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.
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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 complaint review process itself.”
In response to the outcry, the village hired a consulting firm to investigate. That review is not yet complete, a village representative said in a statement, but its outcome will guide further action.
In Forest Park, the July incident drew quicker repercussions.
Officials in the west suburb faced public backlash in response to the parking enforcement officer moving a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent’s car on July 30 after the agent came inside the Village Hall while being followed by a black sedan. The public criticism led to internal squabbling that divided the mayor and the police chief, according to emails the Tribune reviewed.
Forest Park Mayor Rory Hoskins wrote to constituents that “the primary goal was to promptly resolve the situation and remove the ICE officer from the premises to de-escalate a scenario that could have otherwise become disruptive.”
Behind the scenes, police Chief Ken Gross pushed back on any notion that village employees violated the TRUST Act. He initially declined to create an official report documenting the incident, though a police official later submitted a report at the mayor’s request.
“Reading the act one can see that it was not violated and this is hysteria being stirred up for an activist slant,” Gross emailed Hoskins.
Amid the fracas, Gross announced last month he was retiring at the end of September. In an emailed response to the Tribune, he denied any connection between his retirement and the incident. The parking enforcement officer resigned in mid-August.
Hoskins told the Tribune he didn’t “expressly” ask either employee to step down, though he accepted Gross’ retirement “without delay” and called the parking enforcement officer’s decision to resign “probably a very smart thing to do.”
About eight months earlier, on Oct. 27, Palatine officials faced similar scrutiny over an even more charged encounter in which a police officer appeared to help immigration agents handcuff a man they were trying to take into custody.
In an after-action report, Palatine Deputy Chief Brian Growney cited the “gubernatorial example” Pritzker set by deploying Illinois State Police outside the ICE processing center in west suburban Broadview to try to calm standoffs between protesters and federal agents.
Growney argued that while state law “may strive” to keep local police from cooperating with federal immigration, the unified command at Broadview, which also included Cook County sheriff’s deputies and Broadview officers, and the TRUST Act itself showed that “maintaining order and public safety remains paramount.”
Representatives from the Palatine Police Department declined an interview request, but spokesperson David Brandwein said in a statement that the department continues “to review available guidance and ensure our officers understand their responsibilities under the law.”
“These are unprecedented times for local law enforcement,” he said.
Both Pritzker and Broadview Mayor Katrina Thompson have faced criticism over how state troopers and local cops handled the clashes, as well as questions about whether the arrangement complied with the state law.
“People felt we violated their constitutional rights because we put protocols in place,” Thompson told the Tribune in a recent interview, arguing that the decision kept protesters safe. “No one lost their life. And no one wants to give us credit for no one losing their life.”
These encounters all point to the gray areas and complexities inherent in the state law, experts told the Tribune.
That’s particularly true when on-duty federal agents call 911 or local police to report being followed or harassed, as happened in Schaumburg and Forest Park.
“They say, ‘Hey, local law enforcement, come here, we’ve got a bunch of people who are protesting and who are obstructing our ability to get out,’” said Craig Futterman, a University of Chicago Law professor who last year helped represent a group that sued the federal government over immigration enforcement tactics.
The TRUST Act accounts for local cops’ obligation to maintain public safety, Futterman said, though it nonetheless creates a difficult situation for local police officers when agents clash with civilians.
“I think that tension would exist in any version of that (law),” Futterman said.
Chaos, then confusion
Video from an Evanston street captured one of the most indelible images from Operation Midway Blitz: a federal agent kneeling on a man’s back and appearing to punch him in the side of the head. Residents had shouted, “He can’t breathe!”
An agent also pointed his handgun into the crowd during the Oct. 31 melee, the cellphone video shows. He ordered, “Step back or I’ll (expletive) shoot you!” according to a report by the Castillo-headed panel, Pritzker’s Illinois Accountability Commission.
It was among the most turbulent days of the operation. At least three U.S. citizens were detained, immigration agents crashed their SUV, and a witness told Evanston police that agents threw a woman on the ground.
Publicly, Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss, then in the midst of a heated Democratic congressional primary he’d go on to win, condemned the agents’ conduct, alleging that agents “injured residents and traumatized our community.”
