After federal immigration agents broke down the front door of an Elgin home and detained four people this week, the Department of Homeland Security featured them in a news release that declared they were illegal immigrants with serious criminal records.
But when one of the men appeared in court, a federal judge had a different take.
“This is the shortest report I’ve ever seen on anybody,” U.S. Magistrate Judge Keri Holleb Hoatling said, waving his pretrial report in her hand. “He has a criminal history of nothing…There is no danger that I see to the community whatsoever.”
A promised immigration enforcement surge in the Chicago area appeared to escalate throughout the past week, with arrests and sightings of federal agents reported near schools, courthouses, workplaces and other venues.
Tensions have run high. Tear gas was deployed on protesters Friday outside an ICE holding facility in west suburban Broadview, and activists, politicians and even the Mexican government escalated calls for a full, independent investigation into the shooting death of a motorist by an ICE agent after a traffic stop in Franklin Park.
At Broadview ICE facility, federal agents hurl tear gas and pepper spray at protesters blocking vans
Immigration and Customs Enforcement meanwhile, has touted the effort, dubbed “Operation Midway Blitz,” as a smashing success, saying Friday it had made 400 arrests in the first two weeks of the mission.
Marcos Charles, the acting head of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, told the Associated Press that 400 was a “solid number,” adding that the figure includes arrests made by other federal agencies besides ICE who are assisting in the campaign.
“We’re going to be conducting this operation until we feel that we’ve been successful,” he said. “There’s not an end date in sight.”
Charles said roughly 50% to 60% of the Chicago operation arrests were targeted arrests, meaning they were specific people that ICE was trying to find because they had committed a crime, had a final order of removal or had done something that put them on ICE’s radar.
The rest were what’s often referred to as “collateral arrests,” meaning people that ICE comes across during their operations who aren’t the person they’re looking for but are in the country illegally, so ICE can arrest them.
But much remains unclear about the scope and character of the arrests, and social media videos and press releases from both ICE and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that appear to cherry pick the “worst of the worst” cases stand as the only easily-accessible public information on the surge.
Without public accountability tools like body-worn cameras or a full accounting of names, dates and other information about detainees, advocates, community members and officials are left to question ICE’s tactics, including last week’s fatal shooting of a man in west suburban Franklin Park.
Use of force
In west suburban Franklin Park, a small memorial has sprung up on the street corner where Mexican immigrant Silverio Villegas Gonzalez was killed.
On Monday evening, a man in a wide-brimmed hat and work boots pulled out of Grand Avenue’s rushing traffic flow to kneel at the memorial. He stared at the pictures, prayer candles and flowers crowded on the grass and crossed himself before getting up again. A woman in blue scrubs came a few minutes later and did the same thing.
ICE agents pulled over 38-year-old Villegas Gonzalez just before 9 a.m. Sept. 12, planning to arrest him for allegedly being in the U.S. without authorization. Gonzalez was a parent at Franklin Park School District 84, records show, and state officials said he had just come from dropping one of his children off at elementary school.
In a statement, DHS said the officer feared for his life, The agency alleged that Villegas Gonzalez “refused to follow law enforcement commands and drove his car” at officers, striking one of the ICE agents and dragging him “a significant distance.”
Since the shooting, elected officials, advocates and even Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum have called for a full probe into the shooting, which was captured in part on a nearby nail salon’s surveillance cameras.
The videos show Villegas Gonzalez’s gray sedan backing up as two officers draw their guns, one on each side of the car. As the car pulls away, the officer on the driver’s side cannot be seen on the video. Another angle captured Villegas Gonzalez making a right turn as two gunshots ring out, but it was unclear in the footage where the officer was when the shots were fired.
Sharon Fairley, a professor of criminal procedure, policing and federal law at the University of Chicago, said the ground rules for law enforcement’s use of force on fleeing subjects comes from the U.S. Constitution, state laws and agency policies.
According to a 1985 U.S. Supreme Court case, an officer or agent may use force to subdue someone in flight “only if an officer is facing an imminent threat to himself or somebody else and there is probable cause that the person is violent… or some indication that they are going to cause harm if they are not stopped right away.”
“When you look at the constitutional standard, it’s not a very high one, particularly when you have someone that is fleeing by car,” she said. “The Supreme Court has expressed its opinion that individuals who are fleeing by cars are incredibly dangerous.”
But Fairley, who formerly headed the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, which investigates shootings and other allegations of misconduct by Chicago police, said the publicly available footage of the Franklin Park incident doesn’t allow for a thorough legal examination.
The agents involved in the shooting of Villegas Gonzalez were not wearing body cameras, according to news reports and experts who spoke about agency practices.
“There’s not enough information at all to make any judgement about whether what happened here is wrong or not,” she said.
If the agent started firing after the agent was injured as Villegas Gonzalez was trying to get away, Fairley said, “that might not be justified because he’s no longer a threat to the officer.”
In any case, she continued, a follow-up investigation is “tremendously important” following any critical incident.
“The community wants to understand what happened so they can take whatever action is appropriate and tell their government, ‘this problematic thing happened and we’re not happy about it.”
Who was arrested?
While federal authorities have released no information about the vast majority of immigration arrests, there have been a few windows into the process.
Available information about arrestees has been sporadic and difficult to independently verify, but a number of people picked up over the past week appear to have violent criminal pasts, with convictions including aggravated use of a weapon, child sex abuse, and murder. The Trump administration has particularly emphasized these types of arrests, though people with serious criminal records have long been deportation priorities, including under the Biden and Obama administrations.
