Midway Blitz: Keeping ICE agents in check still a challenge
A Schaumburg police officer responded to a 911 call in June from a federal immigration agent who reported being followed, then turned off his body camera at the agent’s request. A Forest Park parking enforcement worker moved a federal agent’s car in July while police leaders let the agent slip out the back of the village police station, where he’d ducked in to avoid an activist’s camera. An Evanston police commander defended his officers’ response to the mayor in October after immigration agents drove away from a violent confrontation with residents on a north suburban street. These incidents and many others like them underscore how — a year after President Donald Trump launched Operation Midway Blitz — quick, chaotic encounters involving immigration authorities, local police and Chicago-area residents continue to leave the public and elected officials alike grasping for answers and seeking accountability. During and after the immigration crackdown, which amounted to a small-scale military incursion into Chicago and its suburbs, local officials have been beset by disagreements and hand-wringing over how to meet the moment, according to dozens of Tribune interviews and a review of hundreds of pages of documents obtained through public records requests. The blitz was the most dramatic test to date of the rules of engagement Illinois has established for how local law enforcement deals with federal immigration agents. In the months since, the Tribune found, those rules have grown no clearer. Local police and other officials “were not prepared for the type of blitz that came in,” said Rubén Castillo, a former federal prosecutor and ex-chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Chicago, whom Gov. JB Pritzker appointed last year to lead a special commission that probed allegations of misconduct during the operation. “A lot of people were caught with their pants down and not prepared for the type of military action and aggressiveness of federal law enforcement that had never been seen before, certainly not in my lifetime,” Castillo said in an interview last month. Trump and Department of Homeland Security officials have consistently denied that federal agents acted improperly during Operation Midway Blitz. Despite tough-talking rhetoric from Illinois politicians, clashes with the Trump administration also laid bare the limited ability of elected leaders to pass state laws that meaningfully restrain federal authorities. Among local prosecutors, cases against federal agents have been nearly nonexistent. While Democrats have tried to present a united front against the Republican administration in Washington, there’s been no shortage of intraparty finger-pointing over who could or should have done more. Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke has become perhaps the most frequent target. Castillo sees the scarcity of charges from O’Neill Burke’s office as an invitation to federal overreach. “There’s all kinds of difficult cases that are prosecuted all the time, and to just … throw up your hands and say, ‘Well, it’s too hard to prosecute these federal agents,’ if you think about that, it just doesn’t make sense at all,” he said. “What you’re saying is, ‘If you have a federal badge, you can come into a local community and do as you please, and you can hurt people, you can do all kinds of criminal behavior, and you’re not going to be held accountable.’” In a statement, though, a state’s attorney’s office spokesperson wrote that the office has said “clearly and repeatedly that it will pursue charges against any (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agent if the law and the evidence supports it, no matter how challenging the circumstances may be.” The office “is committed to pursuing justice on behalf of those harmed and brutalized during Operation Midway Blitz and will continue to make every effort available to them to do so within the confines of Illinois law,” O’Neill Burke spokesperson Elyssa Cherney said. As early voting gets underway for the Nov. 3 midterm election, Pritzker and other Illinois Democrats appear to be pinning their greatest hope for accountability on their party taking control of at least one chamber of Congress next year. As for the police whose interactions have drawn so much scrutiny, many have found themselves on the defensive as they responded to calls from agents and residents as raids and arrests unfolded. Some of those responses have sparked allegations that local police aided the feds as they raided neighborhoods and clashed with protesters. Police officials from around the region largely declined to be interviewed for this story. The Chicago Police Department is also in the midst of a leadership change unrelated to the federal enforcement, as Larry Snelling has left the superintendent’s office. But before he did, he defended his department’s response to confrontations between agents and residents and repeated a familiar refrain: CPD is barred from aiding immigration enforcement but obligated to maintain basic public safety. “Without our officers being there, these scenes would have been way more violent,” Snelling said at a heated forum a few months before he retired. “There would have been more citizens hurt; there would have been more residents hurt.” Chuck Wexler, executive director of the think tank Police Executive Research Forum, said police officers faced a tough balancing act under the unique circumstances of Operation Midway Blitz. “On one hand, you have a specific prohibition against local police becoming involved in immigration enforcement. On the other hand, you have the police responsibility to become involved when public safety is at risk,” said Wexler, a former operations assistant to the police commissioner at the Boston Police Department. “I think the police can often feel caught in between those two principles. But ultimately when it becomes public safety, they have to become engaged even if they know they are going to be criticized for appearing to be assisting in immigration.” Former Chicago police Superintendent Eddie Johnson said police officers were “caught in the middle of that political game and that’s unfair to them.” “They are there to serve and protect,” Johnson said, “and it doesn’t matter who needs that service, who needs that protection.” Complexities of the TRUST Act While the aggressive, at-times violent, tactics of federal agents during Operation Midway Blitz have drawn much of the public outrage, city and suburban police have gotten a large share of the ire for how officers handled clashes between federal immigration agents and residents. Under the Illinois TRUST Act, which then-Gov. Bruce Rauner, a Republican, signed into law in 2017, state and local police are prohibited from participating in civil immigration enforcement, though they may help enforce criminal laws or protect public safety. But repeated confrontations between federal forces and everyday Illinoisans during the 64 days of the blitz and in the months that followed exposed a gap between the letter of the law and the reality on the street. Consider the June incident in Schaumburg. The officer who responded to the 911 call caught up with the agent and the woman who reportedly followed him in the Schaumburg police station parking lot. The officer, who is the son of Schaumburg Mayor Tom Dailly, asked the woman to stop following the federal agent, then turned off his body camera while speaking with him, according to a police report. But the woman was recording, and a video of the encounter posted to social media set off a small uproar in the northwest suburb, including a flurry of angry emails to the mayor and other village officials. One outraged resident put it this way in an email to Dailly, which the Tribune obtained through a public records request: “This matter has moved beyond a single police interaction. It now raises broader concerns regarding public confidence in the integrity of local government and the fairness of the co
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