CHICAGO — A federal judge on Tuesday heard hours of testimony from undocumented immigrants who have recently been detained at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in the Chicago suburb of Broadview — a place described as a “black box” in a lawsuit filed last week alleging horrific conditions and overcrowding.
After listening to five former detainees describe nights trying to sleep on plastic chairs or the cold concrete floor and days eating small rations of cold sandwiches and largely failing to get in touch with families or legal counsel, U.S. District Judge Robert Gettleman concluded the conditions were “unnecessarily cruel.”
“Sleeping shoulder to shoulder next to filthy toilets that are overflowing, surrounded by human waste,” the judge said. “It’s just unacceptable.”Testimony from former detainees corroborated the broad strokes of what was alleged in the Oct. 30 complaint, including that those held in Broadview were denied extra food and water beyond two to three bottles of water and a cold sandwich per day. And both they and a pair of immigration attorneys described how it was difficult, if not impossible, to communicate with anyone on the other side of the facility’s walls.
Read more: Lawsuit alleges ICE detainees denied access to counsel while held in ‘inhumane’ conditions
Without being able to access legal counsel, the lawsuit alleges detainees are coerced into signing voluntary deportation papers, sometimes without truly understanding what they’re agreeing to.
Testifying via videoconference from Honduras, Claudia Carolina Pereira Guevara briefly recounted her arrest by federal immigration agents early in the morning on Oct. 2 while she was on her way to work. She then spent five days in Broadview, where she and other detainees used a garbage bag to unclog an overflowing toilet and was — like everyone else who testified — never given a toothbrush, toothpaste or even soap.
“They wouldn’t give us anything that had to do with cleaning,” Pereira Guevara said through a Spanish interpreter, recalling that she and the other women in the holding cell were also denied a broom to clean or tidy up. “Absolutely nothing.”
Voluntary departure forms
Attorneys for the detainees allege ICE has gone from ignoring its own minimum standards for processing facilities like Broadview to using the filthy environment as leverage to pressure those held inside into signing voluntary departure forms.
Pereira Guevara testified she was led to believe that “if I didn’t sign, I was going to be held there until I signed.” And when she asked to speak with a lawyer, immigration agents allegedly told her, “Well what for?” as Pereira Guevara was already facing a deportation order she wasn't aware of until after her arrest last month. She testified she’d come to the U.S. five years ago.
Eventually, Pereira Guevara signed the voluntary departure form. She said she was told she’d be allowed back in the U.S. after five years — a length of separation she hoped wouldn’t be too hard on her 5-year-old daughter and 9-month-old son, who are now living with her brother in Joliet. But once she was back in Honduras after a stop at a detention center in Louisiana, Pereira Guevara found out that promise wasn’t true.
Positioning the phone camera away from her face as she wiped away tears, Pereira Guevara said she didn’t know when she’d see her children again.
“My children, who are so young,” she said, crying. “I really don’t know.”
Pablo Moreno Gonzalez, a 56-year-old Mexican national who has been in the U.S. for 35 years, said he also presented with voluntary deportation documents while he was in Broadview after his Oct. 29 arrest, grew emotional when recounting what he told the agents.
“They said, ‘Why don’t you want to go?’” he testified through an interpreter. “And I said, ‘Well, I have my family here.’”
Moreno Gonzalez is married with two children, ages 31 and 21, both of whom are U.S. citizens. He was arrested in Chicago’s Albany Park neighborhood last Wednesday morning while he said he was waiting on his boss to begin a construction job.
“I don’t have anyone in Mexico,” he said. “I have my son and daughter here. And I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to go back to my country. I don’t want to leave.”
Felipe Agustin Zamacona claimed Tuesday that an immigration agent in Broadview tried to trick him into signing voluntary deportation papers by saying they were “court papers” after Zamacona told him he “wanted to go in front of a judge.”
Zamacona, who testified in English and completed high school and some college in Chicago, said he could read what the forms actually said: “self-deportation.”
“And you had no intention of signing those papers?” Alexa Van Brunt, an attorney with the MacArthur Justice Center asked.
“No,” he said.
“Why not?” the lawyer asked.
“My whole life is here,” Zamcona said, adding that he intends to fight his deportation proceedings.The 47-year-old is Moreno Gonzalez’s co-plaintiff in the lawsuit. After the round trip to a Missouri detention center and back over the weekend, both men are currently being held at the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center in downtown Chicago.
Attorney Kevin Herrera testified Tuesday that one of his clients ended up signing a voluntary deportation form after he was transferred from Broadview to a detention center in Indiana. He blamed ICE for not allowing him to speak with the client while he was in Broadview, and for having an unreliable online locator that didn’t accurately show his client’s transfer.
Herrera believed he’d be able to clear up his client’s arrest because he was already handling his Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals case, so after he was told the client was arrested, Herrera marched up to the Broadview facility carrying his client’s DACA extension letter, a copy of his social security card and his work permit.
But after navigating several Illinois state troopers and federal agents, he was ultimately denied the opportunity to speak with his client. Phone and email communications were also unsuccessful until after the client had signed the form in the Indiana detention center.
“I was not able to counsel him not to sign documents and I believe that’s why he ended up in the situation that he’s in,” Herrera said.
Temporary restraining order
The Broadview 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. Though there are two showers in the building, neither of them are functional. There is no kitchen on site.
But in concluding Tuesday’s hearing, Gettleman said that due to the increased level of immigration enforcement under the Trump administration, it was clear the Department of Homeland Security is no longer using the facility as it was intended, as the detention rooms are crowded to the breaking point and detainees stay well beyond 12 hours.
“It’s really become a prison,” the judge said, noting that conditions that could be accepted for short stints should be viewed through a different lens when people are held for days on end.
Gettleman said plaintiffs had definitely made a case for a temporary restraining order but he needed time to think about how to make it “as narrow as possible.” He said he intended to issue the order late Wednesday afternoon.
The Trump administration argued that a temporary restraining order resembling anything like what the plaintiffs requested would “effectively shut down operations at Broadview.” And because there are no other facilities in Illinois that can house detainees, a temporary restraining order would also hurt the administration’s ability to enforce immigration laws writ large.
Illinois is one of only two states that ban local law enforcement from detaining people solely on the basis of their immigration status. Though recent reporting from WTTW-TV indicates a number of law enforcement agencies across the state were still housing some ICE detainees, a 2021 law required existing contracts between ICE and local law enforcement be voided. In 2022, the law shuttered the two largest de facto detention centers in the Chicago region: McHenry and Kankakee counties.
“A TRO would effectively halt the government’s ability to enforce immigration laws in Illinois,” Department of Justice attorney Jana Brady said Tuesday. “The government has a right to enforce immigration laws. Whether it’s a popular belief, they do have the ability to do it. And they’re doing their jobs.”
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.
This article first appeared on Capitol News Illinois and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
