ICE Detainees at Chicago-Area Facility Win Class Certification

A federal judge in Chicago certified a class of current and future detainees at a suburban Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility where conditions have been, in the judge’s words, “deplorable.”

Class certification makes sense, Judge Robert Gettleman found Monday, given that the government “can in effect maintain only a single standard of conduct as to the conditions” at the Broadview, Ill., facility.

“If hundreds of detainees filed individual suits, then there would be a high likelihood of varying adjudications regarding defendants’ practices and policies,” he wrote. “The result would be to saddle the defendant with the impossible task of ...