By 
A group of Catholic and Christian faith leaders said it has been granted daily access to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Broadview, Illinois, since May 15 under a milestone agreement with immigration officials.
The Coalition for Spiritual and Public Leadership (CSPL), a Chicago-based Catholic and Christian advocacy group, said in a May 19 press release that it has struck a deal with ICE and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that allows “daily pastoral visits.”
The temporary agreement follows a nearly 10-month-long campaign and lawsuit filed by CSPL and other faith leaders in November. CSPL faith leaders were permitted to provide pastoral care for Ash Wednesday and Holy Week but were denied entrance at Christmas.
The group noted that the agreement is not permanent and that the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois requested a July status update.
“During the pendency of this federal litigation, as ordered by the court, plaintiffs may access the ICE Broadview Service Staging Area Facility,” the agreement states, according to CSPL, “to offer pastoral services on a daily basis to detainees who wish to receive pastoral care, including spiritual care, prayer, or facility-approved sacramental ministry, which may include rites tied to specific religious observances.”
Access to the facility will be allowed for up to five religious leaders per day between 8 a.m. and 11 a.m. and between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m., CSPL said. ICE personnel are required under the agreement to provide “sufficient space for religious services to be carried out within reasonable operational parameters,” CSPL said. The agreement also requires ICE to “make reasonable efforts” to facilitate privacy for detainees during the sacrament of confession, CSPL said.
Visits may only take place after detainees have completed intake and must be concluded with enough time for detainees to be transported out of the facility, CSPL said. ICE is permitted to limit visitation based on safety threats and operational concerns under the agreement, CSPL said.
‘Emergency room treatment’
The group provided religious services to 12 detainees at Broadview under the agreement on May 17, CSPL said.
“One detainee, facing deportation, expressed his gratitude for the visit and said, ‘Me siento como a volver a vivir,’ which loosely translates to a feeling of being brought back to life,” the organization said in the release.
“To my mind, it’s emergency room treatment,” said Father Paul Keller, CMF, the provincial for the Claretian Missionaries and a member of the CSPL Clergy Council. “Someone is there right when the trauma has happened to attend to the immediate emotional and spiritual wounds.”
“This agreement represents a recognition of the human dignity and basic human rights of our detained sisters and brothers,” CSPL Executive Director Michael N. Okińczyc-Cruz said.
Another civil suit (Moreno Gonzalez v. Noem) in federal court alleged detainees at the Broadview facility faced overcrowded, “inhumane” conditions, insufficient nutrition, inadequate medical care, lack of privacy, and a squalid living environment.
Although detainees are only meant to be held at Broadview for a few hours, with the maximum being 72 hours, some alleged last year that they were held there for several days and even up to one week during ICE’s Operation Midway Blitz, which detained about 3,000 immigrants illegally residing in the state.
A DHS spokesperson said “religious organizations are more than welcome to provide services to detainees in ICE detention facilities” and disputed detainees’ claims that the Broadview facility functions as a detention center, not a temporary processing facility.
“Even before the attacks on the Broadview facility, it was not within standard operating procedure for religious services to be provided in a field office, as detainees are continuously brought in, processed, and transferred out,” according to a DHS spokesperson.
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The only ICE I want is in my martini.
There is ample evidence that ICE is out of control. The administration’s aim to deport the “worst of the worst” cannot be argued. It is their methodology that reeks with mismanagement. Ex. DHS Secretary Noem was fired. ICE field officer Matthew Albence was relocated.
Some serious concerns…
Collateral damage: In preceding months at ICE “detention prisons,” elected officials were not allowed in to determine the health and wellbeing of the occupants, many of whom have been determined not to be W of the W.
How does the FBI work with ICE and local law enforcement, who seek to minimize the damage and assist in the recovery from terrorist attacks that do occur within the United States?
