The Broadview ICE Processing Center in Broadview, Illinois, in my view is a 2025 Auschwitz. The center has become a nationally and internationally alarming site of alleged human rights violations, racial terror, and systemic persecution of Brown, Latino and Black people including undocumented, and immigrant communities.

Evidence suggests that this facility operates through mechanisms recognizable within genocide studies, ethnic cleansing research, trauma psychology, international law, and the historical record of state violence. Witness accounts describe children being transported in distress, families separated without notice, detainees traumatized, and communities terrorized by militarized operations. These patterns mirror early and mid-stage genocide indicators, rendering Broadview a modern-day Auschwitz in both function and psychological effect. 

In essence, Broadview constitutes a pestilence—a moral, social, psychological, and humanitarian disease infecting the surrounding community and destabilizing vulnerable populations. Operation Shutdown, organized by Dr. Alli Muhammad MD and the Revolutionary Black Panther Party (RBPP), seeks the immediate closure of this facility based on the overwhelming human rights concerns documented across multiple fields of study.

Across history, the machinery of oppression has often operated quietly at first—behind fences, walls, detention barracks, or administrative offices—until the scale of human destruction can no longer be denied. The Broadview ICE Detention Center epitomizes this historical pattern. Located in a predominantly Black and Brown region of Illinois, Broadview has become a flashpoint for allegations of racial targeting, psychological harm, and ethnic persecution. The reported treatment of detainees, particularly children, along with the militarized presence accompanying transfers and operations, has evoked comparisons to the detention centers of World War II Europe, apartheid South Africa, and military regimes in Latin America.

What happens at Broadview deeply affects Chicago, the western suburbs, and immigrant communities across the entire Midwest. The trauma does not stop at the building's walls—it radiates outward, saturating neighborhoods with fear, sorrow, and instability. In every sense—psychological, social, ethical, and moral—Broadview has become a pestilence: a destructive force harming not only the detained but also the communities forced to live near it.

Genocide studies define genocide as the deliberate targeting of groups for destruction, whether through direct killing, forced displacement, family separation, or psychological harm that erodes the group’s ability to exist (1). The early stages, as Stanton outlines, include classification, discrimination, dehumanization, persecution, and detention (5). Across the world, detention centers have served as the operational core of ethnic cleansing campaigns (2)—from Bosnia to Myanmar, from Argentina’s junta to Rwanda’s pre-genocide phases.

The Broadview facility displays multiple parallels:

Research shows that ICE enforcement disproportionately impacts Black and Latino people, even among undocumented populations (7). This racial imbalance is precisely what genocide researchers identify as “group-based selection” for persecution (6).

Family separation has been repeatedly condemned by the United Nations as a tool of ethnic cleansing (2). Broadview routinely separates families, detains individuals without warning, and transfers detainees across state lines with no ability for families to track their whereabouts (3).

Eyewitnesses describe detainees—especially children—being transported crying, in restraints, half-dressed, or visibly traumatized. Genocide scholars consider humiliation and degradation as essential components of dehumanization (5, 6).

Militarized convoys, late-night transfers, and armed personnel evoke the symbolic terror historically used in genocidal and apartheid systems to intimidate targeted groups.

The presence of a detention center that repeatedly traumatizes communities parallels Auschwitz and other concentration camps—not solely in method, but in the function of instilling fear, submission, and systemic destruction.

Auschwitz was not only a site of death. It was a site of dehumanization, terror, and psychological annihilation. Broadview echoes the same ideological logic: racialized control, family breakdown, community terror, and disposability."

A “pestilence” is any force that spreads damage, despair, or disorder within a community. Public-health research confirms that chronic exposure to trauma—such as seeing detainees treated brutally or hearing militarized convoys—creates community-wide anxiety disorders, depression, sleep disturbances, and toxic stress reactions (4).

Residents near Broadview report:

• Waking to sirens at 1–4 AM
   
• Seeing detainees crying or restrained
   
• Witnessing heavily armed personnel
   
• Hearing the agony of families being separated
   
• Living with daily uncertainty and fear
   

The American Psychological Association notes that persistent exposure to traumatic events produces “collective trauma,” a phenomenon historically tied to genocidal systems, apartheid structures, and war zones (4).

Children exposed to state violence—even indirectly—develop lasting trauma symptoms. Seeing other children in restraints or distress causes mirroring trauma, emotional dysregulation, and fear of authority.

