The Tribune got a rare look inside Broadview’s ICE processing center in 2009. Here’s what we saw.

Since Operation Midway Blitz began Sept. 8, the facility that temporarily houses immigration detainees in west suburban Broadview has become a lightning rod at odds with its otherwise unassuming two-story brick building.

While protesters have regularly clashed with police and agents outside, the conditions inside have come under increasing scrutiny, even as few people who are not workers or detainees have laid eyes on the interior.

A cadre of attorneys and a judge on Thursday will be among the first outsiders to tour the building since the enforcement operation began, as they litigate a class-action lawsuit about the facility’s allegedly inhumane conditions.

But in 2009, Chicago Tribune reporter Antonio Olivo and photojournalist Alex Garcia got a rare look inside the building, walking through its halls and speaking to detainees to document their journey from the facility back to their home country.

“People tell you about all the opportunities in the United States, but they don’t reveal the bad things like this, where they treat us like animals,” a detainee told Olivo.

The Tribune photographs show hallways with white, cement walls and linoleum floors, where detainees line up to be searched and shackled.

Interior windows looking into the holding cells show cushioned furniture on which detainees laid down.

Agents took fingerprints and secured handcuffs on people, some of whom were in street clothes while others wore jail jumpsuits.

In the photographs, the detainees are shown crowded into a bus, then ushered onto a plane at O’Hare International Airport. Aboard the flight, 53 passengers stared out windows as their rising plane banked toward Mexico. Their handcuffs glinted in the morning sun.