Here’s how Yushell Alejandro Yin Del Toro sums up the three miserable days he recently spent at the federal facility in suburban Broadview, where federal officers hold immigrants after arresting them:
For sleeping, crowded cold floors or scant plastic chairs for dozens of men. For eating, sandwiches and water. For bathroom needs, a toilet out in the open, no soap or toothpaste.
“The cell is gross, extremely dirty, I never lay down on the floor, it was so filthy,” Yushell, 38, said from Mexico City, days after he was grabbed by immigration officers in Mount Prospect on Sept. 24 on his way to work from an exercise class. “Still, sleeping while sitting on the floor was impossible.
“We told the guards that the place was at full capacity, but they kept bringing people inside,” Yushell said. “They treated us like animals, or worse than animals, because no one treats their pets like that.”
Broadview was never designed to be a detention facility, but the administration of President Donald Trump is now using it as a de facto one. As a “service processing center” it’s intended to hold people picked up by immigration authorities, with capacity for 236 adults for up to 12 hours each, before they are released, deported or transferred to a detention facility. A 2023 report clocks an average hold time of five hours there.
And yet, U.S. Immigration and Customs held 143 people for two or more days at Broadview during the first seven months of 2025, according to a Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ analysis of ICE data made available by the Deportation Data Project through July 28.
In a June 24 memo, ICE quietly expanded the maximum number of hours to 72, or three days, that an immigrant could be held in a processing center like Broadview. That came as Trump appointees tripled ICE immigration arrest quotas to 3,000 per day, and detention centers filled up.
Between June 24 and July 28, ICE authorities at Broadview held 21 people longer than three days, with a few longer than five days. That’s even before greater numbers of immigrants became targets of immigration enforcement in the city and suburbs beginning on Sept. 8, when ICE and Customs and Border Protection were dispatched here to ratchet up the federal government’s deportation campaign.
“The stories we’re hearing are pretty horrific in terms of the human rights violations and the due process violations that people are reporting,” said Olivia Abrecht, a senior attorney with the Chicago-based National Immigrant Justice Center.
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, did not answer questions about the number of immigrants currently being held at Broadview or why some are being held for longer than ICE-determined time limits for processing centers.
In an emailed statement, the department said that “ICE operates hold rooms and holding facilities in strict accordance with its National Detention Standards to ensure the safety, security, and humane treatment of individuals in custody.”
The rest of the statement refers to conditions at “detention centers.”
ICE detention centers hold immigrants for longer stays, unlike processing centers which are designed only for quick intake. That means they come with clear rules, detailed in a 76-page handbook in 19 languages provided to detainees. They post visiting hours and procedures online, and they’re subject to regular inspections to stay in line with detailed detention standards, all of which are posted on the Department of Homeland Security website.
But Broadview isn’t named among them. In fact, little appears on ICE’s website about Broadview, where 5,200 people were processed and held for as little as an hour and as long as seven days from January through July 28. That is more than three times the number of people jailed during the same period a year earlier, according to the Sun-Times/WBEZ analysis of data from the Deportation Data Project.
Jose Richter, a suburban U.S. Army veteran, stands outside a temporary fence erected outside the ICE facility in west suburban Broadview as he tries to talk to ICE agents on Sept. 28. ICE posts visiting hours and policies for its detention centers but not for immigration processing centers like Broadview.
Ashlee Rezin/Sun-Times
‘Not equipped to be an overnight facility’
Inside the ICE processing building at 1930 Beach Street, there’s no medical staff or services. No food preparation. No beds. That’s all by design because the facility was created for very short-term holds.
A 2023 audit required by Congress, for example, described a single shower in the building that was out of commission at the time and used for storage.
Detainees have no private way to speak with their lawyers, attorneys say. Illinois Congressional members seeking to assess the facility also have been denied entry.
Even a Justice Department lawyer acknowledged last week that Broadview is “not equipped to be an overnight facility.” He told this to U.S. District Judge John Blakey during a hearing about a federal lawsuit filed by a man picked up in Little Village in September.
