Shortly after a contentious listening session where dozens of people accused Chicago police of aiding federal agents during Operation Midway Blitz, Angel Rubi Navarijo told Remel Terry, president of the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability, that he thought they could be doing more.
“The community feels we have dragged our feet with this topic which I think is sad given we have the word Community in our existence as a city-wide commission,” wrote Rubi Navarijo, the commission’s vice president.
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But even in the following months, records show the primary city agency mandated to act as a civilian-oriented check on Chicago police was hampered by division on how to seek accountability over the blitz. Over time, disagreements between commissioners worsened as they argued over plans to bring then-Superintendent Larry Snelling in for a hearing.
In the end, the body largely allowed Snelling to dictate the terms of his appearance.
The commission, established in 2021, is the product of the broadest push for civilian oversight of police Chicago has ever undertaken. It’s endowed with real power: Aside from shaping the hiring process for CPD’s superintendent, drafting general orders and setting goals for the department, the commission can also compel the superintendent or a representative to appear for questioning.
But as Chicagoans took stock of Midway Blitz and considered the possibility that federal agents could eventually return to Chicago in force, the commission’s president resisted using the full scope of the body’s power to take Snelling to task on how his officers had handled themselves during the federal incursion. Commissioners’ attempts to get information from CPD were met with bureaucratic replies that offered almost no new insight into the department’s handling of encounters with federal agents, records show.
By the time the hearing did take place, the commission had acquiesced to Snelling’s scheduling demands, taken other speakers off the meeting agenda and met with his staff to walk through questions in advance.
The resulting back-and-forth about how CPD officers dealt with the height of Midway Blitz was largely defensive. Many of Snelling’s responses amounted to assertions that commissioners and members of the public didn’t grasp the laws that governed his department’s responses to the confrontations that rocked the city throughout the fall.
“You don’t have the experience or the knowledge to understand why we wouldn’t face the ICE agents,” Snelling told one commissioner. “That’s the answer to the question.”
Slow steps
Over and over throughout Midway Blitz, Chicago police were called to the scenes of confrontations between furious neighbors and federal agents. Sometimes the calls came from regular Chicagoans. Other times they came from the agents, alleging that they were surrounded by angry crowds or that people were tailing them in cars to film their movements.
Commissioners had discussed Chicago cops’ role in the federal immigration enforcement surge as early as June 2025, when a group of progressive aldermen got physically involved in a standoff with federal agents outside one of the city’s ICE field offices.
But by January, when the commission held a “listening session“ that brought thousands to Thalia Hall to voice allegations that they’d seen police work with the feds, “the depth of frustration, fear, and urgency that many community members are feeling” was evident to Rubi Navarijo.
“While there has been significant work happening internally, the hearing made clear that much of that work has not been well-received to the public,” he wrote.
Rubi Navarijo suggested that the commission designate the matter of how CPD engaged with the feds as “a distinct strategic priority.”
Commission President Terry didn’t disagree with Rubi Navarijo completely, but she characterized “a significant amount” of the testimony they’d heard at Thalia Hall as “grandstanding … that, in my view, detracted from residents who have been directly impacted and are genuinely seeking resolution.” And she worried that the commission could overstep its authority if it waded much further into the issue.
As agency staff met with the group of district-level officials who had demanded the January hearing and commissioners started to think about a follow-up hearing that would feature Snelling and potentially other experts on constitutional law and immigration policy, they took a few other steps to add to the public knowledge base around how city police approached federal agents.
They designated the topic of how CPD interacted with federal agents as one of their official priorities.
They also submitted a formal request for information to CPD on its policies and practices while responding to federal immigration raids.
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Many of their questions — including how officers were trained to respond to possible misconduct by federal agents, how the department documented its interactions with federal agents, whether there had been complaints about CPD’s interactions with agents and who was responsible for investigating those complaints — had arisen following the clash between aldermen and federal agents outside the ICE office in South Loop, and then again during a confrontational news conference with Snelling that followed the day federal agents shot Marimar Martinez and tear-gassed Brighton Park.
Public records show CPD’s response to that information request consisted mostly of referrals to orders written before Midway Blitz. Snelling was invited to the commission’s February meeting but was unable to attend. The meeting went ahead with representatives from the Civilian Office of Police Accountability and the Office of Inspector General who talked about the existing requirements for CPD and its compliance with the Welcoming City Ordinance.
