NEW YORK — A recently detained immigrant filed a potential class-action lawsuit against the Trump administration on Friday, denouncing the conditions inside holding cells at the main federal immigration offices in Manhattan as overcrowded and unsanitary.

The cells belong to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, at 26 Federal Plaza. They have drawn scrutiny as ICE has hastened the pace of arrests in New York City, with migrants filling the holding facility on the building’s 10th floor. In the past, the cells were used to hold migrants for just a few hours, but amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, migrants often remain there for days or for more than a week.

The lawsuit said that migrants often sleep on the concrete floor or sitting upright, lack access to legal counsel and are subjected to a “horrific stench” emanating from toilets next to where they sleep.

A video recorded by a migrant who sneaked in a cellphone last month appeared to confirm some of those complaints, as has recent reporting by The New York Times.

The lawsuit was filed in Manhattan federal court by Sergio Alberto Barco Mercado, a Peruvian immigrant who entered the United States in July 2022 and lives in New Jersey. He was arrested by ICE on Friday as he was leaving a routine appearance in immigration court, where he was facing deportation proceedings and applying for asylum after being charged with entering the country unlawfully.

Barco Mercado, a father of two, including a 3-month-old, is being held at 26 Federal Plaza, where the lawsuit said dozens of people were often crammed into a space that was just 215 square feet. His lawyers are seeking that a judge certify the suit as a class-action lawsuit.

“People are being deprived of their basic rights, facing medical neglect, and they lack access to adequate food and hygiene,” said Harold Solis, a co-legal director of Make the Road New York, an immigrant advocacy group representing Barco Mercado. “This cruel detention policy is immoral and inhumane.”

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The agency has denied claims of unsanitary conditions at 26 Federal Plaza, telling the Times recently that “overcrowding or subprime conditions at ICE facilities are categorically false.” Agency officials have described the holding cells as temporary processing centers, not long-term detention facilities. They have used that designation to justify denying access to members of Congress who have sought to inspect the cells in recent months.

The 10th-floor cells hold detainees who are in the U.S. illegally and were arrested by agents at the city’s immigration courts, one of which is just two floors above the cells. Immigrants held there are typically processed and shuttled to detention centers elsewhere in the New York area or in other states, including Pennsylvania and Texas.

New federal data analyzed by the Times shows that about half of the more than 2,300 people arrested by ICE in the New York City area since Trump returned to office in January have been held at 26 Federal Plaza. Concerns about detention facility conditions have surfaced across the country as Trump officials race to find enough space to hold the migrants whom Trump wants to expel as part his mass deportation campaign.

The lawsuit argued that detainees have no way to communicate with their lawyers while being held in the lower Manhattan cells, are denied access to their prescribed medications and are served meals so meager that one detainee lost 24 pounds. It also said that ICE was violating its own policies that limit stays at such facilities to 72 hours. The lawsuit said that some detainees have been held for more than a week and that one person was held for 10 days.

Barco Mercado is also being represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, the New York Civil Liberties Union and the law firm Wang Hecker.

Some of the same groups filed a lawsuit in Manhattan federal court on Aug. 1 challenging the federal government’s practice of arresting migrants showing up for routine hearings in immigration court. That lawsuit, coming two weeks after a similar class-action lawsuit was filed in Washington, D.C., argued that the arrests had turned the courts “into traps.”

The courthouse arrests have driven a spike in the detention of immigrants without criminal records in New York, according to the recent Times analysis. The lawsuit filed Aug. 1 in Manhattan argued that the arrests have undermined due process and discouraged immigrants from appearing for their mandated court hearings, which in turn puts them at risk of deportation.

Trump officials have defended the courthouse arrests as a “common sense” tactic to easily arrest and swiftly deport migrants who entered the country illegally during the administration of former President Joe Biden without having to send ICE agents into neighborhoods.

