Judge Orders ICE To Wear Body Cameras In Chicago As Tensions Rise
Chicago has become the epicenter of the Trump administration’s intensifying immigration crackdown — where questions are mounting over Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrest tactics, agents’ use of facial coverings, and conflicting accounts from the Department of Homeland Security about the actions against its officers. Since September, there have been over 1,500 arrests in Chicago as part of “Operation Midway Blitz.”
U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis on Thursday ordered federal immigration officers in the Chicago area to wear and turn on body cameras, after seeing footage of agents deploying tear gas and using aggressive tactics in city neighborhoods.
The Trump Administration argued it would be logistically difficult to immediately have all agents wear body cameras. So the judge said all federal agents who already have body cameras need to make sure they’re on during encounters with immigration protesters.
“Now the federal agents are required to have body cameras on them, because they clearly lie about what goes on,” Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) said. “It’s hard for us to know right away what the truth is.”
ON THE GROUND
Judge Ellis said she was “startled” by TV images showing agents in riot gear confronting protesters and journalists. One flashpoint came Tuesday when agents detained a 15-year-old U.S. citizen for several hours during a confrontation on Chicago’s Southeast Side.
DHS says the teen admitted to throwing an egg at a Border Patrol officer. His lawyer says he was slammed to the ground and held for five hours without contact with his family. DHS officials fired back, calling claims that the teen was “kidnapped” or hidden in a warehouse “categorically false.”
Rewind: It followed scenes in late-September of a military-style raid on a South Shore apartment building — justified as a search for members of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang. Residents, including children and U.S. citizens, were pulled from their apartments, some at gunpoint, and detained for hours.
Last week, Border Patrol agents tackled and handcuffed a Chicago TV news producer, who said she was walking to the bus stop on her way to work. Agents claimed she threw an object at their vehicle, but she was released without charges.
Another Incident: On October 4th, agents shot Marimar Martinez, a U.S. citizen who was accused of ramming a car into federal agents. Her attorney says footage disproves DHS’s account and that unreleased body camera footage shows it was actually a federal agent who swerved into Martinez.
National Guard Latest: Judge April Perry, who last week blocked the administration from deploying National Guard troops inside Chicago, said the legal bar for utilizing the military domestically is “very high” and that Trump officials’ claims of threats from Chicago protesters “are not reliable.”
The law: ICE officers can detain or arrest individuals without a judicial warrant if they are suspected of being in the U.S. illegally. As for U.S. citizens, the government doesn’t track how many have been held by immigration agents, but ProPublica found over 170 cases this year, including children — with cases often dropped.
“If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States,” Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in an emergency ruling allowing racial and language profiling in immigration enforcement, “they promptly let the individual go.”
BEHIND THE TENSION
At a town hall broadcast on NewsNation Wednesday, anchor Chris Cuomo pushed back on Trump’s Border Czar Tom Homan's assessment that ICE agents must mask their faces to protect themselves and their families. Cuomo said people will react to ICE agents with fear when “you make these men and women look like Hamas.”
Homan defended the administration’s track record, asserting that “70% of everyone arrested is a criminal.” But data tells a different story.
Syracuse University’s TRAC project, which relies on Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, shows that more than 42,000 out of nearly 60,000 people in ICE detention (more than 70%) have no criminal conviction, according to late September data.
It follows immigration researcher Austin Kocher’s July report that there is also a “sprawling network of ‘off-the-books’ detention” — such as people held in temporary field offices, staging areas, or local jails that are not recorded by ICE — “that undermines public transparency and complicates efforts to monitor the scale and conditions of immigration enforcement in real time.”