ICE bristles over demand to provide toothbrushes to migrants in short-term detention

Soap? Check.

Bottled water? Check.

Toothbrushes? Nope.

As judges move to order better conditions at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s facilities where they process, and sometimes hold, newly arrested migrants, the agency is drawing a line at the demand for dental hygiene, arguing it’s too dangerous to issue toothbrushes to every detainee.

The problem, ICE has told the courts, is that it’s too easy to make them into weapons.

“Due to health and safety concerns, it is not advisable to provide everyone with a toothbrush as they can be used as weapons, or to destroy property. However, to comply with the court’s order, toothbrushes and toothpaste have been added to the list of items that detainees can request and be provided free of charge,” the government told a judge who’d ordered improvements at a facility near Chicago.

The skirmish over toothbrushes is part of a larger battle over migrant detention and, in a way, ICE itself.

The agency, which survived calls for its abolition in the first Trump administration, is again under fire by Democrats who compare it to “Nazis,” activists who accuse it of “kidnapping,” and federal judges who struggle with the complications of immigration law.

The Broadview facility in Chicago’s suburbs has become a focal point. It’s where migrants nabbed in Homeland Security’s Operation Midway Blitz are taken for processing before either being released back into the community or sent on to a longer-term detention facility.

Migrants who have passed through Broadview say they were denied access to their lawyers, were stuck in overcrowded and cold cells without mattresses, soap, water, access to showers or new clothes, medications or privacy when using the toilet.

It is supposed to be a short-term processing facility, but Fredy Cazarez Gonzalez told a judge in a written declaration in the lawsuit that he spent five days there in September, in a cell that smelled like urine and where the floor was littered with soiled toilet paper.

He said an officer at one point grabbed his head and pressured him to sign paperwork agreeing to deportation.

“The officers treated all of us like savage animals,” he said.

Other migrants reported seeing detainees beaten for asking for more food or questioning the conditions.

Homeland Security has said it provides adequate conditions: Each cell has a window and at least one toilet. Phones are available, and a list of pro bono lawyers is posted on the wall next to the phones. Water is available in wall-mounted fountains and detainees got three meals a day, including at least one that was hot.

But the administration also acknowledged trade-offs.

Bunks and cots aren’t allowed inside the rooms, so detainees must try to secure space on the seating benches to sleep. Fabric blankets can transmit lice, scabies and disease, so foil blankets are the rule.

Visitors have been allowed in the past but were curtailed due to the unruly protests outside the facility.

Then there are the toothbrushes.

ICE’s detention standards for long-term facilities do call for toothbrushes to be issued. But the agency has resisted that in the processing facilities, which are for short-term holds.

The Washington Times has reached out to both ICE and a lawyer for the migrants at Broadview for this story.

In New York, where another processing facility faced a similar lawsuit over conditions, ICE said it had been issuing dental wipes instead.

Judge Lewis Kaplan, a Clinton appointee overseeing that case, had initially ordered toothbrushes to be provided, but the government resisted.

Days later, an ICE official, Nancy Zanello, told the court the agency was trying to buy toothbrushes “with specialized features to mitigate security risks.” In September, Judge Kaplan updated his orders and specifically included toothbrushes on the must-provide list.

It wasn’t clear from the court documents what sort of brushes are now being provided, but it turns out there’s a demand — and so an industry — for toothbrushes that can be safely issued to those in prisons and jails.

Options include a fingertip covering with soft plastic bristles or very flexible plastic ones with short handles that bend at the slightest pressure.