A federal judge appointed by President Donald Trump is threatening officials at the Department of Homeland Security with contempt after they refused to turn over photos of conditions in an allegedly "putrid and cramped" Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility on Long Island.
According to Courthouse News Service, "U.S. District Judge Gary Brown ... suggested Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been 'recklessly' expanding the use of these short-term detention facilities amid its nationwide push for stricter immigration enforcement."
In his furious 24-page order, Brown wrote, “The evidence presented to this court, which has been largely unrebutted, demonstrates that ICE has been deploying its ‘holding rooms’ in a manner that shocks the conscience.”
Brown was particularly enraged by the treatment of a Jamaican national named Erron Anthony Clarke, who came to the U.S. on an H-2B visa in 2018, overstayed it, but married an American citizen in 2023, has no criminal record of any kind, and applied for permanent residency due to his marriage.
After applying, Clarke was arrested by ICE, shut in a holding room within the Central Islip federal courthouse with nine other people despite the cell only being designed for one person, and left there for days, well past ICE's own guidelines, "without access to bunks, bedding, soap, showers, toothbrushes or clean clothes,” virtually no heating while nighttime temperatures dipped below freezing, and constant lighting that made sleep nearly impossible.
Brown demanded photographs of the facility, but DHS officials refused to comply, and in his words, gave timeline information that was “evasive and demonstrably false.”
“This case implicates something more,” wrote Brown. “There is evidence that the conditions of the detention are substandard, abhorrent and likely unlawful.”
This comes after a series of other court cases in which judges expressed shock at how immigration detainees were being treated. Earlier this month, a shocked federal judge in Oregon offered her lunch to a Guatemalan national who, in addition to being held illegally, testified she hadn't been fed anything for hours.