September 26, 5:30 a.m. My goggles and respirator clinked together in the passenger seat as I drove to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Broadview detention facility. Since September 8, federal agents have arrested more than a thousand immigrants in the Chicago area, many taken to Broadview.
What I witnessed that morning—and what my colleagues and I later documented—was not crowd control. It was the deliberate use of excessive force against peaceful protesters, volunteer street medics, legal observers, and journalists. It was a show of power and intentional brutality.
As the sun rose, neighbors, faith leaders, and advocates gathered outside the fence surrounding the facility. They held flags, signs, and crosses, bound by a shared passion to speak out against Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE): the killing of Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, the violent arrests across the Chicago area, and reports on the cruelty of detention conditions that echo those from other ICE facilities.
Before the clock struck 9, without warning and unprompted, federal agents fired pepper-spray projectiles and tear gas canisters into the crowd. Raven Geary, a journalist, collapsed after an agent shot her in the face with a pepper ball. Agents shot Stuart Hall, a 66-year-old Army veteran, six times with pepper balls though he wasn’t advancing toward the facility. He showed me his bruises, still red a week later.
As the gas thickened, my friend grabbed my shoulder and pulled me out. We stumbled past a journalist doubled over, cameras pressed to his chest, shouting that he couldn’t see. We poured water over our eyes, gasping.
On October 3, I returned to Broadview. This time local police and Illinois State Police joined federal agents in crowd control. I watched federal, state, and local officers violently shove protesters, hitting some with clubs.
Violence by State Police continued the following week. The National Lawyers Guild reported that State Police clubbed multiple legal observers over the October 10 weekend. Block Club Chicago also documented the state police’s increased presence and use of force; one demonstrator alleged State Police dragged him into the street and attacked him.
In an October 20 filing opposing the Trump administration’s attempt to overturn a lower court’s decision blocking the deployment of National Guard troops in Illinois, Attorney General Kwame Raoul highlighted ICE’s praise of state law enforcement. He cited an email from Peter Sukmanowski, assistant director of ICE’s Chicago field office, in which Sukmanowski wrote that ICE was “grateful for the leadership” of the Illinois State Police.
There is a very stark disconnect here. Illinois bars state and local law enforcement from assisting civil immigration enforcement, yet local police have joined federal agents in attacking protesters.
Especially in Illinois, this touches a very raw nerve. Less than 60 years ago, officials at the local, state, and federal level worked together to repress Black political leaders. That collaboration culminated in the shocking police killing of 21-year-old activist Fred Hampton in his bed. His name echoes through Chicago’s streets today, a symbol of how quickly “public order” can become the pretext for violence against those who speak out.
Operation Midway Blitz, and the response by federal agents and state and local police to those reacting to it, risks normalizing a level of state violence that should be unthinkable: unprovoked attacks on people expressing dissent, chemical irritants and projectile rounds aimed at journalists, legal observers beaten in the act of documentation, medics targeted while treating the injured.
The call for federal agents to halt the excessive use of force against protesters in Illinois is necessary, urgent, and growing. Governor J.B. Pritzker has publicly condemned the actions by Federal agents at Broadview and established the Illinois Advisory Commission to document complaints against federal agents and recommend reforms. Still, ensuring accountability requires more: state and local officials need to take active steps to ensure that their own forces are working to safeguard, not stymy, the rights to free expression and peaceful assembly.
Governor Pritzker, Attorney General Raoul, and the Illinois State Police should reaffirm—publicly and in practice—that state and local police protect the rights of protesters and stop responding to dissent with violence. The state government should take concrete steps to ensure the police do not deploy excessive use of force against protesters at Broadview; that they provide protesters with ample time, warning, and instructions when issuing dispersal orders; and that they refrain from arresting anyone simply for lawfully exercising their right to protest. The state should also conduct an independent investigation into the use of force by state and local law enforcement.
My phone continues to buzz with photos of protesters, of bruises, beatings, arrests, of violence incurred at the cost of speaking out. The brutality has revealed Illinoisans' enduring courage and compassion. The question is whether local and state officials will show theirs.
