October 6, 2025 (Prospect.org)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Anthony Vazquez\/Chicago Sun-Times via AP<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Protesters gather outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Broadview, Illinois, September 19, 2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
CHICAGO \u2013 On September 12, attorney Kevin Herrera walked up to Chicagoland\u2019s main Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility in Broadview, Illinois, passed a crowd of protesters who didn\u2019t know what to make of him, and knocked on the building\u2019s boarded-up front door.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
No reply. Another knock; nothing. Then Herrera walked to the side of the building, where he saw what he said were two guards behind the facility\u2019s fence. He asked them if they knew anything about his client, Willian Gim\u00e9nez Gonz\u00e1lez, who had been taken by ICE that morning in Little Village, a predominantly Latino neighborhood in Chicago. According to Herrera, ICE agents stopped Gim\u00e9nez Gonz\u00e1lez while he was driving with his wife to get a haircut. They took him away and left his wife, who can\u2019t drive, alone in the car.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The guards listened to Herrera for a moment, then walked away, one of them throwing up a hand as if to say: \u201cWho cares?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
More from Emma Janssen<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Herrera left the facility that day with no idea where Gim\u00e9nez Gonz\u00e1lez was being held. The next morning, he returned to Broadview with elected officials, other advocates, and Gim\u00e9nez Gonz\u00e1lez\u2019s wife to hold a press conference demanding information from ICE. At the end of the press conference, Gim\u00e9nez Gonz\u00e1lez\u2019s wife received a phone call from her husband. He confirmed that he was being held in Broadview, just behind the building\u2019s boarded-up windows and chain-link fence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHis wife handed me the phone. I was talking to him, and his tone changed, and someone asked him who he was talking to,\u201d Herrera said. \u201cAnd he said, \u2018a lawyer.\u2019 And then he told me later that he was made to get off the phone.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n After the press conference, Herrera went home to file a writ of habeas corpus for Gim\u00e9nez Gonz\u00e1lez, a legal mechanism that would force a court to re-evaluate Gim\u00e9nez Gonz\u00e1lez\u2019s detention and provide a clear justification for it. He filed the petition at midnight, and went to bed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At 8 the next morning, Gim\u00e9nez Gonz\u00e1lez\u2019s wife called Herrera and told him that ICE had transferred her husband out of state. That move nullified Herrera\u2019s legal action. \u201cBecause he was in another state at the time that I filed the habeas petition, it couldn\u2019t be heard in Illinois, and the judge just sort of waved it away and transferred it to where he\u2019s being held,\u201d Herrera explained. \u201cI\u2019m not going to talk about where he is [now], because one of the things I\u2019m concerned about is him being moved again.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n HERRERA AND GIM\u00c9NEZ GONZ\u00c1LEZ\u2019S EXPERIENCE<\/strong> is increasingly common under ICE\u2019s current regime. It\u2019s not just happening in Chicago, either. Attorneys in New York and Los Angeles told the Prospect <\/em>similar stories to Herrera\u2019s, outlining how ICE uses bureaucracy and location transfers to isolate their detainees from both their families and their lawyers, limiting their ability to get out of their predicaments and increasing misery and hopelessness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Only 23 percent of defendants in immigration court have an attorney<\/a> in court to represent them. Unlike in criminal courts, defendants in immigration court are not entitled to representation. But even those who do have attorneys are struggling to connect with them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A data investigation by the Los Angeles Times<\/em> found that so far this year, 12 percent of ICE detainees<\/a> have been transferred four or more times. That\u2019s double the number relative to last year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ICE has a number of stated reasons for these transfers, attorneys told me. Sometimes, the agency says it\u2019s a matter of space. Due to pressure from the administration, ICE is working to meet aggressive arrest quotas, leading to inhumane crowding in their detention facilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Illinois, a well-intentioned law<\/a> has played into ICE\u2019s hands, giving the agency an excuse to transfer detainees out of state. In 2021, the state passed the Illinois Way Forward Act, which ended immigration detention in the state. When ICE arrests people in Illinois, they are processed at the facility in Broadview and then quickly transferred to facilities<\/a> in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Kentucky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt has functionally meant \u2026 that when a person is arrested in Illinois, the government can justify taking them hundreds of miles from their family,\u201d Herrera said of the law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ICE uses bureaucracy and location transfers to isolate detainees from both their families and their lawyers.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n He said that in court, government lawyers used the law to explain why Gim\u00e9nez Gonz\u00e1lez was transferred out of state so quickly. But Herrera pointed to local reporting that says some detainees are held in Illinois\u2019s Broadview facility<\/a> for as many as five days. That leads him to believe that Gim\u00e9nez Gonz\u00e1lez\u2019s transfer was retaliatory, or for the express purpose of keeping him away from his advocates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Melissa Chua, who leads the Immigration Protection Unit of the New York Legal Assistance Group, said that it\u2019s hard to know exactly why ICE moves its detainees, but that the results are clear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe outcome is that it is immensely cruel, and that people who actually do have rights are being strongly pressured to give them up,\u201d Chua said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n New York has a universal defender system, which means that detainees are entitled to representation when they are within the state. But when ICE transfers detainees out