Federal Immigration Raid in Chicago Employs Military-Style Tactics, Drawing Widespread Condemnation

"...The troubled apartment building at 7500 S South Shore Drive hadn’t passed an annual inspection since 2022. With the remains of doors and furniture and the bloodied, scattered belongings of former tenants in tatters, it may struggle to pass another...."

"...Days afterward, the building looked like a war zone, which may be the point...."

"...The comment was a continuation of his belligerence toward cities full of Democratic voters and nonwhite populations, delivered a couple of weeks after he meme-posted an image cribbed from the war movie Apocalypse Now about going to “war” in Chicago...."

"...For those on the receiving end of federal force from masked agents in military fatigues, a flashbang grenade thrown by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agent or a soldier may be a distinction without a difference...."

"...Flashbang grenades are standard tools for clearing a room when soldiers conduct military operations on urban terrain. But the use of them by civilian police officers has been sharply curtailed, with many jurisdictions banning them entirely...."

"...Federal agents used flashbang grenades both to disperse crowds of protesters in California in July, and as room-clearing munitions on the raid on an apartment building in Chicago last week...."

"...DHS has not responded to their questions, nor to those of the Guardian...."

"...Even without reference to the use of national guard troops and equipment in support of enforcing the law – a proposition by Trump that federal courts have rejected multiple times this year – the use of military equipment and military tactics like armored vehicles, Black Hawk helicopters, Predator drones and military weapons by civilian law enforcement in the administration has drawn notice and condemnation...."

"...The police agencies of large cities have experience with street protests, and the crowd-control tactics permitted to those agencies are often the result of arduous, deeply argued policy debates by locally elected leaders...."

"...That’s not what Chicago is seeing on the ground...."

"...Journalists from Block Club Chicago, the Chicago Headline Club and other press organizations filed suit Monday in federal court, seeking an injunction against the federal government for actions against journalists outside the Broadview Ice facility. Four of Block Club’s journalists were “indiscriminately shot with pepper-spray bullets and tear-gassed by federal agents” while covering the raid. The lawsuit is an attempt to bar federal agents from, among other things, indiscriminately using chemical weapons against journalists asserting their first amendment right to report...."

"...While federal agencies could fly a helicopter in for a raid on an apartment building in Chicago, many civilians in the Windy City have been locked out of their drones for two weeks...."

"...Citing “special security reasons”, the Federal Aviation Administration imposed a 12-day-long ban on drone flights by anyone without a special commercial operating exemption across a 15-nautical-mile radius around the Ice facility near Chicago. As a practical matter, it denies anyone except news stations with a helicopter from observing federal operations from the air. Practiced drone operators – and journalists – have little experience with this kind of airspace control...."

"...Rose notes that the no-fly space above Los Angeles during the protests earlier this year was 900 times smaller than Chicago, but that DHS filled that airspace with Predator drones drawn from the border to surveil crowds...."

"...“It doesn’t matter what uniform they wear, whether they are federal agents or troops, they are bound by the constitution,” said Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project. “People need to know that if any member of the federal force violates their rights, they need to be held accountable”...."