While activists have been fighting arrests by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on the streets of Chicago, another unlikely party has been facing off against the agency in court.
McHenry County has filed suit against ICE, trying to get the federal government to pay for potential liability for allegedly making immigrant detainees do forced labor.
The court battle pits conservative McHenry County, which once fought in court for the ability to hold accused immigrants in the U.S. without legal permission in its jail, against the agency that once paid it millions of dollars every year to do so. Both county and federal officials have denied liability.
The case comes as the U.S. Supreme Court is considering whether private prisons can immediately appeal their claim of immunity against a rash of similar lawsuits across the nation.
Northwestern University professor Jacqueline Stevens, founding director of the Deportation Research Clinic at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, said the Supreme Court seemed skeptical of Geo Group’s claims regarding a prison it runs in Colorado. That might not bode well for a public jail like McHenry County as well.
But McHenry County Assistant State’s Attorney Troy Owens, who manages civil litigation for the county, said the lawsuit against the county should be dismissed.
“This is an absurd lawsuit,” Owens said. “The Trafficking Victims Protection Act is being grotesquely misused.”
County attorneys have argued in court that the courts have established housekeeping duties as an exception to the 13th Amendment prohibition against slavery. Prosecutors also argue that the county is immune from such lawsuits because no court has found that a government-run detention facility violates the law by requiring detainees to perform housekeeping.
“It’s not asking too much to ask them to clean up their cells and common areas,” Owens said.
About a dozen class-action lawsuits have been filed nationwide, including in Colorado, Georgia and New York, against ICE and its contractors, such as CoreCivic and the GEO Group, which run private prisons. Geo Group reported revenue of $2.4 billion last year, 41% of it from ICE contracts.
The suits generally claim that inmates were forced to clean, do maintenance and perform kitchen duties for little or no pay, in violation of minimum wage laws or the Trafficking Victims Protection Act.
The Supreme Court recently took GEO Group’s case, in which it claims it should have “derivative sovereign immunity,” similar to immunity that protects the government from certain liability, because it had a contract to work for the government.
The McHenry County state’s attorney’s office also is arguing that ICE, acting through its contractor, The Nakamoto Group, should cover any liability in the case because the jail was merely following ICE guidelines.
While the McHenry case, filed in 2022, remains in the early stage of gathering evidence to determine its scope, other such cases have involved millions of dollars. In Tacoma, Washington, a jury awarded plaintiffs $17 million in back wages, and GEO was ordered to pay the state nearly $6 million in unfair compensation, known as unjust enrichment. They pay detainees as little as $1 a day for duties that could otherwise be done at normal wages by public workers or private employees.
“My takeaway is that the kind of get-rich schemes some entities might have through mass detention might not work out as well as they planned,” Stevens said.
McHenry County’s detention of noncitizens for ICE while their cases were decided had been a point of contention for years. Activists had pressured the county to stop the practice, but the county board voted in 2021 to continue, saying it generated revenue and kept detainees closer to home. ICE paid the county $95 per day per detainee, for an average of 240 inmates a day from 2016 to 2021, which the suit stated generated more than $41 million.
But effective in 2021, Illinois lawmakers prohibited detention contracts with local authorities. McHenry County appealed in court but lost. Since then immigrant detainees have been held in facilities out of state or at the ICE processing facility in west suburban Broadview, where federal immigration agents recently clashed with protesters over its arrests of hundreds of immigrants during the Trump administration’s Operation Midway Blitz.
Aleksey Ruderman in 2022 near his home in Milwaukee. While held at McHenry County Jail on civil immigration charges from 2016 to 2019, he said he swept and mopped the floors, wiped tables and cleaned the showers and toilets, all without being paid. (Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune)
In 2022, six detainees filed suit against McHenry, claiming they were forced to clean and maintain the jail without pay or face discipline. Some of the plaintiffs were released, while others returned to the countries they left. While convicted felons can be forced to do work as part of their punishment, immigrant civil detainees waiting for a hearing cannot. McHenry officials said detainees weren’t forced to work, but were responsible for keeping their own cells and day areas clean.
Ultimately, the courts must decide whether entities operating under the direction of the federal government receive governmental immunity from litigation, or whether the federal government assumes liability.
McHenry County officials declined to comment on the litigation, but told the Tribune that before the state prohibited its ICE contract, it was receiving nearly $10 million a year for housing ICE detainees. While the county has temporarily contracted with neighboring counties to house their inmates, the agreements generate about half as much revenue as the ICE contract.
The Trump administration’s solicitor general argued in the Supreme Court case that if an agency delegates authority to perform an unlawful action, the contractor is still liable. The administration has also requested a record $45 billion over the next two years to expand immigrant detention capacity to more than 100,000 people, much of it through private prisons, which are prohibited in Illinois.
In other words, Stevens said, if ICE misinterprets laws Congress passes, its contractors are not immune from lawsuits.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/11/29/mchenry-county-court-ice-lawsuit/
