Video Taken by Migrant Shows Overcrowded ICE Holding Cell in Manhattan

For weeks, immigrants have complained about overcrowded and unsanitary conditions inside the holding cells of the federal immigration offices in New York City, drawing scrutiny from lawmakers and denials from the Trump administration.

On Tuesday, new video footage offered the first glimpse inside one of the four cells on the 10th floor of 26 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan, where the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has held hundreds of migrants for days at a time since ICE stepped up arrests this summer.

Two videos, which were recorded by a migrant who was held there last week and sneaked in his cellphone, show more than a dozen men sprawled on the floor atop thin thermal blankets or sitting on benches built into the room’s white walls. In one video, the man, who recorded it near one of the room’s two metal toilets, is heard saying in Spanish that the migrants were being held “like dogs in here.”

ICE had traditionally used the cells, which don’t have beds, to hold a small number of migrants for a few hours while they are processed and dispatched to detention centers outside the city. But the cells have become crowded since the agency scaled up arrests at its offices and in nearby immigration courthouses in May, forcing migrants to sleep on the floor or to sit upright, sometimes for several days.

The video appeared to confirm some of those conditions, which had previously been described by migrants in interviews with The New York Times, and had been highlighted by activists and Democratic lawmakers, who have been denied access to inspect the cells. The video was obtained by the New York Immigration Coalition through a Queens assemblywoman, Catalina Cruz, and first reported by The City, a local news outlet.

Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, said that 26 Federal Plaza was not a detention center and that detainees were held there only “briefly.”