A federal judge said Wednesday that immigration officials must provide bottled water, clean bedding, hygiene products and access to lawyers at a suburban Chicago detention center that detainees have described as squalid and unsanitary.
The judge, Robert W. Gettleman, said conditions at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Broadview, Ill., “don’t pass constitutional muster.” He gave federal officials until midday Friday to submit a report on how they were meeting 15 requirements that he imposed in a temporary restraining order.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, which includes ICE, defended conditions at the facility and pushed back against how it was characterized in court.
“Any claims there are subprime conditions at the Broadview ICE facility are false,” Ms. McLaughlin said in an emailed statement. “All detainees are provided with three meals a day, water and have access to phones to communicate with their family members and lawyers. No one is denied access to proper medical care. There is a privacy wall around the toilet for detainees.”
The Broadview center, west of Chicago, was designed for short-term stays, but some detainees have been held there for several days during the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration in the Chicago area. The outside of the facility has been a frequent site of protests and clashes between demonstrators and federal agents, but a lawsuit brought by former Broadview detainees has drawn attention to the inside of the brick building where the windows have been boarded in recent weeks.
Five former Broadview detainees testified earlier this week about uncomfortable and unsanitary conditions at the facility, where they said they had to sleep on chairs or on the floor, and were not given soap, toothbrushes or sufficient food and water.
Judge Gettleman, who was nominated by President Bill Clinton, said in his order that holding cells must be cleaned twice a day, that detainees must be allowed to shower at least once every other day and that detainees should be allowed to communicate with their lawyers by phone.
A lawyer for the plaintiffs praised the judge’s order in a statement.
“These are urgent and necessary measures to protect these detainees and preserve their basic human rights,” said the lawyer, Alexa Van Brunt of the MacArthur Justice Center.
The judge also ordered the government to provide detainees with clean bedding and a mat for sleeping, along with sufficient space to sleep. But he stopped short of imposing specific space requirements that lawyers for the plaintiffs had sought, which could have capped the number of detainees held.
“They shouldn’t be sleeping on top of each other,” the judge said in court on Wednesday. “They shouldn’t be sleeping on plastic chairs. They shouldn’t be sleeping on concrete floors.”
The Trump administration has flooded the Chicago area with immigration enforcement officers over the last two months. The administration said it has made thousands of arrests as part of its campaign.
Ms. McLaughlin, the Homeland Security spokeswoman, said that “as ICE arrests and removes criminal illegal aliens and public safety threats from the U.S., the agency has worked diligently to obtain greater necessary detention space while avoiding overcrowding.”
During a hearing on Tuesday, Judge Gettleman voiced concern about “conditions that are unnecessarily cruel,” but said he did not want to interfere with the Trump administration’s ability to enforce immigration laws. He did not agree to the plaintiffs’ request for an inspection of the facility.
A lawyer for the federal government, Jana Brady, said at the hearing that giving the plaintiffs in the case all the restrictions they had sought “would effectively halt the government’s ability to enforce immigration laws in Illinois” and would infringe on the authority of the executive branch.
“The government has improved the operations at the Broadview facility over the last couple months,” Ms. Brady said, adding that “it’s been a learning curve.”
Former detainees and lawyers who have had clients at Broadview described a chaotic facility where people languished for days, basic cleanliness was ignored and lawyers were denied access to their clients. Newly arrested immigrants are frequently taken to Broadview to be processed before being deported or sent to longer-term detention centers in other states.
“It smelled like a dirty washroom, like sweat, like a dirty locker,” one of the former detainees, Felipe Agustin Zamacona, told the judge on Tuesday. Mr. Zamacona, who was arrested by immigration enforcement agents in Illinois last week and who remains in federal custody, said that “it seemed like they never mopped or they never swept.”
Judge Gettleman said he found the witnesses who testified to be highly credible. He said his temporary restraining order tried to balance deep concerns about the conditions while “making it as workable as possible” to run the facility.
When a lawyer for the plaintiffs pushed for the government to be in full compliance with his order by Thursday morning, the judge said he would give them until Friday to submit a report on their progress. He said that “we can’t expect the impossible.”
Mitch Smith is a Chicago-based national correspondent for The Times, covering the Midwest and Great Plains.
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