For nearly two months, Omar was detained at the Miami Correctional Facility in Indiana before being deported to Mexico. He had lived in the Chicago area since he was a child.

Now 49, Omar recalled during a phone interview with the Tribune his final days in U.S. immigration custody.

“It was miserable, I really thought I wasn’t going to make it,” he said, his voice cracking as he spoke from Mexico City. Omar, whose last name is being withheld because he fears retaliation if he ever returns to the U.S., said for much of his detention, officials failed to provide him with the medication he must take to maintain his liver transplant and control his diabetes.

He described a hostile and unsanitary environment where people detained for civil immigration violations go hungry, become sick and, in some instances, become suicidal.

A new class-action lawsuit against the federal government and Indiana officials condemns conditions inside the Miami Correctional Facility in Bunker Hill, Indiana, where many immigrants are taken after being arrested by immigration agents in the Chicago area.

The federal lawsuit, filed late Thursday night in the northern district of Indiana, alleges that the government is using a prison environment to detain people who have not been convicted of a crime, exposing them to dangerous conditions that violate their constitutional rights.

The complaint, filed by the ACLU of Illinois, ACLU of Indiana, National Immigrant Justice Center and MacArthur Justice Center on behalf of three immigrants currently detained at the facility, alleges that immigrants held at the Miami Correctional Facility face inadequate medical and mental health care, prolonged solitary confinement, excessive lockdowns, alleged physical abuse, degrading treatment by staff, unsanitary cells and insufficient food and hygiene products.

The Department of Homeland Security and officials from Indiana did not return requests for comment.

According to Alexa Van Brunt, director of the Illinois office of the MacArthur Justice Center, the lawsuit’s central argument is that the government cannot treat people awaiting civil immigration proceedings as though they were serving criminal sentences.

“The way immigrating detainees are being treated, a combination of solitary confinement, inadequate medical, lack of food, unsanitary conditions and degrading treatment amounts to unconstitutional punishment,” said Van Brunt. “It’s torture.”

In the year since the facility began detaining immigrants for ICE, at least two detained immigrants have died after allegedly not receiving adequate medical care, according to the lawsuit. Earlier in October, “after multiple detained people warned staff for days that a newly arrived man urgently needed mental health care and might hurt himself, the man attempted suicide by hanging in his cell.”

Many immigrants are locked in their cells for days at a time and go days or weeks without prescribed medications or medical and mental health care, the lawsuit states.

The lawsuit, filed on behalf of Sergei Vasenin, Kemoye Muslar and Cynthia Acevedo, three immigrants currently detained at the facility, seeks court intervention to protect detainees’ constitutional rights.

“(They) have suffered and continue to suffer the rights violations at issue in this case every day they are detained at Miami Correctional,” the lawsuit said.

In the past year, at least eight ICE detention facilities across the country have been subject to court orders requiring changes to unconstitutional conditions.

The Miami Correctional Facility, however, is the only detention center located inside an active state prison designed for punitive confinement.

The facility, a state prison historically used to house men convicted of crimes, was repurposed in 2025 to hold immigration detainees in 1,000 abandoned cells as the Trump administration expanded its detention capacity.

ICE named the new operation the “Speedway Slammer,” the lawsuit states. The facility is part of a network of more than 250 immigration detention centers nationwide and has increasingly become a regional pipeline for people swept up by federal agents under President Donald Trump’s aggressive deportation policies.

According to the lawsuit, this arrangement is inappropriate because immigration detention is civil, not criminal.

The Indiana detention center has become an increasingly likely destination for people processed through Chicago-area ICE facilities, as there are no immigration detention centers in Illinois.

The Tribune analyzed ICE detention data obtained by the research group Deportation Data Project. The data, which covers detentions throughout ICE’s entire system through early August, showed that it was rare for Chicago-area detainees to be sent to the Miami Correctional Facility during President Joe Biden’s final year in office and even during the early months of the second Donald Trump administration.

For those detained during last year’s Operation Midway Blitz, for example, just 2.5% spent at least some time at the Indiana detention center.

But for those detained since then, the rate has approached 15% — or more than 360 of the nearly 2,500 people booked into Chicago-area facilities between the end of the blitz’s main surge and early August, the most recent date captured in the data.

Some of the immigrants detained there include asylum seekers, lawful permanent residents and people who have lived and worked in the United States for decades, including parents of U.S. citizen children, according to the lawsuit.

The complaint cites the Supreme Court’s 1982 decision in Youngberg v. Romeo, which says people in civil detention are entitled to “more considerate treatment and conditions of confinement” than convicted prisoners.

But the conditions immigration detainees face at the Miami Correctional Facility are worse, said Katie Hickey, an attorney working on the case with the ACLU of Illinois.

Soon after challenging the federal government over conditions at the ICE processing center in Broadview, immigrants and families of people detained at the Miami Correctional Facility began raising concerns about conditions at the prison.

The class-action lawsuit is the result of an investigation that included dozens of interviews with detainees, Hickey said.

Omar is one of them.

He lost nearly 10 pounds, and his health became seriously compromised when authorities failed to provide his medication for weeks, he said. Without it, he said, his body could reject his kidney transplant, and he could become seriously ill.

“I think I was only able to survive because I speak English, but most of the other people detained there do not,” he said. “We are treated as less than human, there’s no regard for our safety.”

Like him, dozens of other detainees are going weeks without proper medical care, food and hygiene products. Some kitchen workers and other staff members use racial slurs against immigrants, he recalled.

According to the complaint, staff members have told detainees to, “Go back to [their] country.”

The complaint also describes the case of Cynthia Acevedo, a transgender immigrant from Guatemala who has reportedly gone months without consistent access to epilepsy medication.

She now suffers multiple severe seizures a week, which have resulted in physical injuries, including broken teeth.

“We need to keep people safe and we ask the court to stop the inhumane treatment and if the government cannot make that happen, then people cannot be held there,” Hickey said.

The lawsuit is also the first of its kind to include state government officials as defendants.

According to the complaint, the facility has faced scrutiny over chronic understaffing, prisoner safety, deaths and lawsuits challenging its conditions and confinement practices.

The allegations state that these problems became so serious that Indiana officials closed half of the prison in 2022. In April of this year, the ACLU of Indiana finalized a $1.2 million settlement over abusive conditions at the facility.

“The situation is so dire, the magnitude of the situation is really devastating ,” Hickey said, “People have died.”

—Chicago Tribune’s Joe Mahr contributed.

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