Judge rips Trump bid to dodge humane treatment order at ICE facility

SAN FRANCISCO (CN) — A federal judge on Wednesday rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to skirt an order requiring medical care, hygiene and sleep for noncitizen detainees in a downtown San Francisco ICE facility.

U.S. District Judge P. Casey Pitts said in a five-page order that the conditions at the short-term holding facility should not be “punitive,” and the injunction applies to all detention rooms operated by ICE in the building.

During a Dec. 22 conference on the case, attorneys for both parties — the putative plaintiff class that includes noncitizens who have been or are likely to be held at the ICE facility, and the government — disputed what was happening in the building.

Before the preliminary injunction took effect, the ICE holding facility was on the sixth floor. But after the injunction, U.S. Attorney Doug Johns said the floor “went dark” and detention activities moved to the fifth floor. Johns questioned whether the same conditions underlined in the injunction applied to the new space, which Johns argued expanded the scope of the injunction.

“The court explained that its preliminary injunction order contains no language suggesting that it applies only to the sixth floor of 630 Sansome and that the order covers all ‘hold rooms at 630 Sansome,’” Pitts said. “That is, the order applies to any room in that building which are ‘primarily used for … short-term confinement’ of noncitizens between their ‘arrest for an alleged immigration violation’ and their placement in ‘long-term detention elsewhere.’”

Marissa Hatton, an attorney representing the class members, claimed at the Dec. 22 conference ICE detentions at Sansome were “essentially operating as a black site” without access to attorneys, due to the fifth floor’s absence of phones and denial of in-person representation.

“ICE’s motion for a stay was yet another baseless attempt to avoid complying with a valid court order,” she said in email to Courthouse News. “Class members have suffered too long in cruel detention conditions, and the court has made clear that ICE will be in contempt if it fails to provide humane conditions in accordance with the injunction. We intend to pursue class members’ constitutional rights to the fullest extent of the law and are pleased to see that ICE’s attempts to delay justice have been denied.”

During the conference, Pitts, a Joe Biden appointee, became aware of other changes.

“ICE had also begun transferring some detainees from 630 Sansome to a satellite facility overseen by ICE’s San Francisco field office in Stockton before placing the detainees in long-term detention facilities,” he said.

On Dec. 23, the government appealed Pitt’s preliminary injunction decision regarding the conditions at 630 Sansome to the Ninth Circuit.

In his Friday denial, Pitts explained the government took what was discussed at the Dec. 22 case conference as an expansion of the injunction, which would require notice, but Pitts said he didn’t change the nature of the injunction.

“Although the government insists that the court extended the preliminary injunction to cover ICE’s ‘other facilities,’ the court simply reiterated the principle — recently reaffirmed by the Ninth Circuit — that a party may be held in contempt where it uses an overly literal interpretation of an injunction to flout the injunction’s purpose, even if the ‘the strict letter of the injunction was not violated,’” he said.

Attorneys representing the government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.