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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. 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?”
The next day, Giménez González’s wife received a phone call from her husband. They now knew where he was. Herrera filed 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.
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.
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.
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