Democratic members of Congress from New York have sought access to the holding cells at 26 Federal Plaza but have repeatedly been denied entry by ICE. A dozen Democratic lawmakers — including Reps. Adriano Espaillat and Dan Goldman of New York — sued the federal government last month because of its refusal to allow members into immigration facilities in California, New York, Texas and elsewhere.

Many migrants held at 26 Federal Plaza are moved to detention centers in the New York City region, including a new facility in Newark, New Jersey, known as Delaney Hall, a county jail on Long Island that began holding immigrants for ICE this year, and long-standing facilities in the Hudson Valley and near Buffalo, New York.

Related Articles

Lake Elmo mother remains in ICE custody despite release order

Appeals court tosses judge’s contempt finding against Trump administration in prison deportations

Trump administration asks judge to end policy on protections for immigrant children in custody

California religious leaders launch effort to accompany immigrants to court amid Trump crackdown

Trump administration asks high court to lift restrictions on Southern California immigration stops

Under a recent agreement with the Bureau of Prisons, ICE also began holding more than 100 detainees at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, which has a long history of conditions that some federal judges have described as “barbaric.”

Goldman and Espaillat, along with Rep. Nydia Velázquez, D-N.Y., were denied access to the Metropolitan Detention Center on Wednesday after showing up to conduct oversight.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

The day after a lone gunman opened fire on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, killing a police officer and shattering windows across the agency’s campus, employees were reeling from shock, fear and rage.

“We’re mad this has happened,” Dr. Debra Houry, the CDC’s chief medical officer, said in a large group call Saturday morning with Susan Monarez, the agency’s newly confirmed director, who tried to reassure them. Another employee on the call, a recording of which was obtained by The New York Times, asked Monarez: “Are you able to speak to the misinformation, the disinformation that caused this issue? And what your plan forward is to ensure this doesn’t happen again?”

The investigation into the shooting and the gunman’s potential motives was still in early stages Saturday. But law enforcement officials said that the suspect identified in the shooting had become fixated with the coronavirus vaccine, believing that it was the cause of his physical ailments.

Inside the CDC, the shooting was viewed as part of a pattern in which health workers have been targets of political, verbal and physical assaults on them and their workplaces.

Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, the director of the CDC’s respiratory diseases division, told Monarez on the call that employees wanted to see a plan for their safety and an acknowledgment that the attack was not just “a shooting that just happened across the street with some stray bullets.”

Daskalakis was not in his office when its windows were pierced by one of the gunman’s bullets.

Many Americans, and even some top federal health officials in the Trump administration, have blamed the CDC for lockdowns, school closings and vaccine mandates, even when some of those decisions were made by state and local governments, or businesses.

(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM.)

“I am heartbroken, angry and somehow not surprised,” said Dr. Anne Zink, a former president of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials who served as Alaska’s chief medical officer until last year.

Threats against her have increased even though she is no longer a government official, she said.

(END OPTIONAL TRIM.)

The Times spoke with or texted a dozen CDC scientists Saturday, who discussed the shooting on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. They described being terrified as bullets shattered the glass windows, and some recounted the chilling sight of casings littered in front of the CDC.

In interviews, the employees conveyed sadness about the police officer who had died trying to keep them safe, and a feeling of betrayal and devastation at being demonized while working to improve Americans’ health.

The sound of rapid gunfire started around 4:50 p.m. Friday. One scientist who evaluates COVID vaccines had just stepped out of her building to walk to her car. As she headed to pick up her infant daughter from day care, she heard shots over her right shoulder, she said. She turned around, ran back inside and called security to confirm what was happening.

“CDC SHELTER IN PLACE. GUNMAN AT EMORY POINT,” she wrote to friends and colleagues in a group chat at 4:57 p.m. (The agency sent its alert to employees at 5:13 p.m.)

The employee and three others barricaded themselves in an office, moving two loaded bookshelves against the door. She put a sticky note over the motion sensor for the light switch and laid flat on the floor for hours, before a SWAT team arrived to clear the floor.