Cost to the taxpayer is overwhelming: ICE operates approximately 200 detention facilities across the United States, housing 10s of thousands of detainees. These facilities include both government-owned and privately-operated centers with fewer occupant protections. Many of these prisons are massive, purchased warehouses needing a major overhaul to accommodate thousands of “inmates”. ICE’s detention practices are subject to ongoing legal and political scrutiny.
I have informed my elected officials that I do not want my tax funds appropriated for this disgrace. I hope you will do the same.
“There is ample evidence that ICE is out of control.”
I know you think your emotional emesis is “evidence”, it’s just the leftist tendency to regard itinerant indignity as indisputable fact.
If this screed is any indication of your consumption of alcohol, I suspect you might want to be evaluated by a hepatologist.
More insults. It has been my experience (especially in the Marine Corps), that insulting people often needed extensive dental work.
Notice the hive-minded projection from the fellow traveler whose screeds are filled with insults and envy.
As for your instruction in dislodged teeth, I can imagine you learned that the hard way.
I try not to use sinful balderdash rhetoric as a weapon, but I hope you will offer your help in trying to save my soul. Much here is a dislodged form of medicine and an attack on my use of alcohol. My liver has been determined to be fresh. I hope yours is fresh, also. Let me offer a toast.
God bless.
“I try not to use sinful balderdash rhetoric as a weapon….”
Really? I mean, seriously??????”
It’s hard to worry about what he calls “sin” as he freely admits he does what people used to call “living in sin”.
Of course reading his stuff is adventure in a curious amalgam of unrestrained ignorance and indignity.
Mr. Morgan, have you ever visited a correctional facility? You can’t just show up & demand to be admitted. It’s a long process.
Elected officials & clergy have to go through security protocols too.
If our border hadn’t been so poorly secured by previous administrations we wouldn’t have so many detainees in the first place.
Oh, it’s all Biden’s fault? Keep drinking the Kool Aid. Total loyalty to Dear Leader?
No it’s been going on for a long time. Meanwhile the cartels are becoming richer & increasingly more dangerous.
Nobody brought up Biden, but since you did-he certainly played a role in the mass invasion of this country.
Once again, try to focus.
mrsC. As a jury foreman, I visited a local maximum security prison in NYS. There was no screening for pastoral care. There was no long process. True, our southern border was mismanaged, allowing “the worst of the worst” to cross. However, it’s not the intent; it’s the flawed process used by Homeland Security, ICE, that is causing collateral damage. The brutality at the massive 122 detention centers, warehouse prisons, has not only killed a Minnesota couple, but also caused a number of innocent detainees to comit suicides. The firing of Secretary Noem and her field general, Matthew Albence, who was reassigned, shows that ICE is out of control.
Thank you.
Perhaps things have changed in visitation rules since you were last in a prison Mr. Morgan? Did you visit inmates or take a tour of the facility?
We have bi-annual events at our state prison where the general public can enter the grounds outside & buy handmade things from selected inmates but that differs from setting up an inmate visit inside the facility.Theses days that’s a long process of screening, being approved, & setting up a date to visit. If an inmate loses their visitation privileges you have to wait until those are restored.
There’s no way today that you can just show up and be admitted.
As I understand it, the people who died in the Minnesota protests died because they were behaving very badly around ICE officers, who are not trained in crowd control. As far as why there were no police officers trained in crowd control between the protesters and ICE, that’s a question for the Minnesota officials who forbade the police from being there.
“As a jury foreman, I visited a local maximum security prison in NYS. ”
IF there’s any validity to this story, and its plausible only because the nature of New York’s judiciary, your visit was limited to a very limited in scope and time-for the purposes of some aspect of the charges being adjudicated.
You didn’t have unlimited access to any facility as a juror and normal routines would have been suspended to accommodate you-because the mere presence of outsiders is inherently disruptive to the good order.
They idea that because you didn’t observe something makes it absent “isn’t even wrong” to borrow an idea from physicist Wolfgang Pauli.
