An intriguing judge, known for his flair for the dramatic, hinted at possible contempt charges against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). This follows their questionable handling of a Jamaican man’s detention in a “hold room” within a Long Island federal courthouse.

U.S. District Judge Gary Brown, who secured a lifetime appointment in 2019 under President Donald Trump after an eight-year tenure as a U.S. magistrate judge in the Eastern District of New York, opened his decision by criticizing the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. He accused them of presenting “sworn evidence” filled with “rank hearsay and demonstrably false statements,” ignoring multiple court directives, and outright defying a court order in the habeas corpus case involving Erron Anthony Clarke.

Clarke, originally from Jamaica, legally entered the United States in 2018 for employment but overstayed his visa. In 2023, he married a U.S. citizen, a union that could potentially pave the way for his permanent residency, as documented in court records. He applied for this status, hoping to solidify his stay.

According to the records, Clarke openly admitted to DHS that he had overstayed his visa while his spouse sponsored his permanent residency application in early November. He received a “Biometrics Notice” for fingerprinting on December 5 in Hauppauge, but was promptly arrested by ICE on the same day, as noted by the judge.

Judge Brown, initially nominated by President Barack Obama in 2015 and later re-nominated by Trump, highlighted ICE’s actions in detaining Clarke overnight in a “hold room” at the Central Islip Courthouse. The room was described as “putrid,” freezing, and far too cramped, holding nine men despite being intended for a single brief detention, with an open toilet adding to the conditions.

“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.