Donald Trump, left, shakes hands with Kristi Noem at a campaign rally on Saturday, March 16, 2024, in Vandalia, Ohio. (AP Photo/Jeff Dean)
A judge with a penchant for magic signaled he could pull contempt proceedings out of his hat, dressing down the Department of Homeland Security and ICE for sleights of hand about the “disturbing” detention of a Jamaican man in a “hold room” inside a federal courthouse on Long Island.
U.S. District Judge Gary Brown, appointed to the bench for life by President Donald Trump in 2019 following his eight years as a U.S. magistrate judge in the Eastern District of New York, said at the start of his ruling that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, an agency within Secretary Kristi Noem”s DHS, submitted “sworn evidence” supported by “rank hearsay and demonstrably false statements,” “ignored at least three court directives,” and “blatantly refused to comply with a court order” in the habeas corpus case of Erron Anthony Clarke.
Clarke is a noncitizen from Jamaica who in 2018 legally entered the U.S. for work but overstayed his visa, and then married a U.S. citizen in 2023 — “which may entitle him to permanent residency in the United States,” a status he had applied for, according to court documents.
In fact, documents said, Clarke “truthfully” volunteered to DHS that he had overstayed his visa while his wife sponsored his permanent resident status application in early November. As part of the application, he was subsequently issued a “Biometrics Notice” to appear on Dec. 5 in Hauppauge to be fingerprinted, and ICE arrested him a short time later that same day, the judge added.
Brown, nominated by then-President Barack Obama in 2015 before that nomination was blocked and resubmitted during Trump’s first term, said ICE arrested Clarke and placed him overnight in a “hold room” at the Central Islip Courthouse — a “putrid,” frigid, “small cell containing an open toilet” crowded with eight other men despite being “designed to briefly detain a single individual.”
“ICE held them, day after day, without access to bunks, bedding, soap, showers, toothbrushes or clean clothes. The space is unheated or poorly heated at night, while the outside temperature dropped to as low as 21 degrees. The men were provided two packaged meals a day. To the extent they could sleep, they did so, crammed on the filthy floor, while the lights blared 24 hours a day,” Brown detailed.
Clarke, a man with no criminal record, was taken the next morning to “relatively humane” conditions at the Nassau County Correctional Center and then, on Dec. 9, was taken back to the “hold room” in Central Islip for two more nights, court documents said.
Two days later, Clarke was expected to appear in court, but ICE “ignor[ed] this Court’s order to produce him for a hearing” and instead moved him again, this time to a Newark, New Jersey, “private detention facility,” Brown added.
“On December 11, 2025, at a hearing at which Clarke was forced to participate by telephone, this Court ordered his immediate release on bail,” the judge recounted. “ICE again held him overnight before, finally, releasing him on December 12.”
What came next in Brown’s order Thursday was a chapter and verse recitation of the government’s failure to obey an “unequivocal” court order to immediately release Clarke, “material misstatements” of fact by an ICE Supervisory Detention Officer John Diaz in an “evasive and demonstrably false” court declaration about how long Clarke was detained, and the “failure or refusal” of the government to “provide information ordered by the Court” — photos of the “hold rooms.”
“The evidence presented to this Court, which has been largely unrebutted, demonstrates that ICE has been deploying its ‘holding rooms’ in a manner that shocks the conscience,” Brown wrote, rebuking the agency for a series of “transgressions” that “cannot be overlooked.”
The judge, at length:
ICE’s failure and, in at least one instance, flat out refusal, to comply with the Court’s directives along with its provision of demonstrably false evidence, requires some comment. While this matter was necessarily conducted in haste, and the Court believes that the assigned AUSA struggled to handle these matters in a reasonable fashion, ICE’s transgressions which include (1) failure to produce the Petitioner for the hearing, (2) failure to provide the holding capacity of the Central Islip hold rooms, (3) refusing to provide photographs of the Central Islip hold rooms and (4) ignoring this Court’s order providing for Clarke’s immediate release, cannot be overlooked.
Ultimately, as another federal judge has in immigration matters, Brown ordered the Trump administration to explain why he shouldn’t hold the government in contempt for the “indefensible […] refusal” to comply with a court order.
“Of these failings, perhaps the most indefensible is the agency’s refusal to provide photographs consistent with this Court’s order,” the judge said. “A party who believes that a court order is unlawful – or in this case, unduly burdensome – does not have the right to resort to self-help.”
Brown, a magician who has said that the craft has helped him smoke out “fraud and deceit” on the bench, remarked that over the course of three and a half decades as a prosecutor and a judge, he has “never encountered anything like this,” and it’s why granting Clarke bail was necessary.
“ICE’s seeming disregard of procedural requisites, combined with the chillingly brutal conditions of confinement to which Petitioner has been, and presumably would continue to be subjected, cries out for immediate remedy,” the judge concluded.