Behind closed doors, city officials struggled with how to respond, according to emails obtained by the Tribune. They debated whether the agents’ conduct amounted to civil rights violations or rose to the level of potential crimes that should be referred to O’Neill Burke’s office.
In a Nov. 1 email, Evanston police Chief Schenita Stewart wrote to city officials that she thought what happened didn’t fall under the jurisdiction of the Cook County state’s attorney. Instead, she determined it was a civil matter that should be referred to the civil rights division of the U.S. attorney’s office.
In response, Liza Roberson-Young, the city’s chief legislative policy adviser, raised concerns about sharing information with the federal government and asked Stewart why “yesterday’s activity is limited to civil rights violations rather than an investigation of potential criminal charges.”
A couple of days later, Roberson-Young suggested referring the matters to Burke “if we think the evidence supports criminal charges,” but noted the Illinois attorney general’s office was another option.
Stewart responded that “the evidence at this time indicates a potential civil rights violation,” and that she planned to send information to the civil rights bureau of the Illinois attorney general’s office.
The matter would eventually land on O’Neill Burke’s desk.
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Evanston’s uncertainty after one of the blitz’s most chaotic days goes to the heart of a question city and suburban residents ask more than any other: Why haven’t federal agents faced criminal charges in the vast majority of these encounters?
Missed opportunities for accountability?
The hunger for accountability has most often led to the doorstep of O’Neill Burke, who was elected Cook County’s top prosecutor in 2024.
At an event earlier this month in which Pritzker memorialized Silverio Villegas González, whom a federal agent shot and killed last year in Franklin Park, Pritzker said he was “frustrated with state’s attorneys and police departments that aren’t doing their duty,” though he noted the criticism extended beyond O’Neill Burke.
“We have laws on the books that are not being prosecuted against people who, it appears to me, have broken the law,” Pritzker said. “But we need those state’s attorneys to step up.”
O’Neill Burke declined to be interviewed but, in a statement to the Tribune, said that law enforcement agencies are responsible for investigating allegations of criminal conduct.
“The conduct of federal agents who swarmed Chicago — terrorizing communities, racially profiling our neighbors, and tear-gassing children — was completely appalling,” O’Neill Burke said in the statement.
She also outlined steps her office has taken, such as developing a protocol for law enforcement agencies to follow and supporting a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s attempt to deploy the National Guard to Illinois.
After the blitz’s near-daily enforcement actions quieted, O’Neill Burke fended off a petition by attorneys, clergy members, elected officials and community organizers to appoint a special prosecutor to potentially charge immigration agents.
In rejecting the petition, Cook County Judge Erica Reddick noted that police agencies largely did not appear to have referred criminal cases to O’Neill Burke’s office, a nuance often missing from the attacks on her.
But O’Neill Burke also initially said publicly that her office could not charge on-duty federal agents, a position she later backtracked on.
“The state system has no ability to weigh in on what the federal system is doing,” O’Neill Burke said in a Dec. 2 speech to the City Club of Chicago. “It’s called the supremacy clause of the Constitution.”
Asked about the City Club comment, Cherney, the O’Neill Burke spokesperson, said in the statement that the office is “navigating an unprecedented legal situation” but would bring charges if the law supports it.
A little more than a month later, an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, and the response from authorities there was starkly different. Within a day, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension opened an investigation, though it later announced it would have to close it because federal authorities blocked access to the evidence.
Illinois State Police, by contrast, didn’t say it had begun investigating the shooting of Villegas González until after Pritzker’s accountability commission completed its work in April.
State police typically only get involved in such investigations at the request of local law enforcement, Pritzker noted last week in an interview with the Tribune. Among the challenges state police have faced in investigating the shooting, which took place in the early days of the blitz, is the lack of video or other evidence that exists for later incidents and stonewalling from the federal government.
“Much of the evidence lies with people who don’t want to be cooperative and have the ability, in their lack of cooperation, to hide behind the president of the United States,” Pritzker said.
The Trump administration contends Pritzker’s state police “lack authority to police federal law enforcement officers performing their official duties.”
“Instead of smearing ICE law enforcement officers, Governor Pritzker should be thanking them for putting their lives on the line to arrest dangerous criminals,” White House spokesperson Lauren Bis wrote in an email.
