The Department of Homeland Security now says that two weeks of critical surveillance footage from within Immigrations and Customs Enforcement’s Broadview detention center wasn’t actually lost in a “system crash,” but rather, was never recorded in the first place. It is also arguing that, had the footage been recorded, it would be irrelevant because prisoner living conditions have improved since the time it was supposed to be recorded.

The filings, made by U.S. attorneys on behalf of Greg Bovino, Kristi Noem, and other DHS officials, are the latest in an ongoing class action lawsuit against the U.S. government filed by detainees at the Chicago-area ICE detention center. The people suing the government in this case argue that they were held in subhuman, illegal conditions at Broadview: “They are denied sufficient food and water […] the temperatures are extreme and uncomfortable […] the physical conditions are filthy, with poor sanitation, clogged toilets, and blood, human fluids, and insects in the sinks and the floor […] federal officers who patrol Broadview under Defendants’ authority are abusive and cruel,” their complaint reads in part.

As we have reported, the plaintiffs’ lawyers have been trying to get the government to produce nearly two weeks worth of surveillance footage from inside the detention center from between October 20 and October 31, 2025, which was a critical period where ICE was detaining people en masse in Chicago. The government first said that the footage had been “irretrievably destroyed,” but that it was working with its vendor, a one-person company called Five by Five, to try to recover it. In a later filing, it said that the footage was lost due to a nonspecific “system crash.”