A federal judge, known for his unconventional methods, has issued a stern warning to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) over their handling of a Jamaican man’s detention in a courthouse on Long Island. Judge Gary Brown criticized the agencies for what he described as misleading practices and non-compliance with court orders.

Judge Brown, who was appointed as a U.S. District Judge in 2019 by then-President Donald Trump after serving as a magistrate judge in New York, expressed his concerns in a ruling. According to Brown, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, a division of DHS, relied on “unreliable” evidence and ignored several court directives in the habeas corpus case of Erron Anthony Clarke.

Erron Anthony Clarke, a Jamaican national, legally entered the United States in 2018 for work but overstayed his visa. In 2023, he married a U.S. citizen, which potentially qualifies him for permanent residency. Clarke had applied for this status, as outlined in court documents.

The documents reveal that Clarke informed DHS of his visa overstay while his wife sponsored his residency application. He was scheduled for biometric processing on December 5 in Hauppauge, where ICE subsequently detained him, according to Judge Brown.

Judge Brown, initially nominated by former President Barack Obama and later confirmed during Trump’s presidency, stated that Clarke was detained in a “hold room” at the Central Islip Courthouse. The conditions were described as dire, with the small cell being overcrowded, unclean, and lacking basic amenities.

“The detainees were held without essentials such as beds, soap, or clean clothing. The room was inadequately heated, and temperatures outside fell to as low as 21 degrees. They were given two packaged meals daily and had to sleep on the floor under constant lighting,” Judge Brown reported.

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.