Burdened by costs of an ICE facility in town, Broadview reckons with a spotlight it never wanted

In a lot of ways, what happened last fall to the small village of Broadview during President Donald Trump’s immigration “blitz” felt like a storm.

Broadview’s leaders and residents had no say in the scope or magnitude of the federal push that shuffled thousands of immigrants through the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility that’s long operated in their quiet town. They couldn’t control what was coming or predict the impact.

The 7,900 people living in the unassuming western suburb are still digging out.

Just as the village had gotten its financial house in order, it was hit with nearly $400,000 in unexpected costs as a result of last fall’s campaign — around 10% of the small municipality's discretionary budget. That’s in sharp contrast to local governments elsewhere in the country that have contracted with the federal government to have their costs covered — and more — for detaining immigrants in local jails.

Broadview’s mayor recently made an ambitious request for federal reimbursement — that the village’s budget is banking on — and announced grand plans to have the ICE facility shuttered to become a museum to help change Broadview’s image. But her requests are a long shot.

Regionally, Broadview is now synonymous with the federal immigration processing facility at 1930 Beach Street that last fall became a de facto immigration detention site and drew the area’s most contentious protests.

Reluctant to draw more attention to themselves or their village, many residents say they don’t want to publicly discuss the saga.

Broadview Mayor Katrina Thompson also canceled a scheduled interview with the Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ after learning the village finance director answered a reporter’s budget questions without her knowledge. She sent word through spokesman David Ormsby who says, “There is currently no intent to reschedule.”

Still, after the Illinois legislature recently tried to restrict immigration enforcement facilities in residential areas, Thompson took to social media and wrote, “No community should have to experience what the Village of Broadview has endured.

“How do we ensure that no community is left to carry a burden it neither chose nor has the power to control?”

Before the “blitz,” Broadview flew under the radar

The village is the picture of calm, with tree-lined residential streets and unpretentious shopping corridors. Until last fall, it generated few headlines — for anything, really.

At 1.78 square miles, it’s smaller than most Chicago wards. What might characterize this suburb just south of I-290 at 25th Avenue, is just how modest it is.

Many Broadview residents say they moved there for that peace, some for retirement, others for the lower costs.

The most expensive home listed online for sale in the village where it’s hard to find houses bigger than three bedrooms is $310,000.

The U.S. Census pegged the village’s median income at $65,000 in 2024, putting it in the lowest 25% of Cook County municipalities, below Chicago’s $77,000. Yet its share of poor people is just 9%.

That’s influenced by a large number of seniors in Broadview — about one in every five residents — whose income is typically fixed.

Broadview’s total population peaked in 1970, back when Black residents accounted for less than 6% of the 9,600 mostly white people living there.

But in similar trends around Chicago, demographics began to flip and the Black population quickly rose to 74% by 2000. Black residents still comprise a majority with Latinos making up about a quarter, and white residents accounting for 11%.

Unlike Chicago’s south suburbs, whose property tax rates ballooned after their industrial bases slipped away, Broadview stabilized property tax rates at an average 10.5% that matches Cook County’s median, according to 2024 data.

That’s because as this and many other suburbs were booming following World War II, Broadview made sure its land would remain evenly diversified. It’s still roughly a third residential, a third industrial and a third commercial — including the Broadview Village Square shopping center and the classic Sawa's Old Warsaw Restaurant.

Then the federal “blitz” upended the suburb’s under-the-radar status.

The ICE building operating for decades at 1930 Beach Street became the center of the action and resulting protests. From its roof, masked federal agents lobbed tear gas, pepper spray and rubber projectiles. They barricaded Beach Street with a 8-foot-high fence.

The mayor declared a state of emergency.

Neighbors suffered the effects of the chemicals in and around their homes.

During the last week of September, a resident some 300 yards from the ICE building told lawyers the pepper spray aggravated his asthma at his house. Street blockages also prevented Reggie Thompson from getting groceries delivered or his home’s electricity serviced after it went out, court records show.

Local businesses felt the effects, too.

The mayor says Reynolds Advanced Materials and Wagner Foundry and Bronze Memorial Company, both within two blocks of the ICE facility, lost a combined $353,813 — and she’s seeking federal reimbursement for them, too. They declined to comment. Nearby, Kevin Halm of the Northcross Roofing construction company says protesters took up his parking spaces and blocked the lot’s entrance.

And as the weeks went by, fewer diners were walking into the Broadview Family Restaurant about four blocks from the ICE facility, says Ricardo Padilla, one of the employees.

“People have been really scared away, and so basically it slowed down the business,” Padilla says. “I think as a whole, it just put the village on a podium, and it’s like every single move just pretty much … it’s mainly just negative.”

Broadview had its finances together — until the “blitz”

One year ago, Broadview officials spent all of 15 minutes discussing the village’s 2025-26 budget at a public hearing. Armed with a surplus and millions more in cash reserves, the village’s finance director called the spending plan “one of the easiest ones I’ve done in a while.”

Fast forward, and the cheery outlook is gone.

What started as a $334,000 surplus on core operations turned into a $94,000 deficit for the fiscal year ending April 30, budget documents show.

That’s because midway through the fiscal year, the village had to spend $361,536 responding to activity around the ICE facility through mid-January, Broadview officials say.

Records obtained by the Sun-Times through a Freedom of Information Act request show those costs included $71,185 police overtime, $12,100 for fire department overtime and $3,000 for additional personal protective equipment. Ambulance transfers from the ICE facility’s address cost nearly $250,000.