By March, the commissioners were still trying to hammer out a format for a hearing with Snelling, but the divisions among them were getting worse.
Four of the other seven commissioners wanted Snelling to appear alongside the subject matter experts. But Terry was backing away from the idea.
In a March 19 email, she told Rubi Navarijo that she was “not opposed to expertise” but that “the superintendent must remain the central participant and CPD accountability must remain the purpose.”
In her view, placing other speakers alongside Snelling distracted from that purpose.
When asked about that position in a Sept. 23 interview with the Tribune, Terry echoed that correspondence and said the reason a panel was being discussed at all was because she had wanted to have representatives from two other oversight bodies — the Office of Inspector General and Civilian Office of Police Accountability — appear alongside Snelling.
But when she told a group of district councilors who had been pushing for further follow-ups with Snelling that the hearing would not feature experts alongside the superintendent, it opened a new front for conflict: the operation of the body itself.
Commission staff had spoken with the commissioners individually and determined that the majority of them wanted to put Snelling on a panel, as others were quick to point out.
“Without debating the merits of the panel format, the key issue is that we operate democratically,” former Commissioner Aaron Gottlieb wrote to his colleagues in a March 19 note. “If one commissioner can overrule what the majority of the commission wants, there is little reason to have a commission at all.”
Rubi Navarijo, for his part, appeared to be close to a breaking point.
“Can we do what we all selected and move forward?” he wrote. “The majority of the commission voted for this.”
And, he noted, they still hadn’t set a date for the hearing despite the time ticking down to when the federal agents had said they’d return: “Right now, this prolonged DHS federal government shutdown is buying us time,” he wrote. “I suggest we use it and focus on securing a date that is feasible for everyone.”
Mounting hostility
As the hearing approached, the disagreements among the commissioners crystallized.
Records show that commission staff shared a plan for the meeting and draft questions with Snelling’s team in the last week of March.
Gross also wrote to Snelling and a handful of his senior aides that week with a heads-up that the commission planned to ask the city’s Office of Inspector General to audit the department’s compliance with the Welcoming City Ordinance.
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At the commission’s regular meeting on March 26, they couldn’t conduct any business — including that vote to ask for an audit — because there weren’t enough commissioners to establish a quorum.
The next day, a member of Snelling’s staff sent the commission’s executive director, Adam Gross, a memo and accompanying email first reported by Block Club Chicago: “The Superintendent is happy to participate in the commission meeting next Thursday, but he will not attend the meeting if it includes subject matter experts anywhere on the agenda.”
Gross forwarded that information on to Terry and Rubi Navarijo with the advice that they had a couple of options: they could defer to Snelling’s wishes. They could try to negotiate with the department, noting that they’d been discussing a panel format for several months. Or they could use the power given to them in their governing ordinance to vote to order Snelling (or his representative) to attend the meeting.
Terry replied that she supported Snelling’s stance that he would only attend “without additional individuals who do not have accountability for, or oversight authority over, the department.”
“What I need to better understand is why the language about compelling him is being included,” she wrote. “It creates the impression that we can require his attendance in a meeting structure that includes people not directly connected to his work.”
Gross wrote back: “I completely understand your position, including your view that it would be ill-advised, out of order, and harmful to credibility to compel the Superintendent.”
Speaking later to the Tribune, Terry said she simply didn’t think it was necessary to compel Snelling to attend the hearing, since he’d agreed to attend, adding that her priority was to get “the sole and foremost authority to answer the questions we needed about the department” onstage for a hearing.
The next day, as the options circulated among the other commissioners, Commissioner Gina Piemonte staked out her position.
In an email first reported by the indie news outlet Unraveled, Piemonte said the commission should stand its ground on controlling the format of its meetings and have a separate panel of law and immigration experts on the agenda.
“We have already accommodated him way too much … I don’t see the point of proceeding on his terms,” she wrote.
She ticked through the concessions they’d made: They scheduled the hearing on a major Jewish holiday, “met ahead of time with him and basically gave him a script of the evening so that he could prepare and not be caught off guard” and changed the format of the meeting so he didn’t have to be part of a panel discussion.
“Under these conditions I don’t know why we are bothering to have him at all,” she wrote.
The hearing went ahead, on Snelling’s terms, on April 2, and the commission voted to ask the Office of Inspector General to investigate CPD’s role in the blitz.