce them to self-deport.”

Kaplan on Thursday granted class-action status to people currently detained and who will be detained by ICE at the facility. The injunction requires that every detainee be provided access to a lawyer as needed and that they receive a basic screening from a licensed medical professional and whatever treatment they require, including for mental health disorders. It orders that a medical professional be on site at all times.

Detainees must be provided with clean and warm bedding, clothing, a place to change in private, basic toiletries such as soap, toothpaste, and feminine hygiene products, three meals a day mindful of dietary and religious restrictions, and bottled water, the injunction states.

Kaplan’s opinion made note of trial evidence showing detainees experienced cruelty by guards beyond squalid conditions, like ICE agents beating and jeering detainees and filming them while they were crying.

“It might be one thing if it had been convicted criminals whom ICE had been detaining. But that was not the case,” the judge wrote. “Many had been living in the United States for several years. Some had married U.S. citizens. Some had young children. And many had been forced to flee their home countries to escape persecution and the threat of violence.”

As the Trump administration intensified its aggressive mass deportation campaign last summer, more than 1,000 people were detained inside the Manhattan skyscraper that towers over Foley Square. Many targeted were rule-followers cornered by packs of ICE agents in narrow hallways while lawfully seeking asylum.

Kaplan issued a temporary injunction in the case in August 2025 requiring ICE to improve conditions and reduce overcrowding in the building, which ICE later admitted it violated at least twice. The judge on Thursday wrote that ICE and DHS had persistently disregarded his capacity limits in “reckless, if not willful” ways.

According to ICE data collected in the suit, 175 people were detained in the detention area on July 1, 2025, almost eight times over capacity.

The judge said that while he had already restrained some of the worst practices occurring there, overcrowding and other abuses would resume unless fewer people were arrested or the government increased its number of appropriate detention facilities, noting, “neither seems likely in any reasonable span of time.”

The New York Daily News reached out to officials for ICE and DHS for comment.

“We are clear-eyed that these abuses did not occur in isolation,” Harold Solis, the co-legal director of Make the Road New York, one of the nonprofits representing detainees in the suit, said in a statement.

“They are part of a broader pattern of cruelty and lawlessness that has characterized this administration’s treatment of immigrants over the past year, fueling fear, inflicting profound harm on communities, and undermining the rights and safety of citizens and noncitizens alike.”

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