In January, the Tribune detailed a potential legal pathway for state prosecutors to charge on-duty federal agents. In a statement to the Tribune, O’Neill Burke acknowledged state prosecutors can pursue such charges in some circumstances.
The next month, her office released a protocol outlining the steps for filing charges against federal immigration agents, meant as a guide for law enforcement agencies investigating allegations. But the effort, released in February, was too late to guide officers on the ground during the height of last fall’s blitz.
In its statement, though, O’Neill Burke’s office said law enforcement has access to legal resources and guidance within its departments. Law enforcement officers also have access “24 hours a day, 365 days a year” to the felony review unit to seek guidance.
“We led the state, and the nation, in developing this framework, which has been adopted by the Illinois attorney general’s office and the Illinois State’s Attorney’s Association,” Cherney said in the statement.
Only one instance appears to have involved charges filed against an immigration agent, and that agent was off duty. ICE agent Adam Saracco pleaded guilty to battery in an attack on a protester at a Brookfield gas station while he was off duty. Brookfield police initially sought a felony charge, but O’Neill Burke’s office recommended a misdemeanor.
Some Chicago police detectives have since reportedly been assigned to cases after Marimar Martinez, whom a Border Patrol agent shot last year, and nine others filed criminal complaints with the CPD in August.
In Evanston, meanwhile, officials reversed course and turned to O’Neill Burke’s office after all. This summer, the city sent the state’s attorney’s office a file of materials, according to an email the Tribune reviewed.
The file included “citizen submitted media,” photos from Evanston police evidence technicians, officers’ body camera footage and police reports.
Stewart, the police chief, wrote to Assistant State’s Attorney Lynn McCarthy asking for guidance from her unit, which handles cases involving police officers accused of crimes.
“At this stage, the Evanston Police Department believes it has exhausted the investigative resources and legal authority available to it,” Stewart wrote.
Evanston police met with O’Neill Burke’s office in late August to discuss the evidence file, records show.
In a Tribune interview, Biss acknowledged conversations within his administration about how to handle potential crimes by federal agents were not straightforward.
Asked why the Evanston Police Department turned to O’Neill Burke’s office months later, Biss said that “to the naked eye,” the events of Oct. 31 looked like crimes — “and the traditional place to bring criminal charges is through the state’s attorney’s office.”
“It’s important to use the mechanisms of the state and local law enforcement systems to hold these guys accountable, because the federal government won’t,” he said.
Accountability in federal court
The most effective check on federal agents has been at the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse in Chicago. There, federal judges have issued orders reining in some of the agents’ most aggressive tactics, such as indiscriminately firing tear gas into crowds. Perhaps the most consequential ruling came in a lawsuit brought by Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul that prevented the quasi-military operation from becoming an actual one.
U.S. District Judge April Perry’s Oct. 9 order, which the Supreme Court later upheld, blocked Trump from deploying National Guard troops from Illinois, Texas and California onto Chicago and suburban streets.
Illinois’ success protected all states, both from the immediate threat and from the administration’s “pretty audacious” argument that the president could send troops into states regardless of the facts on the ground, Raoul said in a recent interview.
“Some people may argue that all of this talk about authoritarianism is sensationalism, but that is dangerous: to give a president such power to militarize American cities, to turn the National Guard against American citizens. That was what was at risk, not only for Chicago and Broadview but for the entire nation.”
In January, the state and city of Chicago sued the federal government over its “militarized” immigration enforcement tactics, litigation that moved forward this month.
Raoul acknowledged in an August interview that, for now, “Illinoisans, and I think all Americans all across the country, are vulnerable to these tactics and a lot more.”
“This administration has proven their disregard for the Constitution and disregard for the rule of law, and all we can do is be prepared to respond to specific actions,” Raoul said.
Democrats and election experts have raised the specter of Trump attempting to deploy immigration agents or National Guard troops to polling places in November.
Pritzker, meanwhile, tried to turn to the court of public opinion.
In late October, he announced the Illinois Accountability Commission. But by the time it held its first hearing a week before Christmas, Operation Midway Blitz was effectively over.
“I wanted to have a hearing within two weeks, and it just was not possible to get all our ducks lined up to do it any quicker,” Castillo said.
Castillo said he initially worried the commission would be playing catch-up to meet its April 30 deadline to produce a final report. In the end, despite lacking subpoena power, the commission’s roughly 200-page final report created “a pretty good record” of abuses by federal agents, he said.
