Man charged with aiming gun at woman following Border Patrol raid

Chicago police on Saturday arrested a man who allegedly aimed a gun at a woman in a Little Village restaurant parking lot the day federal immigration agents said that someone had shot at them as they ran enforcement raids near the restaurant and surrounding neighborhood, Chicago Police Department and Cook County court records show.

Police said they found Hector Gómez, 45, with a gun in a black Jeep Wrangler near the intersection of West 26th Street and South Kedzie Avenue Saturday afternoon. A few hours before Gómez’s arrest, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents had called 911 to report that someone in a black Jeep had fired at them one block to the north.

Police records reviewed by the Tribune state that the black Jeep Gómez was sitting in was a possible match to the car federal agents had described Saturday morning.

U.S. Department of Homeland Security representatives said on social media Monday afternoon that Gómez is an an immigrant living in the country without permanent legal status. No charges have been filed against Gómez at the federal level and the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are investigating.

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Cook County prosecutors on Sunday said that Gómez, a Little Village resident, pointed the gun at a 49-year-old woman in the parking lot of Aguascalientes restaurant and charged him with aggravated assault using a deadly weapon and possession of a weapon as a felon, court records show.

Gómez’s arrest took place toward the end of a chaotic morning in Little Village in which a CPD officer was hit by a car and a baby girl and her family were pepper-sprayed while trying to get groceries. During the raids, incensed residents pursued carloads of federal agents as they wound their way through the neighborhood, arresting people and deploying chemical crowd controls.

Agents were making one of several incursions into the neighborhood Saturday morning when they called CPD near 25th and Kedzie to report that someone had fired shots from a black Jeep Wrangler at one of their vehicles. No one was shot, police later said.

According to a police report, officers who arrived at that intersection in response to the call didn’t get to question the Border Patrol agents further “due to a large hostile crowd that was beginning to escalate and throw bricks.” Ogden (10th) District Cmdr. Lázaro Altamirano personally located two 9 mm shell casings on the 2500 block of South Kedzie Avenue, per the report.

Around 2:15 p.m. Saturday, police arrived at Aguascalientes for a 911 call of a person with a gun. People in the restaurant’s parking lot, on the 3100 block of West 26th Street, pointed them toward a black 2018 Jeep Wrangler. A man was sitting in the car with a gun in his lap, authorities said.

The man, later identified as Gómez, had allegedly approached a woman with the gun in his hand, laughing and pointing it at her, authorities said. The arrest report states that the Jeep matched the description federal agents had given a few hours earlier but doesn’t draw any other connection between Gómez and agents’ report of shots fired.

Ald. Mike Rodríguez, 22nd, said at a news conference Sunday that the raids around the neighborhood were a “reign of terror” and questioned whether anyone had actually fired at the agents.

“I heard no gunshots,” he said. “I don’t know when the alleged gunshots happened.”

Mayor Brandon Johnson on Monday also cast doubt on the DHS’ narrative of someone firing at federal agents in the Little Village neighborhood. At a City Hall news conference, the mayor said his team could not independently confirm reports of the gunfire from over the weekend, which remains under investigation by the federal government.

“Unfortunately, Bovino and his team have absolutely no credibility because of the repeated lies, both to the courts and to the public, so we have no way to verify this,” Johnson told reporters.

Johnson also nodded to a Chicago police officer being injured during the hourslong confrontation between neighbors and federal agents, saying that “protesters with valid anger and frustration at the reckless actions of ICE were aggressive towards CPD officers.”

As protests sprang up around 26th and Kedzie, a driver trying to leave the area accidentally hit and injured an officer conducting traffic control. Johnson said the “provocative” raids intentionally sparked chaos by “putting our police officers right in the middle of it to clean up the mess.” Police representatives later said the officer was in good condition and that the driver had been given two citations.

At Gómez’s first court appearance Sunday, Cook County Judge Deidre Dyer ordered Gómez held pending trial, noting that he had a prior felony conviction for aggravated unlawful use of a weapon and that he’d “brandished the gun at civil public protesters” on the public way in the middle of the day.

He is next set to appear in court Friday, records show.

baiduhai’s Alice Yin and Jason Meisner contributed to this report.