She finally made it home to her husband and two young children around midnight. In a text message sent at 3:11 a.m., she said she was still awake, too traumatized to sleep.

At least four buildings were damaged by bullets, Monarez said in a statement Friday night. Photos shared by workers revealed glass windows shattered by bullet holes. One showed as many as 18 bullet holes in a single building.

One of the buildings included a containment lab of the highest biosecurity level, but under tight security and with reinforced walls. It was not hit in the attack. The CDC studies some of the most dangerous pathogens in the world, including Ebola and Marburg viruses and the bacteria that cause anthrax.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who oversees the CDC, did not make a statement Friday. Late Saturday morning, more than 30 minutes after posting photos of himself fishing on social media, Kennedy posted condolences on his official X account and pledged to support CDC employees.

In an email sent later in the day to the entire Department of Health and Human Services, including the CDC, Kennedy wrote: “This is a reminder of the very human challenges public servants sometimes face — even in places dedicated to healing and progress. But it also reinforces the importance of the work you do every day.”

On the Saturday morning CDC call, an employee asked Monarez twice if she had spoken to Kennedy. Both times, Monarez replied that she had been in touch with the “office of the secretary.”

Kennedy has previously called the CDC a “cesspool of corruption” and a fascist enterprise. He has accused the agency’s scientists of ignoring vaccine harms to children, comparing it to the Catholic Church’s cover-up of child sex abuse. He has also disparaged the COVID-19 vaccine, calling it the “deadliest” vaccine ever made.

Some scientists said the attack was an extreme example of the violence many health workers have experienced since the pandemic began.

“The intersection of disinformation, conspiracy theories and political violence is getting scarier by the day,” said Dr. Celine Gounder, an infectious disease specialist at Bellevue Hospital Center. “I’m very worried about how this is now going beyond defunding of infectious diseases and public health to political violence against the people working in those fields,” she said.

(STORY CAN END HERE. OPTIONAL MATERIAL FOLLOWS.)

Nearly 9,000 employees and contractors work at the campus where the shooting took place, but it is unclear how many might have been absent because of off-site work and vacations, or because they had just left the office.

Dr. Fiona Havers, who resigned from her position as a senior CDC adviser on vaccine policy earlier this year, was on lockdown at Emory University Hospital while visiting a colleague. She heard the sirens, and stayed in close contact with her friends and former colleagues, including in a 900-person chat group where CDC employees shared terrifying details of the shooting.

“I am feeling very angry and very sad for my colleagues that are still at CDC,” said Havers, who quit after Kennedy fired all 17 members of a committee that makes recommendations on which shots Americans should take and when.

“This was a major attack on a federal facility,” she said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

In the wake of a trade deadline selloff that jettisoned 10 regulars, the Twins are managing to play some pretty good baseball with prospects, minor league vets and healthy veterans who survived the purge.

The Twins made Sunday’s series finale against Kansas City a bullpen day, and fielded a starting lineup that included only two players you’d call major league veterans, but beat the Royals, 5-3 in 11 innings, in the rubber match of a three-game series in front of 26,746 at Target Field.

The Twins have now won 2 of 3 series, and are 5-4 overall against the three teams ahead of them in the American League Central, since the trade deadline drastically altered the roster.

Rookie infielder Luke Keaschall, who earlier extended his hitting streak to start his mejor league career to 11 games, hit a two-run, two-out home run off reliever Carlos Estevez for the winning runs. Michael Tonkin (1-0) pitched scoreless 10th and 11th innings for the win.

With starting pitchers Pablo Lopez (shoulder) and Simeon Woods Richarson (illness) on the injured list, the Twins got a good collective start from Jose Urena, Kody Funderburk and Pierson Ohl, who turned a 2-1 lead over to Cole Sands with two out and none on in the seventh inning.

Sands allowed base hits to the first two batters he faced, the second a two-run home run by Vinnie Pasquantinto that made it 3-2.

