ICE Moves to Alter Broadview Clergy-Access Injunction, Citing Space, Staffing and the Establishment Clause

The government asked Judge Gettleman to alter the order that made clergy access daily (a motion to alter or amend judgment under the federal rules). It argued that daily visits are unfairly burdensome: there is insufficient space at Broadview for the type of private, hands-on pastoral care that plaintiffs seek to provide, daily services pull officers off processing, and the plaintiffs’ visits, which are Christian services only, risk offending the Establishment Clause.

The motion is also the government’s own account of what the court-ordered Holy Week visits looked like, and so the best public evidence of how many people were in the building. On Holy Thursday the government counted approximately 13 detainees in custody. The next day there were seven detainees at the facility, and three opted to participate in religious services. That day ICE opened a locked lobby door so the visitors could wash the feet of the detainees who took part. These are defendants’ declarations (the Keith Taylor Declaration, not itself in RECAP), not independent observation.

The motion’s background paragraph also restates, in the government’s voice, the history the Christ the King sermon leans on: that Sisters JoAnne Persch and Pat Murphy conducted weekly visits to the Broadview facility, meeting with detainees and their families at 4:00 a.m. every Friday, from 2010 to 2020.

Outcome: no ruling on the motion appears in RECAP. The briefing schedule was stayed in mid-May so the plaintiffs could take expedited discovery and has since been reset; as of the latest docket entry RECAP holds, the plaintiffs’ response was not yet due. Meanwhile the parties agreed to daily access.

Sources

• Defendants’ motion to alter judgment, via RECAP: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ilnd.490229/gov.uscourts.ilnd.490229.48.0.pdf
• Docket: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/71934446/coalition-for-spiritual-and-public-leadership-v-noem/