'26 Fed Essentially Was a Black Site': Judge Kaplan's 125-Page Ruling Orders ICE to Fix Federal Plaza Detention Conditions

'26 Fed Essentially Was a Black Site': Judge Kaplan's 125-Page Ruling Orders ICE to Fix Federal Plaza Detention Conditions

On Thursday, Sept. 24, 2026 (reported Sept. 25), U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan (S.D.N.Y.) issued a 125-page ruling granting a permanent injunction requiring DHS to fix the immigration detention conditions at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan, in the class action brought by detainee Sergio Alberto Barco Mercado — an asylum seeker arrested while attending his own immigration hearings after three years of compliance.

The findings are unusually blunt:

• "26 Fed essentially was a black site before this Court issued the [Temporary Restraining Order and Preliminary Injunction]" — referring to his earlier August 2025 orders.
• "[ICE] has overcrowded severely the 26 Fed hold rooms, subjecting detainees for extended periods to inhumane conditions that violate the Constitution, not to mention any decent concern for the Golden Rule or the demands of humanity."
• "ICE knew, or should have known, that how it was treating detainees was wrong, yet it continued to do it anyway. It did so to inflict punishment on detainees and induce them to self-deport.¹²"

Kaplan found the government's use of alternative detention floors not named in the suit was a "willful or reckless misreading of [the court's] previous orders," that ICE had willfully "sanitized the record," and that ICE blocked attorney access — erecting "procedural roadblocks," failing to update its detainee tracker, and telling attorneys that clients at 26 Fed were "in transit" — in violation of the First and Fifth Amendments. All future detainees at the site must be held in better conditions. Carmen Iguina Gonzalez of the ACLU's National Prison Project: "Defendants in this case already demonstrated how important it will be for us to monitor compliance closely... and we will be ready to do so with respect to this permanent injunction."

Why it matters: a sweeping judicial finding that the federal government ran a punitive detention site in Manhattan — with conditions deliberately inflicted to push self-deportation — is among the starkest court rebukes of the administration's immigration-enforcement machinery. The compliance fight (and any government appeal to the Second Circuit) is the next front.