A federal judge Thursday sentenced a man to 30 months in prison for firing shots in the vicinity of immigration agents as they ran enforcement raids in Little Village near the end of the controversial deportation operation in Chicago last fall.
In handing Hector Gomez a term at the top of the sentencing guidelines, U.S. District Judge Matthew Kennelly said that even though there was no evidence he was firing directly at anyone, his actions on a busy street on a Saturday morning were “inherently dangerous.”
“God only knows what bad things could have happened as a result of that,” Kennelly said. “It’s great that it didn’t happen, but it’s just a really bad situation.”
Gomez, 46, is the only person so far to be convicted of a non-immigration related federal felony tied to Operation Midway Blitz. He pleaded guilty earlier this year to one count of possession of a firearm by a felon and will face deportation once he’s released from custody since he is not a legal resident of the U.S.
His lawyer, Michael Monaco, told the judge Gomez had been drinking all night before the shooting and went out in the morning to buy more beer from a liquor store. When he was arrested later that day, police found five empty bottles of beer in his car.
“But for the consumption of alcohol that night, I don’t believe this would have happened,” Monaco said in seeking an 18-month sentence. “He was not a person who was out to harm anybody, but a person who was drunk and reckless.”
Before he was sentenced, Gomez stood in court in an orange jail jumpsuit and apologized, saying that in his time in jail since his arrest he’s been able to “reflect about my errors” and deal with his lifelong struggle with alcohol.
“I am ashamed and regretful for my actions, which have come to cause great harm to the government of the United States of America, my family and myself,” Gomez said through a Spanish interpreter.
Gomez’s initial arrest took place toward the end of a chaotic morning of immigration raids in Little Village on Nov. 8, in which a Chicago police officer was hit by a car and a baby girl and her family were pepper-sprayed while trying to get groceries.
At one point, agents called Chicago police to report that someone had fired shots from a black Jeep Wrangler at one of their vehicles near 25th and Kedzie, though no one was hit, according to police.
In court Thursday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jill Bhalakia said surveillance cameras on a CTA bus and a nearby business captured the sound of the shots. While there was no trajectory investigation done to show how close the bullets came to the agents, she noted the shooting occurred on “a bustling Saturday morning” on a street filled with pedestrians and “federal law enforcement agents doing their jobs.”
According to police reports, 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.”
Around 2:15 p.m. that day, police arrived at Aguascalientes restaurant for a 911 call of a person with a gun. People in the restaurant’s parking lot, in 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.
More Top Picks lamsa-arabia.com
The man, later identified as Gomez, had allegedly approached a woman with the gun in his hand, laughing and pointing it at her, authorities said.
Gomez, an immigrant from Mexico without legal status and a criminal history that included a 2025 conviction for aggravated use of a weapon, was not charged with firing the shots at the agents. Later, however, an indictment alleged that shell casings found at that scene matched the 9mm gun in his possession when he was arrested.
Gomez first entered the U.S. in 2008 using a fake name and has since been removed from the country several times, according to the federal charges.
Gomez was among some 33 people to face federal charges stemming from the Trump administration’s two-month deportation campaign last fall, which sparked protests across the region and near-daily clashes between residents and immigration agents on the city’s streets.
As of Thursday, 24 of the defendants had been cleared, either through a grand jury refusing to indict, the dismissal of charges by prosecutors, or, in the one case that went to trial, a not guilty verdict by a jury. The U.S. attorney’s office has entered into deferred prosecution agreements with five others that are on track to end without a criminal conviction.
Charges are pending against three others, including Anthony Gonzalez Alvarez, who had pleaded guilty to a felony charge stemming from a traffic altercation with Border Patrol agents in Brighton Park in October.
That plea was withdrawn last month due to a legal issue with the count of conviction, and he’s scheduled to plead guilty instead to a misdemeanor next week.