The report’s eight recommendations focused largely on federal-level changes, such as prohibiting roving patrols, investigating high-level officials who spread misinformation during the operation, and disciplining Border Patrol and ICE agents who engaged in misconduct. But Castillo is clear-eyed about the chance for true accountability at the federal level, even if Democrats regain power in Washington.
“Even if there’s a presidential changeover (after the 2028 election) … one of the last things this president is probably going to do is pardon all these people before he exits,” Castillo said. “So federal accountability is going to be difficult.”
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Complaints to local police, like those filed by Martinez and others in Chicago, he said, could prompt more action from prosecutors.
“Things are coming along, but not as fast as all of us would have liked,” Castillo said.
The commission, meanwhile, hasn’t disbanded and is weighing whether to update its April report. Its members have also advised similar efforts in other states, including the Minnesota Truth Council recently launched by Democratic Gov. Tim Walz.
For his part, Pritzker said the commission and earlier efforts to educate Illinois residents about their rights and encourage them to document possible abuses by federal authorities helped write the playbook for Minnesota and other states, at a time when the federal government has abdicated its responsibility to police itself.
“We had to go become innovators about how to use state law, or how to get around federal law, in order to do what was right and just to protect the people who live in this state,” the governor told the Tribune.
New laws, more holes
State lawmakers have only a narrow lane on immigration, which largely falls under the federal government’s domain. But many Chicago-area residents, and the legislators who represent them, saw last year’s federal tactics as anything but ordinary, and they wanted to act.
Amid mounting public pressure, the Illinois General Assembly passed a package of limited measures during its fall veto session last October.
State Sen. Celina Villanueva, a Chicago Democrat, said the legislative package came in response to “the reality of the pain and the cruelty and the inhumanity that’s being inflicted on my community, on my district, on the communities in this state — that are also American — for the simple fact of looking the way that I do.”
“I’m going to fight back,” Villanueva — whose district includes the Little Village neighborhood, an epicenter of Operation Midway Blitz — said on the Senate floor shortly before the bill passed.
Signed by Pritzker in December, the package aimed to stop federal agents from making certain arrests near courthouses and to make it easier for people to sue if their rights are violated during civil immigration arrests.
In practice, the new protections have proved far from ironclad, as the Tribune has documented since the laws took effect.
For one, the Trump administration sued to block the courthouse law. And immigration agents have continued to make arrests at Cook County courthouses, including in some high-profile scenes caught on video.
From Jan. 1 through June 9, agents were in or around Cook County courthouses at least 50 times, according to a Tribune review of a tracker maintained by the county public defender’s office. Sometimes agents made arrests; other times they were spotted entering the buildings or waiting nearby.
The legislative package also required hospitals, daycare centers and higher education institutions to adopt policies on how they would respond to federal immigration agents, following ICE activity at or near some of those locations across the Chicago area. It also generally prohibited schools from disclosing the immigration status of students, employees and those associated with them.
The Illinois Community College Board and the Illinois Board of Higher Education each filed a report with the General Assembly detailing schools’ plans, as the law requires.
The plans generally advise employees to avoid answering personal questions about students or employees and to consult school attorneys. Many go further, spelling out the differences between administrative and judicial warrants and giving administrative employees a script of questions they may ask immigration officers.
All hospitals required to submit policies under the law — more than 200 — have done so, with two still under review, according to the Illinois Department of Public Health.
Lawmakers did not pass more ambitious proposals floated at the height of the raids. Courts in other states have blocked one of them: a ban on federal agents wearing masks.
In August, Pritzker signed a law banning the construction or operation of federal immigration detention facilities within 1,500 feet of homes, churches, schools and daycare facilities. The law was a direct response to the Trump administration’s use of the Broadview ICE processing center, tucked into a largely residential neighborhood, to hold detainees for days at a time.
Asked whether she was disappointed that civil immigration arrests appeared to continue at courthouses despite the law aimed at preventing them, Villanueva said it was a “bigger disappointment” to see ICE “still operational.”
“It’s always hard when it doesn’t work out the way you want it to work out,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean that we stop doing our work.”
Tribune reporter Jeremy Gorner contributed.