As an immigration attorney, Abrecht has represented people processed through Broadview for three years. She has heard increasing complaints from clients confined there about mistreatment.
Gladis Yolanda Chavez spent four days in Broadview in June after she was arrested on an immigration charge. The women were kept in two rooms with glass windows, the men in two other larger rooms. The toilet on each side wasn’t private. The phone in the women’s cell didn’t always work.
She was in a room with about 30 women, “stacked one next to the other one.” The floor, where they slept, “was extremely cold. We couldn’t lay on the floor for too long.”
“We couldn’t change our clothes, we couldn’t do our personal hygiene,” she told WBEZ in Spanish from Honduras, where ICE deported her. To use the toilet, “We had to come together, three or four women, to block the view so that others couldn’t see through the glass window” of the cell.
Menstruating women were given a little toilet paper and a pad, she said. There was only so much cleanup they could manage using the sink.
As for food, “We were only given cold bread — all day. Sometimes we were given small water bottles; sometimes they didn’t give us water,” Chavez said. “It was a terrible experience. We looked out the window and saw that more people were coming, and we would be more crowded.”
Immigrants say cells are crowded, meals are Subway sandwiches
Arrests are believed to have ramped up since Trump launched his “blitz” in Chicago on Sept. 8, though ICE has yet to release detailed data.
But little has improved since June, based on reports from several immigrants, including Salam, who spent two days in Broadview last week before being deported to Belize. Toilets still out in the open, cells still crowded.
“Everybody is like, ‘It’s like a pile of fish in there,’” said Salam who asked not to disclose his full name to protect his privacy.
He said the sandwiches served for breakfast, lunch and dinner now come wrapped in Subway paper, bread with ham and cheese. But they’re hardly as good as the sandwiches he’s bought.
“Conditions at Broadview are exacerbated by the pace of ICE arrests, which choke ICE’s processing capacity at Broadview and its detention capacity,” said Fred Tsao, a senior attorney with the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.
By law, Illinois bans overnight detention of immigrants. But the Illinois Way Forward Act in 2021 only prohibits local and state governments from contracting with federal officials to house immigrants overnight. The law doesn’t govern ICE-operated facilities like Broadview, the Tsao said.
“ICE is trying to define this facility in some way that basically gets them out … of the regular inspections process,” said Jesse Franzblau who heads policy initiatives at the National Immigrant Justice Center.
If, as ICE says, it’s operating Broadview according to national detention standards, “then there should be regular inspections, which should be made public in accordance with congressional reporting requirements, and ICE should be allowing members of Congress to conduct oversight in the facility. From the testimony of people held there, it is clear that ICE is not adhering to the most basic standards of care,” Franzblau said.
Many of the 122 ICE detention facilities in 36 states and territories contract for services, but Broadview appears to be staffed exclusively by federal employees. Elsewhere, the federal government leases space in county jails and prisons, or they hire a for-profit company to operate detention centers on their behalf.
That offers more access points to understanding what’s happening inside beyond what ICE may or may not share.
This lack of transparency prompted several local Democratic members of Illinois’ congressional delegation — Danny Davis, Jesús “Chuy” García, Delia Ramirez and Jonathan Jackson — to show up to Broadview for a tour. So far they’ve been denied entry, despite their protests that Congress is entitled access to facilities it funds. A meeting they and other Illinois Democratic representatives set with ICE’s Chicago field office director has been postponed to an “unconfirmed date in October,” according to ICE.
Letters that delegation members have sent to the ICE field office director and to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem ask basic questions about the detention standards that govern Broadview; the data of the last facility inspection; the medical care available to the detainees.
“There’s a lot of secrecy with regards to what’s going on in Broadview,” said Franzblau of the National Immigrant Justice Center. “It’s incredibly hard to even talk to people about their legal rights in Broadview, because of the nature under which people are being detained, because ICE is essentially trying to hold them in this type of limbo.”
Contributing: Jon Seidel, Amy Qin