The Department of Homeland Security now says that two weeks of critical surveillance footage from within Immigrations and Customs Enforcement’s Broadview detention center wasn’t actually lost in a “system crash,” but rather, was never recorded in the first place. It is also arguing that, had the footage been recorded, it would be irrelevant because prisoner living conditions have improved since the time it was supposed to be recorded.
The Department of Homeland Security now says that two weeks of critical surveillance footage from within Immigrations and Customs Enforcement’s Broadview detention center wasn’t actually lost in a “system crash,” but rather, was never recorded in the first place. It is also arguing that, had the footage been recorded, it would be irrelevant because prisoner living conditions have improved since the time it was supposed to be recorded.
As we have reported, the plaintiffs’ lawyers have been trying to get the government to produce nearly two weeks worth of surveillance footage from inside the detention center from between October 20 and October 31, 2025, which was a critical period where ICE was detaining people en masse in Chicago. The government first said that the footage had been “irretrievably destroyed,” but that it was working with its vendor, a one-person company called Five by Five, to try to recover it. In a later filing, it said that the footage was lost due to a nonspecific “system crash.”
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