Videos from inside a small immigrant detention facility at a federal building in New York City show roughly two dozen people crammed in, lying on a cement floor with nothing but emergency blankets, steps away from a toilet separated only by a waist-high partition.
“Look how they have us like dogs in here,” the person filming the videos can be heard saying in Spanish.
Immigrants’ rights groups, lawyers and lawmakers have warned for weeks about deteriorating conditions inside the building, which also houses immigration courts. Federal law enforcement officers have been stationed in the building’s hallways since at least May 20 to make arrests moments after immigrants appear in court.
People have been detained on the 10th floor for “days and weeks at a time without showers, medication or a change of clothes,” with only minimal food and outside contact, according to the New York Immigration Coalition.
“The American Dream,” the man recording the videos says in Spanish. “Immigration, 26 Federal Plaza.”
Footage, obtained by The Independent, provides outsiders with a first glimpse of the room, which Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have prevented members of Congress from seeing.
In a statement to The Independent, Department of Homeland Security assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin said the building does not house a “detention center” but a “processing center where illegal aliens are briefly processed to be transferred to an ICE detention facility.”
“Any claim that there is overcrowding or subprime conditions is categorically false,” she said.
The brief clips, which were first reported by The City, show the inside of one of several brightly lit holding rooms. The men inside are seated on benches that line the walls or are lying on aluminum emergency blankets on the bare floor. Two toilets in the room, one of which appears to be covered by tinfoil, are blocked off by a small partition. There are no doors separating the toilets from the rest of the room.
“ICE is kidnapping so many people from New York’s immigration courts that they had to create a new detention facility,” New York Immigration Coalition president Murad Awawdeh said in a statement.
“But instead of sharing the truth with the public, ICE has skirted accountability by consistently lying about what’s happening on the 10th floor, and breaking the law by not allowing Congressmembers to view the conditions,” Awawdeh added.
The group is demanding the facility be immediately inspected and shut down.
“As we arrest and remove criminal illegal aliens and public safety threats from the U.S., ICE has worked diligently to obtain greater necessary detention space while avoiding overcrowding,” McLaughin said in a statement.
“Despite a historic number of injunctions, DHS is working rapidly overtime to remove these aliens from detentions centers to their final destination — home.”
Democratic members of Congress and other New York officials have repeatedly been denied entry to the facility, despite congressional authority granted to lawmakers to “conduct unannounced inspections of detention facilities holding individuals in federal immigration custody.”
“Since May, ICE has been snatching New Yorkers off the streets and out of immigration court and taking them to this floor,” said Rep. Nydia Velazquez, who is among House lawmakers who were denied entry to the facility.
“They’ve claimed it’s not a detention facility, just a ‘processing center,’ to block members of Congress from exercising our legal right to conduct oversight,” she said. “This video confirms what we’ve feared all along: ICE has been lying and locking us out to hide what’s happening inside. There is no more excuse. ICE must grant members of Congress immediate access to the 10th floor and shut this facility down.”
Rep. Adriano Espaillat said the facility is emblematic of the Trump administration’s anti-immigration agenda, which he says views immigrants as “disposable.”
“This video demonstrates a moral and legal failure that demands immediate action,” he said.
While ICE has repeatedly denied that the room on the building’s 10th floor is being used as a detention facility, detention data analyzed by The City shows that the floor is being used for much more than just processing immigrants’ cases.
In May and June, when arrests at immigration check-ins and courthouses began to skyrocket, immigrants were being held inside the room for 29 hours on average, according to The City’s review. Within those two months, 81 people were detained there for four days or more at a time.
Detentions peaked on June 5, when 186 people were held there overnight.
On June 17, masked federal officers arrested New York City comptroller Brad Lander after observing immigration court hearings in the building.
The city’s elected watchdog, among the city’s top officials second only to the mayor, was accused of assaulting and impeding an officer. He was released from federal custody hours later, and said that the charges against him were dropped.
Thousands of people have faced arrest after showing up for court-ordered ICE check-ins, and immigration court hearings, as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda.
The administration has effectively “de-legalized” tens of thousands of immigrants, including people who show up to immigration courts each week only to have their cases dismissed, with federal agents waiting to arrest them on the other side of the courtroom doors.
Those actions have radically expanded a pool of “undocumented” people to add to the president’s demands for mass deportations.
Unlike federal district court judges, immigration judges operate under the direction of the attorney general’s office.
The Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review has issued guidance to judges to grant motions from government lawyers to immediately dismiss immigrants’ cases, making them easy targets for arrest and removal.
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