"[2] MDC Brooklyn occupies land that was originally part of Bush Terminal (now Industry City), a historic intermodal shipping, warehousing, and manufacturing complex.

[5] Critics feared that the facility, with its staff, inmates, visitors, and supply deliveries, would overburden neighborhood traffic and water and sewer systems.

This brought the total number of inmates to close to 3,000 and made MDC Brooklyn the largest detention center in the United States.

In June 2015, a lawsuit filed in 2002 against high-ranking officials of George W. Bush's presidential administration, including former Attorney General John Ashcroft and former F.B.I.

Director Robert S. Mueller III, brought by eight, mostly Muslim immigrant detainees, was allowed to go forward by a three-judge federal panel.

It alleged that the plaintiffs were subject to chronic arbitrary abuses including beatings, strip searches and solitary confinement.

This decision is possibly related to a previous ruling by a Federal Court judge who threatened to vacate a man's sentence if he was sent to MDC Brooklyn due to the "dangerous, barbaric conditions" of the jail.

[12] The same month, musician and record producer Sean "Diddy" Combs was incarcerated at the prison's Special Housing Unit.

Gonzalez was terminated and arraigned in federal court on charges of sexual abuse of a person in custody, because an inmate cannot legally consent to sex.

According to a report in The Intercept: On all three of those housing units where men collectively refused food, jail staff shut off the valves to the toilets in all of the cells, according to accounts relayed to lawyers.

Confined to their cells on lockdown, deprived of light, the men on these units now found themselves shivering on their bunks with their heads inches from toilet bowls nearly overflowing with festering feces.