Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents privately admitted to each other how horrific the conditions were in their section of 26 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan, Courthouse News reported on Wednesday — including the proliferation of dangerous diseases in the facility.
"At the height of ICE’s immigrant detention campaign in New York City last summer, the agency regularly crammed well over 100 people at a time into a holding facility in Lower Manhattan, according to a class of detainees suing over their treatment," said the report. "Health issues permeated throughout the facility, even according to employees of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement."
Nancy Zanello, a New York-based ICE assistant field office director, raged in a 2025 email that “This week has been one gross contagion after another,” leading to “multiple” cases of detainees requiring hospital treatment for “cardiac and seizures.”
"Heather Gregorio, an attorney representing the plaintiffs, told the court that someone with tuberculosis was held in the jam-packed facility for six days," said the report. "'And we have a guy with monkeypox,' Zanello wrote in a text shown to the court, punctuating it with a facepalm emoji."
This is the latest in a long string of reports about subpar conditions in the troubled Manhattan ICE detention area.
In February, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan accused ICE of "stalling" production of documents in the case, and was reportedly "bewildered" when agents admitted to him that they had set up an entirely unreported portion of the building for their own use without public knowledge.
