Judge hears allegations about Illinois ICE site

A judge heard testimony Tuesday about overflowing toilets, crowded cells, an absence of beds and water that “tasted like sewer” at a Chicago-area building that serves as a key detention spot for people rounded up in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

- By CHRISTINE FERNANDO

Three people who were held at the building in Broadview, just outside Chicago, offered rare public accounts about the conditions there as U.S. District Judge Robert Gettleman considers ordering changes at a site that has become a flash point for protests and confrontations with federal agents.

“I don’t want anyone else to live what I lived through,” said Felipe Agustin Zamacona, 47, an Amazon driver and Mexican immigrant who has lived in the U.S. for decades.

Zamacona said there were 150 people in a holding cell. Desperate to lie down to sleep, he said he once took the spot of another man who got up touse the toilet.

And the water? Zamacona said he tried to drink froma sink butit “tasted like sewer.”

A lawsuit filed last week accuses the government of denying proper access to food, water and medical care, and coercing people to sign documents they don’t understand. Without that knowledge, and without private communication with lawyers, they have unknowingly relinquished their rights and faced deportation, the lawsuit alleges.