ICE detained visa holder in unheated, overcrowded Central Islip courthouse cell for days without beds or showers

On December 5, 2025, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained Erron Anthony Clarke, a Jamaican national who had entered the United States legally on an H-2B work visa in 2018, married a U.S. citizen in 2023, and applied for permanent residency, while he was in the process of that application. ICE held Clarke for several days inside a holding room at the federal courthouse in Central Islip, New York -- a space designed to briefly detain a single person that instead confined up to nine men at once, without bunks, bedding, soap, showers, toothbrushes, or clean clothes, unheated or poorly heated overnight while outside temperatures dropped as low as 21 degrees, with the lights kept on 24 hours a day.

Clarke filed a habeas corpus petition, and U.S. District Judge Gary Brown -- a Trump appointee -- ordered his release on December 11. In a 24-page ruling issued December 18, Brown found that Clarke's detention violated due process and wrote that the conditions were "substandard, abhorrent and likely unlawful," saying he had "never encountered anything like this" in nearly 35 years in the district's federal courts. Brown further found that ICE had been "recklessly" expanding the use of these short-term holding rooms amid its broader immigration-enforcement push, and that the Department of Homeland Security had given the court "evasive and demonstrably false" information about how long the agency had been detaining people that way after DHS refused to provide photographs of the cell.

Updates

2025-12-23 — ICE told court it would end overnight holds within 12 hours [3]

Responding to Judge Brown's order questioning why the court should not issue a remedy against ICE for non-compliance, the government told the court in a newly unsealed letter that ICE would no longer hold detainees at the Central Islip facility overnight, would transfer everyone out within 12 hours, and would submit sealed photographs of the holding room the judge had previously been denied.

2026-01-23 — ICE detailed reforms, acknowledged false statements to court [4]

In a further court filing, DHS and federal prosecutors detailed additional changes at the facility -- limiting each holding room to two detainees, providing padded mats, hygiene items, meals, a posted list of detainee rights, and an attorney stationed on-site to assist with compliance -- and acknowledged that a supervisory ICE officer's declaration to the court had contained false statements about detainees' booking times, which the agency said were not intentional.