Among them was Aldo Salazar Bahena, 37, who was convicted of murder in 2007 in the gang-related beating death of a Schaumburg man whose body was found in the trunk of a car dumped near the Fox River.
Bahena was sentenced to 20 years in prison and was released from Stateville Correctional Center on parole on Sept. 12, according to DHS.
ICE officers located and arrested Salazar on Sept. 15 in Elgin, according to DHS, which blamed Illinois’ law barring cooperation with civil immigration proceedings.
“Salazar was locked away in one of Illinois’ maximum-security prisons for two decades for murder, but the state saw fit to release him despite the fact that he had a final order of removal from a Department of Justice immigration judge dated Sept. 26, 2016,” acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said in a statement.
Other cases have not been as clear-cut.
In the case of 48-year-old Carlos Gonzalez-Leon, the Mexican citizen arrested in Elgin who had been previously removed from the U.S. on three separate occasions, the DHS said in a news release that Gonzalez-Leon had been convicted of assaulting a family member, though no further explanation was provided.
That information didn’t come out until a detention hearing in federal court Thursday, where prosecutors asked he be held without bond. In doing so, it was revealed that Gonzalez-Leon had pleaded guilty to misdemeanor battery in Texas nearly 20 years ago, and has no criminal history since then.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Saqib Mohammed Hussain acknowledged Gonzalez-Leon was not a danger, but argued he should be detained as a flight risk, given that his children and most of his close relatives are in Mexico.
Hussain also questioned Gonzalez-Leon’s ties to the community, noting he rents a basement room with others he does not know.
“What is your point — because he rents a room?” the judge shot back. “U.S. citizens rent rooms all the time. Why does that mean he is not involved in the community?”
Gonzalez-Leon’s court-appointed attorney, Daniel Hesler, told the judge his client has been living in Elgin for three years and works in construction. He moved to his current residence after his wife, who has been ill for some time, recently went into hospice at a facility in Chicago.
“He’s somebody who doesn’t get into trouble,” Hesler said. “He seems to have been quietly living here, working here…He was living with his wife until she got really sick and was like, ‘OK, all I need is a room.’”
In the end, the judge decided to release Gonzalez-Leon on electronic monitoring, though even his defense attorney acknowledged that immigration authorities could pick him up at any time.
“ICE will do whatever they will do,” Hesler said, adding he was going to write his phone number on his client’s arm just in case. “The arm they don’t take.”
Gonzalez-Leon was living in the basement of a home on Chippewa Drive in the far northwestern suburb when a team of immigration agents broke down the door and arrested him and several other men allegedly living illegally in the U.S.
The raid, which was overseen by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and used to boost the Trump administration’s law-and-order image, also resulted in the brief detention of Joe Botello, a U.S. citizen born in Texas who was handcuffed and put in the back of a van but later released without charges.
Gonzalez-Leon, meanwhile, was charged with illegally reentering the U.S. after deportation. A criminal complaint unsealed after his arrest revealed not only that he was the prime target of the raid, but that he had come on the feds’ radar after he applied for an Illinois driver’s license using his real name and the Chippewa Drive address.
Immigration officials had the home where Gonzalez-Leon was staying under surveillance as far back as Sept. 10, nearly a week before the raid, according to the complaint.
A border patrol agent said in an affidavit that he observed Gonzalez-Leon’s green Mercury minivan parked at the address. Two days later, agents tailed him as he got into a different vehicle and drove to a gas station, the complaint alleged.
Shortly before 6 a.m. on Tuesday, a team of agents dressed in military fatigues knocked down the door to the home and detained everyone inside. Noem later shared a video on social media of four men handcuffed and being led away from the home.
Noem appears to hop on a truck at the end of the clip, but she is not shown interacting with any of the detainees.
According to the DHS news release, the other residents of Gonzalez-Leon’s Elgin home who were detained were: Jose Morales-Rodriguez, of Mexico; Juan Eduardo Solarzano-Morales, of Mexico; Victor Manuel Rodriguez-Pantaja, of Mexico; and Ruben Antonio Gonzalez-Querales, of Venezuela.
Morales-Rodriguez has previous convictions that all appeared to be traffic-related, including a 2010 conviction for aggravated DUI and driving without a valid license, records show.
According to DHS, Solarzano-Morales has convictions for domestic violence and stalking. A search of local court records did not turn up any information on those cases.
The other two men arrested had no reported criminal background.
Protests
Early Friday morning, about 100 people gathered outside a low-slung brick building with all the windows and the door boarded up. They carried noisemakers and — following a series of encounters with pepper balls and a chemical crowd dispersal agent outside the same facility last week — goggles and N95 face masks.
Milagros Pelayo, 22, and her sister Yessenia, 16, had come to the building every day for the last three days. They said their father, Rosalio, a custodian from Mexico, was inside with 200 to 300 others.
He had one driving under the influence conviction from 13 years ago, they said, for which he had served time and otherwise had no other criminal record.
“Our dad came to this country to build a better life not only for himself, but for his kids, and now he’s being ripped away from that,” Milagros Pelayo said.
He’d been arrested from their home in Elgin early the morning of Sept 10, the sisters said, and they’d heard from him about 12 hours later. He’d been brought to a holding facility in Kankakee briefly before landing at the Broadview facility earlier this week.
People arrested by ICE may land at more than a dozen cooperating jails around the Midwest that the agency uses as holding facilities for the Chicago office.
Meanwhile, outside the Broadview building, the Pelayo sisters described days of frustrating phone calls and fear as they try to take stock of the situation.
“I don’t believe that we’re the only ones coming every day to find out anything we can about our family member,” Milagros Pelayo said.
They weren’t sure where their dad would be sent next.