The Justice Department is bristling at the idea of providing toothbrushes to jailed migrants at a Manhattan ICE facility — claiming the detainees could use the teeth-cleaning tools as dangerous “weapons.”
Manhattan US Attorney Jay Clayton’s claim came after a judge ordered Wednesday that conditions in a makeshift jail at 26 Federal Plaza be improved, acting on complaints that asylum seekers have been kept in dirty, overcrowded cells.
“Toothbrushes can readily be improvised as weapons,” Clayton’s office wrote, adding that ICE agents would prefer to continue providing migrants with “teeth-cleaning wipes” instead.
The feds did not provide an example of a migrant using a toothbrush as a weapon.
Jail inmates have fashioned the products into sharp tools in the past by shaving down the handle, but it’s unclear how serious of a threat toothbrushes are, given that they can be purchased at Brooklyn’s infamous Metropolitan Detention Center jail for 85 cents.
Judge Lewis Kaplan ruled Thursday to ban toothbrushes from the site for now, pending further argument.
The migrants’ lawyers shot back in court papers that “there is no basis to deny individuals detained at 26 Federal Plaza basic hygiene products” that detainees can access at other ICE sites in the US.
The toothbrush debate comes as ICE agents have been photographed arresting migrants almost daily outside their mandated immigration court hearings in the same federal building.
The aggressive tactics drew criticism Thursday from a separate federal judge, who accused the government of playing an unconstitutional “game of detention roulette” with human beings.
“Treating attendance in immigration court as a game of detention roulette is not consistent with the constitutional guarantee of due process,” Judge Dale Ho wrote.
The jurist issued the ruling to describe why he ordered that Carlos Javier Lopez Benitez, a Paraguay native who works in construction and has no criminal record, be released from ICE custody after his arrest outside immigration court in July.