Errata:
IF there’s any validity to this story, and it’s plausible only because the nature of New York’s judiciary, your visit was limited in scope and time-and only for the purposes of some aspect of the charges being adjudicated.
Dear Fork. You are piling on. I received several comments and will address most concerns. “Unlimited access”?
Watch this space.
Thank you. mD
I get that your s/creed hates ICE, but the article is about pastoral care to detained illegal immigrants. How does hatred of ICE relate to the topic?
“How does hatred of ICE relate to the topic?”
Because a presenting symptom of what has been described as a “mind virus” is subordination of reason to emotion, so coherence and focus are often wanting. Any topic is subject to the threadjacking to irrelevant or tangential matters.
Note this phrase: “elected officials were not allowed in to determine the health and wellbeing of the occupants”
As mrscracker notes, you can’t just waltz in to correctional facilities because you are a grandstanding politician, even the staff is subject to restrictions and rules.
I worked on the fiscal end of a state correctional facility and had the pleasure of reporting to work with a sniper’s rifle pointed at my left temple until the officer on the ground checked my ID. Staff also wasn’t allowed to bring a lunch, because of the potential for compromised/fraternizing staff to bring contraband. You either ate at the staff dining hall (food prepared by inmates) or went to nearby restaurants.
Order is the sole thing that protects staff and other inmates from a riot, injury and death. Much has been learned since the infamous Attica, Camp Hill and other riots of the past.
Then there is the simple inference that most politicians are not licensed healthcare professionals, so they aren’t qualified to offer an opinion on physical wellbeing.
Forget for a minute that they never visit other correctional facilities, where whatever the reason for incarceration, many of those inmates are citizens who, in the grand scheme of things deserve their concern-especially the ones incarcerated with the illegals that compromise a large portion of the population. According to the U.S. Sentencing Commission in 2025, 44% of the incarcerated were non-citizens, many sentenced due to drug and gang activities.
Most people have no idea what goes on inside those facilities and if they did, they’d afford corrections officers a lot more respect and have less disordered notions of inmate nobility.
Amen. Correctional facility officers do deserve greater respect. As does ICE, Border Patrol, & every other type of law enforcement agency.They put their lives on the line daily to keep us safe.We have no idea what they face- unless you’ve been there & done it. Or if your family member has.
The public does not know but has an absolute right to know. They are paying for it and the “correctional officers” work for them. That is why their elected representatives have the legal right to inspect the facility with a moments notice.
“That is why their elected representatives have the legal right to inspect the facility with a moments notice.”
NOBODY has a “right to inspect” at “a moments notice”. Where the hell would you get such a notion?
I worked in this environment. You clearly did not and have no idea what goes on there or how easily the good order of a facility can disturbed.
Here’s a little insight.
On one occasion my responsibilities required me to conduct an accounting inventory inspection and evaluation of a particular facility. As a part of the preliminary procedures, I was required to alert the superintendent’s office if I knew any inmates at that facility.
I alerted them of a former classmate and teammate, a high risk individual who was convicted of torturing and murdering a counterparty in a drug deal and was assessed as so violent he was assigned to single resident housing.
Even though we hadn’t had contact in a couple decades, the facility staff ensured that we would not have any contact-including incidental sight at a distance. The reason is that there is a known risk of “adverse reactions” by inmates when they have contact with or even sight of unrelated acquaintances from their pre-confinement life.
Maintaining institutional security is incredibly difficult. There’s a company called Keefe Group that among other things specializes in products that are safe for distribution to inmates, with the principal concern being not convertible into an improvised weapon, or to conceal an improvised weapon “aka a shiv” or other contraband. The soap sized Sony SRF-M37W radio was a hot item when it was in production, both because of its reception from the inmate’s perspective and its inability to be used as contraband package from the staff’s perspective.
The people who are confined there and especially the staff need to have their safety prioritized over every other concern, and certainly those of grandstanding politicians or the sanctimonious political activists masquerading as pious religious.
Suzanne, you write: “That is why their elected representatives have the legal right to inspect the facility with a moments notice.”
