In the most significant legal challenge to the Trump administration’s ongoing immigration enforcement blitz in Chicago, civil rights groups have alleged federal immigration agencies have illegally arrested and detained dozens of people, including some U.S. citizens, without probable cause.
Now, a federal judge is set to rule whether those arrests constituted violations of a consent decree in place since 2022 that bars U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from making warrantless immigration arrests unless they have probable cause to believe someone is in the U.S. unlawfully and that the person is a flight risk.
Among those added as recent alleged violations: a family from Ecuador, including a 5-year-old girl, arrested in the parking lot of a Humboldt Park shopping center; a man from Mexico with no criminal record arrested in a high-profile Elgin raid attended by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem; and a mother and her two young children detained in Millennium Park downtown in a case highlighted by the Tribune.
A high-profile hearing had been set in the matter for Friday, but that was scuttled due to the government shutdown that has frozen civil litigation where the U.S. is a party.
Instead, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Cummings said he will issue a written ruling “in the coming days.”
Leaders of the National Immigrant Justice Center and the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the original lawsuit against Trump’s first administration in 2018, are hopeful that Cummings will extend the consent decree and help curb the tide of what they call “increasingly violent and dangerous arrests by DHS and other federal officers” in Chicago.
Mark Fleming, associate director of litigation at the NIJC, told the Tribune this week the judge’s ruling on what’s known as the Castañon Nava settlement agreement could have a significant impact in how ICE conducts its arrests, both in Chicago and across the country.
In addition to extending the consent decree, the plaintiffs want Cummings to order the immediate release of more than 100 people swept up in Chicago-area raids since “Operation Midway Blitz” began Sept. 8, as well as force ICE to better document the probable cause for arrests going forward, Fleming said.
“What we are hopeful for is that the judge recognizes they are systematically violating the law,” Fleming said. “This could be very significant, and it is incredibly urgent in light of what’s happening in the streets of Chicago on a daily basis. We are hopeful that the judge sees the urgency of the moment.”
Lawyers and other representatives of both ICE and its umbrella agency, DHS, did not respond Friday to requests for comment on the litigation.
In a recent court filing, however, the government blasted the plaintiffs’ efforts as overwrought, arguing the consent decree was limited in scope and that the plaintiffs were using “inflammatory” language to try to attack legal immigration enforcement.
“The settlement agreement has a limited focus on documentation for warrantless arrests, not all recent law enforcement operations in Chicago as claimed by plaintiffs,” the government’s filing on Thursday stated. “Furthermore … plaintiffs categorize all collateral arrests as warrantless and ‘likely failing to comply with the settlement agreement.’ This ambiguous and nebulous categorization is misleading because not all collateral arrests are warrantless.”
The filing by the Department of Justice also scoffed at the plaintiffs’ portrayal of U.S. Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino, the buzz-cut, fatigues-wearing chief whose social media posts and interviews on the ground have painted the immigration sweep in highly militaristic terms. They say he’s just doing his job — and doing it legally.
“As much as plaintiffs want to create a bogeyman against which to inveigh, Mr. Bovino’s involvement in current law enforcement operations in Chicago is irrelevant to whether defendants engaged in violations of the settlement agreement set forth in plaintiffs’ original motion,” the DOJ filing stated.
The filing also pointed to the recent ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in California that allowed ICE to consider factors like race, language, and even employment in a low-paying job as grounds for reasonable suspicion of being in the country illegally.
Fleming, however, called that a red herring, as the case in Chicago “focuses on what happens after a stop and what immigration officers are required to establish and document when making an arrest without a warrant,” not the reasons for the stop itself.
In arguing that Bovino has a history of flaunting court orders, the plaintiffs have also pointed to another case in California where Bovino and other CBP officers made eight warrantless arrests at a Home Depot, allegedly in explicit violation of a judge’s order there.
The Castañon Nava settlement agreement was originally supposed to sunset in March. At a hearing in June, however, Cummings made clear that the consent decree would remain in effect while he sorted out the motions alleging repeated violations by ICE.
Many of the alleged violations involved “collateral arrests,” or the detaining of individuals who are not targets, which the plaintiffs have argued are becoming commonplace as the administration ramped up daily quotas of people detained.
During the hearing in June, Fleming described a pattern of reckless and unlawful enforcement actions after President Donald Trump was sworn into office for his second term and pledged to begin mass deportations in Chicago. In some cases, Fleming said, ICE agents even carry around blank warrants, one of which he handed up to the judge for inspection.
“That doesn’t sit well with me,” Cummings told lawyers for the government, according to a transcript of the hearing. “I want to offer you a chance to explain how that is legitimate. You are carrying around blank forms so that you can get around making an individual flight risk analysis that you would otherwise have to do for a warrantless arrest.”
The attorney for the Department of Justice, William Weiland, told the judge he didn’t think there was “anything inappropriate or unlawful” about the practice of filling out blank warrants on the spot.
“They have the lawful authority to issue an administrative warrant in the field, and that is what they do,” Weiland said, according to the transcript.
Fleming told the Tribune on Thursday that ICE is the “only law enforcement agency in the country that feels it doesn’t need to document probable cause” for an arrest.
jmeisner@chicagotribune.com