Detention centers fracture communities by:

• Creating fear-based withdrawal from public spaces
   
• Discouraging immigrants from seeking medical care, education, or community support
   
• Increasing isolation among residents
   
• Destabilizing multiracial solidarity
   

Broadview depresses community stability by:

• Reducing property value
   
• Creating stress-related illness
   
• Raising mental-health burdens on families
   
• Interfering with sleep, work, and daily functioning
   
• Increasing fear-based social avoidance
   

When a government normalizes cruelty, society internalizes that cruelty. Silence becomes complicity. This is the same moral sickness that allowed genocide to escalate in Germany, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Chile.

Broadview is more than an immigration facility.
It is a contamination site—a psychological and sociopolitical infection.

Ethnic cleansing is defined as the removal of an ethnic group from a community through fear, terror, displacement, detention, or violence (2). While often associated with mass killing, ethnic cleansing begins long before death:

• It begins with fear.
   
• It begins with detention.
   
• It begins with separation.
   
• It begins with dehumanization.
   
• It begins with children in restraints.
   
• It begins with terrorizing neighborhoods.
   

Broadview fulfills multiple indicators recognized by genocide and ethnic cleansing experts (1, 2, 6):

• Forced displacement
   
• Racialized detention
   
• Family destruction
   
• Deprivation of basic dignity
   
• Psychological assault on targeted racial groups
   
• Community terror
   

This is not immigration policy.
This is state-led persecution.

Operation Shutdown—organized by Dr. Alli Muhammad MD and the Revolutionary Black Panther Party—is the public, moral, and humanitarian demand to permanently close the Broadview ICE Detention Center.

The mission is rooted in:

• Human rights
   
• Trauma prevention
   
• Community protection
   
• Historical memory
   
• Anti-racism
   
• International law
   
• Ethical responsibility
   
• Collective liberation
   

1. Immediate end to all detainee transfers and processing
2. Permanent closure of the Broadview facility
3.  National exposure of conditions and alleged abuses
4.  Protection of Black, Brown, immigrant, and refugee communities
5.  Healing and restoring the community from the trauma inflicted
6.  Ensuring that atrocities do not escalate in silence

Broadview must be shut down now—not incrementally, not administratively, but decisively. We in no way are speaking of breaking laws, and we do not believe in riots, or inciting riots, we believe in be lawful, while of course acting in self-defense if someone is unlawfully putting your life in danger.

The Broadview ICE Detention Center represents a violent rupture in human decency and a direct threat to the dignity, safety, and survival of Black, Latino, and immigrant communities. Its operations mirror key indicators of early-stage genocide and ethnic cleansing, evoke historical parallels to Auschwitz and other concentration camps, and inflict profound psychological, social, and emotional harm on communities forced to live near it.

To allow Broadview to continue is to accept a humanitarian crime. To tolerate its existence is to betray the lessons of history. As Dr. Alli Muhammad MD and the Revolutionary Black Panther Party launch Operation Shutdown, the call is clear and the time is now:

“Never Again” means nothing if we allow it again.

 As we recognize the (Latino/Brown) genocide and ethnic cleansing being carried out by ICE, and CBD, let's also not forget the (Palestinian/Gazan) genocide in Gaza, it to must end now, liberate Palestine, lets also not forget the 28-34 cycle of (Black) genocide, carried out by law enforcement in Black communities, let's not forget the war on women's reproductive rights, let's not forget the war on marriage equality, all consenting adults have a right to marry each other. Let's all understanding that our collective oppression is interconnected and that it is all our fight, as Dr. King said "Injustice anywhere, is a threat justice everywhere...".

1. United Nations. (1948). Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
    
2. Mann, M. (2005). The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing. Cambridge University Press.
    
3. Human Rights Watch. (2020). Detained and Dehumanized: The Conditions of U.S. Immigration Detention.
    
4. American Psychological Association. (2017). The Effects of Community Trauma on Child and Adolescent Mental Health. APA Publications.
    
5. Stanton, G. (1996). The Eight Stages of Genocide. Genocide Watch.
    
6. Harff, B. (2003). “No Lessons Learned from the Holocaust? The Risk of Genocide and Politicide Since 1955.” American Political Science Review, 97(1), 57–73.
    
7. Massey, D. (2019). Racialized Immigration Enforcement in the United States. Annual Review of Sociology, 45, 503–522.
    
8. Straus, S. (2016). Fundamentals of Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention. U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.