Lawsuit alleges ICE detainees denied access to counsel while held in ‘inhumane’ conditions

CHICAGO — For several weeks in September and early October, highly publicized protests in the small suburb of Broadview roughly 12 miles west of Chicago focused attention to a little-known facility operated by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The building kept a low profile for most of its 19-year history. There was a weekly prayer vigil, started by a pair of nuns in 2007, usually the only crowds attracted to the facility. But the launch of the Trump administration’s “Operation Midway Blitz” Chicago-area immigration enforcement campaign last month drew protesters to Broadview, where they were met by tear gas and pepper balls.

But for all the sudden public awareness of the ICE processing center — thanks to the commotion outside of its walls — the facility’s interior is a “black box” in which detainees are denied access to legal counsel, according to a federal lawsuit filed this week.

Undocumented immigrants languish for days in squalid conditions with little food or water, sometimes so overcrowded that there’s barely enough room to lay on the floor, according to the complaint.

Attorneys for the detainees allege ICE has gone from ignoring its own minimum standards for such facilities to using the filthy environment as leverage to pressure those held inside into signing voluntary departure forms.

“Officers have used a variety of verbal threats in order to coerce detainees into signing forms, including threatening a detainee that they will remain in horrific conditions inside Broadview until they sign,” the complaint said.

The lawsuit, filed late Thursday, alleges officers respond with “threats, abuse, or contempt” when detainees ask for basic necessities. Some Broadview arrestees claimed in the complaint that they were ignored or belittled when they asked for water or, in one case, needed medical attention for a possible heart attack, the lawsuit alleged.

“Broadview is a black hole, and federal officials are acting with impunity inside its walls.”

The facility is only meant to hold arrestees for a maximum of 12 hours before they’re moved to the next part of the immigration adjudication process. The building isn’t equipped with cots or showers. Detainees held in its four main holding cells must use toilets in plain view of everyone else, including those of the opposite gender and immigration agents — and that’s if the toilets are even working, according to the lawsuit.

Due to a number of policy changes the Trump administration and has made this year, immigration agents have been arresting and detaining more undocumented immigrants than in previous eras. Longer wait times for transfers to out-of-state detention facilities or flights out of O’Hare Airport has meant overcrowding at Broadview.

And members of Illinois’ congressional delegation have been repeatedly turned away from the facility this year. The refusal from ICE officials to let the elected officials tour Broadview is an about-face from previous policy. Attorneys have also been turned away.

Reaching their clients inside the facility by phone is also a logistical challenge, the lawsuit said, which has caused some detainees to make permanent decisions with imperfect information.

The complaint cites the case of a widower who was the sole caretaker of four children who are all U.S. citizens. The 56-year-old had entered the country legally and had a work permit and was a fully certified union roofer.

“Unbeknownst to him, at the time he signed the voluntary departure, his lawyer had already secured a court date for a bond hearing for the next day,” according to the lawsuit. “But by that afternoon, he was on the other side of the border. His children, who are already grieving the loss of their mother from earlier this year, now must process the sudden loss of their father.”

In a hearing Friday afternoon, U.S. District Judge Robert Gettleman put some of the blame for Broadview’s overcrowding on state law, which prohibits law enforcement agencies from entering into contracts to detain people arrested on immigration charges.

“The state of Illinois doesn’t allow immigration detainees to be housed in Illinois facilities, otherwise we wouldn’t be having some of the problems we’ve been encountering,” he said.

Gettleman scheduled a fuller hearing on the case for Tuesday morning, telling attorneys he’d make the “entire day available.” By then, U.S. Department of Justice attorneys said they’d have at least some response from the Trump administration about the allegations in the lawsuit.

“If these facts are correct … then the sooner the better,” Gettleman said.

Appeals court nixes daily Bovino hearings

Meanwhile on Friday, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals permanently blocked a federal judge’s order that would have required U.S. Customs and Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino to appear in court for daily check-ins on immigration agents’ use of force against civilians.

U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis had ordered Bovino to show up for end-of-day appearances in her courtroom after the longtime Border Patrol official spent an hour on the witness stand Tuesday. During that hearing, the judge went through various recent alleged violations of her Oct. 9 temporary restraining order restricting immigration agents’ use of force against civilians, including the deployment of tear gas in four separate Chicago neighborhoods three days in a row last week.

But less than two hours before Bovino was set to appear for the first of the daily court-ordered reports on Wednesday, the 7th Circuit issued a temporary stay on Ellis’ order. And on Friday, the appeals panel said the judge’s extraordinary order set her up to be an “inquisitor rather than … a neutral adjudicator” as well as a “supervisor of Chief Bovino’s activities, intruding into personnel management decisions of the Executive Branch.”

“These two problems are related and lead us to conclude that the order infringes on the separation of powers,” the appellate judges wrote.

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.

Hannah Meisel

Hannah has been covering Illinois government and politics since 2014, and since then has worked for a variety of outlets from NPR affiliate stations to a startup newsletter. She’s a graduate of both the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the U of I’s Springfield campus, where she received an M.A. through the Public Affairs Reporting program and got her start reporting in the Capitol.