of state, they lose that right. \u201c[ICE is] not just isolating them emotionally, but taking them practically away from places where they would have had counsel,\u201d Chua said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These transfers then lead to a bureaucratic hellscape for those who have been arrested, their families, and their lawyers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Chua described one client who was moved between five different facilities within the span of eight days. Because of how quickly he was being moved and inaccuracies in ICE\u2019s detainee tracking database, her team was unable to speak with the detainee ahead of the briefing on his habeas case. They kept setting up calls, only to find out that he had been moved to an entirely different facility. \u201cWe weren\u2019t able to even confirm that he wanted representation, because we couldn\u2019t even speak to him,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A CHANGE OF FACILITY BRINGS<\/strong> a host of logistical issues. \u201cIt\u2019s never straightforward,\u201d said Ming Tanigawa-Lau, a staff attorney at Immigrant Defenders Law Center in Los Angeles. \u201cEvery place has a different way of requesting a meeting, rules about how far in advance you have to request it, who to contact, what hours they can receive calls at.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The confusion often means lawyers simply can\u2019t meet with their clients\u2014amounting to a lack of access to counsel. \u201cMaybe if the systems that they had set up were functional, it would be acceptable,\u201d Tanigawa-Lau said, referring to the phone, email, and meeting systems she and other attorneys are navigating. \u201cThey\u2019re telling the attorneys that we all have this kind of access. But in practice, it doesn\u2019t work.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n What\u2019s more, ICE detention facilities don\u2019t have a system that allows lawyers to remotely share documents with their clients, or vice versa. That means that lawyers and clients need to meet in person to share and review documents, which becomes complicated when clients are moved out of state and meetings are difficult to schedule.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Immigration attorneys can practice in any state, so having a client transferred out of state doesn\u2019t necessarily mean their connection is severed. But in practice, attorneys told me, their inability to speak to their clients, review legal documents with them, and travel to appear in court functionally means they can\u2019t represent their clients\u2014or, at least, makes it much harder to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Many immigration judges require clients and attorneys to appear in court in person, rather than virtually over video call. Tanigawa-Lau has represented clients virtually after they had been transferred to a different state, but her colleagues have had to fly out to appear in court. Chua said her team couldn\u2019t represent a client who was transferred from New York to Arizona.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ICE is supposed to notify attorneys when they transfer their clients, Tanigawa-Lau says, but in practice the agency doesn\u2019t. Sometimes, she won\u2019t even know that ICE has transferred her client until she gets a call from their family informing her. That\u2019s what happened in the case of Willian Gim\u00e9nez Gonz\u00e1lez in Chicago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Keeping in touch with clients in other states is a major hurdle. Tanigawa-Lau described being on hold for over 30 minutes just to leave a message for a client, waiting days to schedule a meeting, and having to drive two hours to meet in person at the nearest detention facility to her in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOne time I had to set up a call for a client on a Monday, and when I got there \u2026 I found out that he was actually deported the Saturday before,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CHUA, IN NEW YORK, IS DEEPLY CONCERNED<\/strong> that this lack of due process is leading to illegal and immoral deportations. Though she gave the caveat that she doesn\u2019t have a specific example, she told me she\u2019s almost certain that ICE has deported U.S. citizens who simply weren\u2019t able to assert their rights without access to a lawyer and their community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The stakes of ICE detentions and transfers seem higher today than they\u2019ve ever been, due to recent legal decisions that have amped up the cruelty at ICE facilities. Just a month ago, the Board of Immigration Appeals ruled that anyone who enters the country without inspection doesn\u2019t qualify for bond.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cSo, they\u2019re not only moving people hundreds of miles away,\u201d Herrera explained, \u201cbut those people can\u2019t get out at all. It\u2019s a really punitive and desperate situation for them.\u201d On top of that, the government\u2019s quotas for arrests mean that detention facilities are inhumanely crowded. Chua said that New York\u2019s 26 Federal Plaza, an immigration court that\u2019s been a highly public site of ICE cruelty<\/a>, has just four cells where up to 70 people have been held at the same time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cBecause of \u2026 the denial of access to counsel, there really aren\u2019t any safeguards or stopgaps that keep someone from being moved or held,\u201d Herrera said. \u201cEverything we worry about when a person is in jail\u2014all bets are off once you don\u2019t have access to a lawyer.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n All told, ICE\u2019s practices of transfers, isolation, and overcrowding amount to a desperate situation where due process rights are too easily ignored. \u201cTo me, it seems like cruelty is the point,\u201d Chua said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Emma Janssen is a writing fellow at The American Prospect, where she reports on anti-poverty policy, health, and political power. Before joining the Prospect, she studied political philosophy at UChicago and worked as an editor and freelancer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u2018It seems like cruelty is the point,\u2019 one attorney said. by Emma Janssen October 6, 2025 (Prospect.org) Anthony Vazquez\/Chicago Sun-Times via AP Protesters gather outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Broadview, Illinois, September 19, 2025. CHICAGO \u2013 On September 12, attorney Kevin Herrera walked up to Chicagoland\u2019s main Immigration… Continue reading \n
Emma Janssen<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n