Please cite for us that statute in either State or Federal law. Be specific.
Thanks to God for this great outcome! Never give up the fight for true religious freedom.
Fantastic.
Now do daily pastoral access to prisons, nursing homes, and hospitals.
“Now do daily pastoral access to prisons, nursing homes, and hospitals.”
Especially nursing homes, which we treat as God’s waiting rooms.
Many decades ago, my great grandmother was in a facility in the last weeks of her life. We visited on Sundays. One particular Sunday, my grandmother was summoned to the adjoining room of another resident-we did not know room, with “ma’am please”.
The resident was an ailing old man who we determined had some paralysis-perhaps from a stroke. You could see what he was requesting was breaking him mentally. While he was able to press the call bell, he was experiencing a need to urinate and lacking staff response, was reduced to asking a stranger to help him relieve himself. The man simply wanted the simple dignity of not soiling his bed. We did track down a nurse who dispatched an aide.
I’ve never forgotten that. I was around 20, and not particular disposed to being affected by such things-nonetheless, it shook me as I think it was the first time I had a preview of the meaning phrase “the indignities and infirmities of old age”.
Dickens’ term “telescopic philanthropy” comes to mind again. So nice to put the veneer of pastoral concern on political activism.
YES! My son had cardiac surgery this past year. The hospital did offer him a female chaplain of indeterminate denomination, but we declined that help. We made many phone calls to try to get a priest or deacon from the archdiocese. Because we financially support the diocesan annual appeal and seminary education for priest/deacon formation, we pushed those buttons. It was mighty rude of us but we did want the sacrament from an ordained Catholic. A WONDERFUL Ukrainian Catholic priest arrived to anoint my son, so we were given (or paid for) a little miracle. There is a serious priest shortage with parish family groups occurring here. Priests are overworked and strained. They need our prayer.
meiron, how is your son doing. I will offer my evening prayers tonight for his intention.
Thank you for your prayers, Deacon. He is doing better, but his long term prognosis isn’t so great. We are blessed with much goodness.
I’m so sorry to hear that, meiron. I will say a prayer for your son today.Praise God you were able to find a priest to come to the hospital.
Thank you, mrscracker. Yes, we are blessed.
I wonder if all the clergy doing visits to ICE detention centers make regular pastoral visits to the elderly homebound members of their parishes. I doubt it.
No, this was a cheap sentimentalist display of politics highjacking the Catholic faith. To our bishops I say: STAY OUT OF PÒLITICS. Politics is the domain of the laity in the Church.
You should probably check into that before engaging in calumny, Deacon.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines calumny as a statement contrary to truth (false). Calumny offends the dignity of a PERSON.
The deacon clearly says, he “wonders.” IOW, he asks. He does not presume. He makes no false statement.
The deacon clearly says, he “doubts.” He is skeptical. He does not make a false statement.
The deacon describes this group’s advocacy as POLITICS. That statement is true, and a moment’s reasoning will show how.
This CSPL group does not advocate for pastoral care for Catholics. It does not advocate for care for every Christian. This group does not advocate or seek to provide pastoral care for the elderly or the ill in hospitals, nursing homes, or adult family homes. The group does not seek to provide care to those in any prison. This group wants to work only in this Broadview ICE Detention Facility.
Its action IS thus a display of POLITICS, seeking access to one specific ICE short-term stay detention facility for illegal immigrants. It IS a display of POLITICS, covertly a display of piety. This group wants to bring God to a small select group of immigrants detained prior to removal from a country they entered illegally.
The group advocates for what is important in the way that they are called. Does the ministry of a sidewalk anti-abortion protestor get diminished because they don’t also protest inside the halls of government?