But the Twins quickly got a break when Royals left fielder John Rave tried to make a sliding catch on a low liner from Austin Martin with one out in the eighth inning. Martin wound up on third, and scored on Ryan Jeffers’ two-out single to left to tie the game 3-3.

With the team’s best player, center fielder Byron Buxton, on the IL with rib cage inflammation, Jeffers and Trevor Larnach were two of three players in the lineup who made the team out of training camp. The third was Mickey Gasper, who made the active roster as a utility player but has spent most of the season at Class AAA St. Paul — and was making his first major league start at catcher.

The Twins took a 2-1 on Ryan Fitzgerald’s two-run home run off starter Ryan Bergert in the third inning.

With Gasper on base on a leadoff walk in the third, Fitzgerald, a minor league veteran playing in his fourth major league game, hit a line drive into the home run porch in right field to make it 2-1. It was the infielder’s first major league hit, and the 15th time a Twins player had homered for his first MLB hit.

Related Articles

Twins: No plans to give Byron Buxton extra rest as season winds down

One year after Hall of Fame induction, St. Paul gets its night to celebrate Joe Mauer

Shipley: It’s going to be a while before the Twins contend again

Luke Keaschall torrid MLB start a rarity for Twins, not for his manager

Joe Ryan strong as Twins beat Royals

No, it’s not mathematically secure. But Minnesota’s grip on home-court advantage throughout the WNBA playoffs is about as firm as it can be on Aug. 10 after the Lynx downed the Liberty 83-71 in Brooklyn in a nationally-televised matinee Sunday.

Minnesota (27-5) now leads the second-place Liberty (20-11) by 6.5 games with just 12 games to play in the regular season.

Natisha Hiedeman #2 of the Minnesota Lynx shoots the ball during the second half against the New York Liberty at Barclays Center on Aug. 10, 2025 in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. (Photo by Ishika Samant/Getty Images)

Minnesota trailed by two at the break, but exploded for 30 points in a third frame in which it went 12 for 18 from the field. Natisha Hiedeman and Dijonai Carrington combined for 17 points off the bench in the quarter.

Carrington finished with 15 points and six rebounds. Kayla McBride had 18 points on the strength of four triples, while Courtney Williams had 14 points, seven assists and five boards and Alanna Smith finished with eight points, nine rebounds, seven assists, four steals and three blocks while quarterbacking another stupendous defensive effort.

After scoring 24 points in the opening quarter, the Liberty tallied just 47 points combined over the final three frames.

Sabina Ionescu finished with just 10 points on 4 for 15 shooting as the Liberty shot 42% from the floor as a team.

“Our anchor is Lan,” McBride said.

The two teams will meet two more times — in Minnesota on Saturday and back in Brooklyn on Aug. 19. Should Minnesota win at least one of those bouts, it was also secure the tiebreaker, which would push its advantage over the Liberty to the brink of insurmountable.

Both teams are still without their star forwards, as Napheesa Collier (ankle) and Breanna Stewart (knee) continue to miss time. But the Lynx continue to find ways to win, even sans the presumptive MVP.

Minnesota is now 5-1 this season without Collier in the lineup.

“It keeps Phee humble,” Reeve joked of the team’s success sans its best player.

In all seriousness, Collier exudes excitement on social media, and has sent Reeve numerous messages expressing her pride in the performance of her teammates.

“I think what we’ve learned — it’s what we know, but it’s reinforced — is how gritty we are,” Reeve said. “Just throw some stuff at us. This team doesn’t break. You may beat us, but you’re not breaking us, and there’s a big difference there. They have such high belief in one another and high belief, really, in the group. … So we’re able to get through tough times.”

How much does the top seed matter? Well, look no further than the site of Sunday’s victory. It was the same floor were Minnesota lost the decisive Game 5 of the WNBA Finals last October. Had that game been at Target Center, perhaps the result would’ve been different.

Those little advantages can be the difference between euphoria and heartbreak, and the Lynx are doing everything in their power to stack the deck in their favor this time around.