Another $41,000 went toward legal expenses, mostly to sue the feds over the fence they erected near the facility — without permission — that blocked off Beach Street.

In a new $22 million operating budget proposal unveiled this week for the new fiscal year starting May 1, Broadview officials are leaving room for costs related to the ICE facility even though the feds won’t say if they’re sending another wave of agents back to Chicago.

Those include more for overtime and for the clerk’s office to handle an influx of FOIA requests — which landed in Broadview as the federal government limited its release of information. Separately, contracts require pay raises for police officers, firefighters and other village employees. Health care costs are up 17%.

The surplus projected for next year is just $45,000, according to the proposed budget.

The village expects to have to dip into its reserves — even after assuming hundreds of thousands in reimbursement from the federal or state governments for ICE-related municipal expenses.

"It's costing us a ton,” finance director Thomas Hood told trustees this week. “So it's really led to a lot of expense for the village that we didn't count on. But we're hopeful that we're going to get reimbursed for some of that."

Justin Marlowe, Director of the Center for Municipal Finance at the University of Chicago, says, “that's a lot of money riding on something that's less than certain.”

The vast majority of Broadview’s budget — around 80% — is eaten up by police and fire department salaries and predetermined pension payments. That leaves around $4 million for discretionary spending on village programs. Last year, costs resulting from ICE facility activity ate up about 10% of this.

“If we weren't already in a great financial position, we'd be underwater now,” Hood told the Sun-Times. He calls the hundreds of thousands of dollars in unexpected spending a “huge deal.”

“It throws a wrench into your plans,” he says. “Plans that had been in place and going for maybe five years or even longer."

Most other towns with ICE facilities, like in Indiana, don’t incur costs

Nationally, Broadview stands out as one of only a few immigration centers that the federal government owns and operates. Most others are local jails that lease space to the federal government for a daily flat fee for each person detained there for alleged immigration violations.

One of the closest is in Clay County, Ind., a three-and-a-half-hour drive, where local taxpayers have at the very least been shielded from increases in related costs resulting from detaining more immigrants, such as a surge in ambulance runs to nearby hospitals.

That’s because Clay County collects $85 per day per immigrant, according to its contract with the U.S. Marshals Service. The deal has prompted lawsuits from immigrant-rights advocates accusing Clay County of profiting handsomely from increased detentions.

Records show Clay County has had a detention-for-hire agreement in place since 2006, at $45 per federal inmate then. Terms expanded in 2013 to allow ICE to use the jail for immigrants pending deportation, and the daily rate later rose to $55.

Meanwhile in 2021, Illinois’ legislature barred such agreements between law enforcement and federal immigration officials, ending contracts between local governments including Kankakee County.

Clay County’s jail was the only long-term immigrant detention center in Indiana by 2022 when county officials voted to build an addition, expanding its capacity from 176 beds to more than 450.

Two of Clay County’s self-described “very conservative” commissioners viewed the proposed $25 million expansion as a smart investment for county taxpayers as ICE sought more detention space, they explained on local radio in December 2021.

Clay County had already reaped benefits of adding ICE inmates, a way to “make more money for the county” whenever its population of local inmates dropped, commissioner Marty Heffner said.

“The $55 a day, we are definitely making a profit at that,” Heffner continued. The rate since has risen to $85 a day.

Fellow commissioner Paul Sinders said the goal is to keep local taxes down “and not to increase taxes.”

“Because if we receive more ICE detainees, we speculate that we could receive close to $7 million per year for ICE detainees,” Sinders said. “And this will pay for the expenses of the jail, salaries, utilities, heating, cooling, and so on and and without that money then being freed up, the county may have to raise taxes.”

Heffner, Sinders and the county sheriff didn’t respond to interview requests.

Some outside help was made available to Broadview. Last October, Illinois State Police and the Cook County Sheriff and others sent officers to help Broadview police respond to protests that grew chaotic when federal agents fired gas and projectiles. State police are still calculating their share of costs for 34,000 staff hours; the sheriff’s office has spent about $3.8 million, agency spokespeople said.

Mayor looks to set a new course — but is that possible?

In her latest attempt to move Broadview out of an unwanted spotlight, Thompson has asked members of the Illinois congressional delegation for help securing reimbursement plus the closure of the ICE facility and its transformation into a museum.

Is that possible?

“If the federal government really wants to do that, they can find a way to do it, and they can find a way to do it relatively quickly," the University of Chicago’s Marlowe says.

Political will is another matter.

The Trump administration has sought a dramatic expansion of ICE facilities nationwide, including efforts to purchase commercial warehouses to open new detention centers. So closing facilities doesn’t seem in the cards. The two senators and six representatives whom Thompson enlisted for help are all Democrats — unlikely candidates to sway the administration.

Ormsby, Thompson’s spokesman, says the mayor has not yet received any responses. The only offices to respond to requests for comment were Rep. Sean Casten’s, which said he never received a letter from the mayor but would be open to helping, and Sen. Tammy Duckworth’s, which said it received the mayor’s letter and is in touch with Broadview officials.

For those living in Broadview, the costs went beyond the financial.

Last fall, a resident and business owner railed to her village’s defense in a Facebook post boosted by the mayor, begging people to stop saying, “Broadview ICE Detention Center.”

“Friends, I need your help to stop the slander against Broadview,” she wrote in September. “We are NOT like the towns that have prisons and give jobs to the community. We are a small, proud, majority Black working and middle-class community with a high quality of life.”

“Please help me stop people from disparaging my Village.”