Overview
- Federal agents used tear gas on a residential block of Old Irving Park on Saturday as neighbors gathered and a children’s Halloween parade was about to begin, with witnesses reporting multiple detentions including construction worker Luis Villegas.
- Separate operations stretched across the North Side in recent days, including a delivery worker tackled and detained inside an Avondale grocery and reports of rideshare drivers detained at O’Hare, while several Wicker Park schools enacted soft lockdowns on Friday.
- Cellphone videos from multiple neighborhoods show masked agents deploying chemical agents and physical confrontations, including an instance of a woman being shoved to the ground near a federal minivan.
- U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis has ordered Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino to appear in court Tuesday over possible violations of her order limiting crowd-control tactics and requiring warnings before chemical agents are used.
- DHS and CBP defended the deployments as compliant with policy, saying agents issued warnings and responded to assaults and attempts to obstruct operations, and confirmed that riot-control measures, including by Bovino, were used.