‘It seems like cruelty is the point,’ 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 – On September 12, attorney Kevin Herrera walked up to Chicagoland’s main Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility in Broadview, Illinois, passed a crowd of protesters who didn’t know what to make of him, and knocked on the building’s boarded-up front door.
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’s fence. He asked them if they knew anything about his client, Willian Giménez González, who had been taken by ICE that morning in Little Village, a predominantly Latino neighborhood in Chicago. According to Herrera, ICE agents stopped Giménez González while he was driving with his wife to get a haircut. They took him away and left his wife, who can’t drive, alone in the car.
The guards listened to Herrera for a moment, then walked away, one of them throwing up a hand as if to say: “Who cares?”
Herrera left the facility that day with no idea where Giménez González was being held. The next morning, he returned to Broadview with elected officials, other advocates, and Giménez González’s wife to hold a press conference demanding information from ICE. At the end of the press conference, Giménez González’s wife received a phone call from her husband. He confirmed that he was being held in Broadview, just behind the building’s boarded-up windows and chain-link fence.
“His wife handed me the phone. I was talking to him, and his tone changed, and someone asked him who he was talking to,” Herrera said. “And he said, ‘a lawyer.’ And then he told me later that he was made to get off the phone.”
After the press conference, Herrera went home to file a writ of habeas corpus for Giménez González, a legal mechanism that would force a court to re-evaluate Giménez González’s detention and provide a clear justification for it. He filed the petition at midnight, and went to bed.
At 8 the next morning, Giménez González’s wife called Herrera and told him that ICE had transferred her husband out of state. That move nullified Herrera’s legal action. “Because he was in another state at the time that I filed the habeas petition, it couldn’t be heard in Illinois, and the judge just sort of waved it away and transferred it to where he’s being held,” Herrera explained. “I’m not going to talk about where he is [now], because one of the things I’m concerned about is him being moved again.”
HERRERA AND GIMÉNEZ GONZÁLEZ’S EXPERIENCE is increasingly common under ICE’s current regime. It’s not just happening in Chicago, either. Attorneys in New York and Los Angeles told the Prospect similar stories to Herrera’s, 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.
Only 23 percent of defendants in immigration court have an attorney 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.
A data investigation by the Los Angeles Times found that so far this year, 12 percent of ICE detainees have been transferred four or more times. That’s double the number relative to last year.
ICE has a number of stated reasons for these transfers, attorneys told me. Sometimes, the agency says it’s 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.
In Illinois, a well-intentioned law has played into ICE’s 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 in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Kentucky.
“It has functionally meant … that when a person is arrested in Illinois, the government can justify taking them hundreds of miles from their family,” Herrera said of the law.
ICE uses bureaucracy and location transfers to isolate detainees from both their families and their lawyers.
He said that in court, government lawyers used the law to explain why Giménez González was transferred out of state so quickly. But Herrera pointed to local reporting that says some detainees are held in Illinois’s Broadview facility for as many as five days. That leads him to believe that Giménez González’s transfer was retaliatory, or for the express purpose of keeping him away from his advocates.
Melissa Chua, who leads the Immigration Protection Unit of the New York Legal Assistance Group, said that it’s hard to know exactly why ICE moves its detainees, but that the results are clear.
“The outcome is that it is immensely cruel, and that people who actually do have rights are being strongly pressured to give them up,” Chua said.
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. “[ICE is] not just isolating them emotionally, but taking them practically away from places where they would have had counsel,” Chua said.
These transfers then lead to a bureaucratic hellscape for those who have been arrested, their families, and their lawyers.
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’s 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. “We weren’t able to even confirm that he wanted representation, because we couldn’t even speak to him,” she said.
A CHANGE OF FACILITY BRINGS a host of logistical issues. “It’s never straightforward,” said Ming Tanigawa-Lau, a staff attorney at Immigrant Defenders Law Center in Los Angeles. “Every 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.”
The confusion often means lawyers simply can’t meet with their clients—amounting to a lack of access to counsel. “Maybe if the systems that they had set up were functional, it would be acceptable,” Tanigawa-Lau said, referring to the phone, email, and meeting systems she and other attorneys are navigating. “They’re telling the attorneys that we all have this kind of access. But in practice, it doesn’t work.”
What’s more, ICE detention facilities don’t 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.
Immigration attorneys can practice in any state, so having a client transferred out of state doesn’t 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’t represent their clients—or, at least, makes it much harder to.
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’t represent a client who was transferred from New York to Arizona.
ICE is supposed to notify attorneys when they transfer their clients, Tanigawa-Lau says, but in practice the agency doesn’t. Sometimes, she won’t even know that ICE has transferred her client until she gets a call from their family informing her. That’s what happened in the case of Willian Giménez González in Chicago.
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.
“One time I had to set up a call for a client on a Monday, and when I got there … I found out that he was actually deported the Saturday before,” she said.
CHUA, IN NEW YORK, IS DEEPLY CONCERNED that this lack of due process is leading to illegal and immoral deportations. Though she gave the caveat that she doesn’t have a specific example, she told me she’s almost certain that ICE has deported U.S. citizens who simply weren’t able to assert their rights without access to a lawyer and their community.
The stakes of ICE detentions and transfers seem higher today than they’ve 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’t qualify for bond.
“So, they’re not only moving people hundreds of miles away,” Herrera explained, “but those people can’t get out at all. It’s a really punitive and desperate situation for them.” On top of that, the government’s quotas for arrests mean that detention facilities are inhumanely crowded. Chua said that New York’s 26 Federal Plaza, an immigration court that’s been a highly public site of ICE cruelty, has just four cells where up to 70 people have been held at the same time.
“Because of … the denial of access to counsel, there really aren’t any safeguards or stopgaps that keep someone from being moved or held,” Herrera said. “Everything we worry about when a person is in jail—all bets are off once you don’t have access to a lawyer.”
All told, ICE’s practices of transfers, isolation, and overcrowding amount to a desperate situation where due process rights are too easily ignored. “To me, it seems like cruelty is the point,” Chua said.
Emma Janssen
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.