The ministry of pro-lifers is multi-pronged, and we go WHEREVER we need to go. wE HAVE GONE INSIDE LEGISLATIVE HEARINGS, INTO GOVERNOR’S OFFICES, AND WE HAVE GONE INTO NEIGHBORHOODS, DOOR-TO-DOOR. WE HAVE GONE INTO THE COURTS. WE GO TO THE SIDEWALKS AND INTO THE CHURCHES. You assume that we go only one place. We are pro-life, and our advocacy is needed everywhere. Pastoral care is pastoral care. Why would a priest or minister choose only to minister to one facility in one location to one type of person???
Go for life, susanne.
“Does the ministry of a sidewalk anti-abortion protestor get diminished because they don’t also protest inside the halls of government?”
We have a little pronoun lesson just for you today. The ministry of a sidewalk anti-abortion protestor gets diminished because he or she is not a ‘they.’
Right, the pot calling the kettle black. Please get your own facts straight before commenting on the site. You have added nothing substantive to the discussion here. Are you being paid to troll CWR? It seems like it.
The “facts” are that pastoral care is now available to our brothers in Christ where it was not previously. How dark a soul must be to feel aggrieved by that.
Suzanne: before you make idle accusations study up on what exactly constitutes calumny.
Perhaps you should, as well..
I doubt it also. Visiting the elderly, housebound, the ill and infirm, does not advance the progressive agenda, so those activities are not important in the larger scope of things. I might believe their intentions are pure and serious if they were going in there to administer the sacrament of confession and penance, since those who are presently incarcerated are there because they violated immigration law. I won’t hold my breath.
Tell that to MAGA Bishop Barron.
Incontinent and incoherent.
Try to focus.
Barron is a Trump sycophant.
Bishop Barron is a reason that one of my family members still practices their Faith.
God bless him.
William. You walloped it!
Barron attended Trump’s State of the Union address on March 25, 2025, where he compared Trump’s address to Congress to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.
His adoration of a convicted criminal who shows hatred for anyone who disagrees with him. His targeted list continues to grow daily. His rantings show he is in mental decline. God save the Republic.
https://www.ncronline.org/opinion/ncr-voices/bishop-barrons-video-capitol-annotated
The difference being that the detained immigrants have been there for days, and the elderly/imprisoned have often been there for months with no visit.
Dear Deacon. There is a difference between the indigent elderly and ICE. They can leave their nursing homes.
The Global Detention Project reports the capacity of the Broadview facility is 236.
The article reports that provisions have been made for access to detainees by (up to five) religious leaders per day. According to this report, on May 17, 12 detainees received pastoral care. Pastoral services include as spiritual care, prayer, and provision of specific rites (confession).
The article notes that “ICE’s Operation Midway Blitz detained about 3,000 immigrants illegally residing in the state.” QUESTION: Did ICE detain all 3,000 immigrants at the Broadview facility and were they all there at the same time? The report seems to imply that but I really tend to doubt that.
Thanks to all who responded to my comments. I appreciate that there are both favorable and unfavorable. Reasonable discourse prevails, that is, minus un-Catholic-like degrading and hateful rhetoric.
Much of what I said was substantiated by actual statements made by powerful leaders in broad daylight. Optics played a significant role.
There is so much to unpack here that a full response is all but impossible. A brief synopsis may help defend my position…
Most importantly, the actions of ICE dominance and overreach are hard facts.
ICE is using tear gas and pepper spray to subdue protesters. ICE shows a WAR-LIKE PRESENCE.
Military vehicles, Armored Personnel Carriers (APCs): Used for transporting TROOPS safely in COMBAT zones. Tactical Trucks: Versatile vehicles for logistics and TROOP movement in various terrains and military dress with powerful long rifles, masks. The lives lost include those who committed suicide in some of the 122 detention centers. Anyone would ask, “WHY do they need so many jails to house the worst-of-the-worst?” USA Facts: 70,805 people as of the end of December, according to the agency. That’s a 73.5% increase from the same period in 2025. I tried to get the number of cartel inmates. “ICE does not release that population.” WHY? No answer. The ICE portal is a detailed recording of their mission.
https://portal.ice.gov/home