Federal court found ICE detained immigrants beyond 12-hour limit, denied medical care at San Francisco holding facility

On November 25, 2025, U.S. District Judge P. Casey Pitts of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had been unlawfully detaining people at its San Francisco field office, 630 Sansome Street, in violation of the facility's own 12-hour design limit. In a 51-page opinion, Pitts found ICE "routinely" held detainees beyond 12 hours -- some over 72 hours -- while denying them intake medical screenings and prescribed medications, withholding beds and mattresses so detainees slept on concrete floors or metal benches, keeping cells at frigid temperatures without blankets, running continuous bright lighting, and denying basic hygiene supplies including soap, changes of clothing, and toothbrushes. The findings rested on declarations from 16 detainees and five of their attorneys; ICE's only evidentiary response was a declaration from one detention and deportation officer defending the round-the-clock lighting as a security measure, which Pitts found was not shown to rest on personal observation of the facility. Citing Supreme Court precedent that the Constitution bars subjecting even lawfully detained, convicted people to inhumane conditions, Pitts provisionally certified two detainee classes and granted a preliminary injunction ordering thirteen specific remedial measures, effective immediately, in a suit filed in September 2025 by the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, the Central American Resource Center of Northern California, and the ACLU of Northern California, which also challenged ICE's separate policy of arresting immigrants at San Francisco's immigration court.

ICE's own 12-hour cap on hold-room detention had been in place for years, but the agency issued a nationwide waiver of that limit in June 2025; Pitts's ruling left the waiver itself in place and instead ordered the parties to propose a plan to resolve a separate, ongoing challenge to its legality. Attorneys and local reporting described 630 Sansome -- an office building, not a certified detention facility -- as having been used to hold people overnight since roughly the spring of 2025, with detainees sometimes sleeping within one foot of open toilets. ICE declined to comment on the ruling to reporters.

Updates

2025-12 — Attorneys accused ICE of evading the injunction by relocating detainees within the building [4]

Attorneys with the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area told Judge Pitts that ICE had closed the sixth floor of 630 Sansome and moved detainees down to the fifth floor rather than implementing the injunction, calling it an attempt to "circumvent" an order the attorneys said applied to the entire building. A government attorney disputed the allegation, telling the court "we are not not complying with the orders."

2025-12-31 — Judge Pitts denied ICE's motion to stay the injunction pending appeal [6, 7]

ICE appealed the preliminary injunction on December 23, 2025 and sought a stay of the order three days later while the appeal was pending. In a five-page order issued December 31, Pitts denied the stay, rejecting the government's argument that the injunction applied only to the sixth floor and ruling that it covers all areas of the building used for short-term confinement. Pitts wrote that conditions of short-term detention "must not be punitive" and must meet the Fifth Amendment's constitutional minimums, and separately warned that using a satellite facility to transfer detainees in a way that circumvented those protections could itself violate the injunction.