Judge orders ICE to improve Chicago ‘prison’ after immigrants break down in court describing ‘black hole’ inside
A federal judge has ordered Homeland Security officials to improve conditions inside a Chicago-area immigrant detention facility where detainees say they are treated “worse than animals” and packed into unsanitary holding cells “like a pile of fish.”
Wednesday’s temporary restraining order from District Judge Robert W. Gettleman follows several hours of courtroom testimony from five people who have been crammed inside the Broadview Processing Center, a focal point for protests against Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda.
“It has really become a prison,” Gettleman said during a hearing Tuesday.
In court filings and in haunting courtroom testimony, detainees described being forced to sleep sitting upright or on urine-soaked floors next to clogged toilets under bright lights. “It was too much,” one person said while crying on the stand.
“Broadview is a black hole, and federal officials are acting with impunity inside its walls,” according to a lawsuit brought by civil rights groups on behalf of detainees inside the facility.
Judge Gettleman has ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement to provide three meals a day, adequate supplies of water, access to prescription medicine, clean bedding and space to sleep for any detainee held there overnight, with “adequate supplies of soap, towels, toilet paper, oral hygiene products (including toothbrushes and toothpaste) and menstrual products for women detainees.”
Holding cells and toilets are to be cleaned, and detainees should have access to showers “at least every other day,” according to the order.
The facility is meant to serve as a “processing center” to temporarily hold detainees before they are transferred, deported or released.
But the lawsuit accuses ICE of operating more like a jail, where people are held for two days or more, on average. The average holding time at the facility was five hours in 2023.
Gettleman said he did not intend to “fashion an order that is impossible to comply with,” but his order reflected the “disturbing record” presented in court that called for his intervention, he said.
“I think everybody can admit that we don’t want to treat people the way that I heard people are being treated today,” he said Tuesday.
Department of Justice attorney Jana Brady warned that any sweeping injunction against the administration “would effectively halt the government’s ability to enforce immigration laws in Illinois,” among Democratic-led states where the Trump administration has surged federal officers.
Jana also claimed that the government “has improved the operations at the Broadview facility over the last couple months.”
In a statement to The Independent last week, Homeland Security officials disputed detainees’ accounts, flatly stating that “any claims there are subprime conditions at the Broadview ICE facility are false.”
