Suffolk County Returns to Court to Fight Immigrant Detention Settlement

Suffolk County returned to court this week to fight a $112 million judgment stemming from its years-long practice of holding immigrants in county jails past their legal release dates solely to hand them to federal immigration agents, reversing an earlier agreement and deepening a legal battle that has already cost eight years and is now testing the limits of taxpayer exposure on Long Island.

The class-action case, Orellana Castañeda et al. v. County of Suffolk and Suffolk County Sheriff's Office, was filed in 2017 by civil-rights firm Winston & Strawn and co-counsel LatinoJustice PRLDEF on behalf of 674 plaintiffs. The lawsuit alleged that the Sheriff's Office violated the Fourth and 14th Amendments by detaining immigrants beyond their legal release dates, after they had either posted bail or resolved their criminal cases, for the sole purpose of transferring them directly to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The overdetentions occurred between July 18, 2014, and November 15, 2018.

A federal jury in Brooklyn delivered the $112 million verdict on November 7, 2025, following a five-day trial, assigning $75 million for Fourth Amendment and New York State Constitution violations and another $37 million for procedural due process violations. The figure represents roughly 2.6 percent of Suffolk's $4.3 billion annual budget, or approximately $75 for every one of the county's 1.5 million residents.

County Executive Ed Romaine, who earlier vowed to "fight this all the way" at a Hauppauge press conference, has consistently argued the county should not bear costs for cooperating with a federal agency. "We are now being sued for detaining them at the request of the federal government," Romaine said. County attorney Chris Clayton pushed to invoke the same sovereign immunity extended to ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, an argument the court rejected. After the verdict, the Suffolk County Legislature approved the purchase of a surety bond to stay the judgment while the appeal moves forward in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Civil-rights attorneys who represented the class dismissed the county's immunity argument. "This decision brings long-overdue accountability," said José Pérez, deputy general counsel at LatinoJustice PRLDEF. Efrén Olivares of the National Immigration Law Center was equally direct: "A $112 million damages verdict against Suffolk County sends that message" that civil detainers are not judicially authorized criminal warrants, a legal boundary he said local governments have routinely crossed.

One plaintiff arrested in Central Islip in April 2017 illustrated the human mechanics of the practice: his cousin paid $1,000 bail, yet he was never informed, and was instead transferred first to the Varick Street Detention Center in Manhattan and then to Bergen County Jail in New Jersey. A federal judge found he had suffered physical and psychological harm, loss of liberty, and economic loss.

The reversal leaves the county facing not only the $112 million award but potential interest and attorney-fee exposure that grows with each additional round of litigation. New York City settled a parallel class action over similar ICE detainer practices for $92.5 million, providing a benchmark against which Suffolk's continued litigation strategy will be measured. The county has not outlined any structural changes to Sheriff's Office supervision protocols to prevent similar overdetentions in the future, leaving the policy record that generated the lawsuit largely unaddressed in public filings.