ALBANY PARK — Federal agents deployed tear gas in Albany Park Sunday as residents chased off agents who were trying to detain a neighbor.
Gabriel Paez and his wife, Megan Dougherty, were returning home from brunch Sunday afternoon when they saw two armed federal agents confronting a neighbor on the sidewalk.
The couple, who live near Wilson and Sawyer avenues, said the agents wore bulletproof vests and had their faces covered. Paez began shouting warnings in Spanish to alert neighbors while Dougherty filmed the initial encounter.
“As soon as the agents saw us and saw that we were responding, they let the guy go,” Paez said. “They stopped pursuing him, and the guy wasn’t saying anything … He knew how to react correctly.”
The video then shows the couple follow federal agents down the block while Paez shouts for neighbors to close their doors. Within minutes, some neighbors started walking out of their homes to confront the agents, including locking arms to block the agents’ path and leading to the officers deploying tear gas on a residential corner.
It is the latest use of non-lethal chemical weapons deployed by agents in neighborhoods, following an incident where officers threw a smoke bomb on a Logan Square street earlier this month.
The Albany Park incident comes more than a month into the targeted immigration enforcement effort dubbed Operation Midway Blitz, with neighbors more recently escalating their efforts to resist the operation. On Saturday, around 400 Rogers Park neighbors rallied on Clark Street to denounce the ICE arrests of four people, including a popular tamale vendor.
At the Albany Park scene, a woman in a bathrobe stood in the middle of the one-way street, blocking an agent’s car. She can be heard on video screaming that agents ran her over. Paez said the woman’s toenail split open as a result of the agents’ vehicle revving forward.
A crowd of neighbors and rapid responders soon gathered near Wilson and Sawyer avenues. Residents, including young, old and even a lawyer, can be seen in videos yelling at agents and filming them as they walk down the street. Paez can also be heard in the video shouting things like” f— you,” “traitor” and “Nazis” to agents as they walk down the street.
“If it comes out as anger, it’s because it’s righteous anger,” Paez said. “We are trying to make the good trouble. If it takes civil disobedience, then so be it.”
The agents, wearing border patrol vests, badges and face coverings, walked alongside their vehicles, trying to move people out of the way, until they were confronted with the human chain formed by neighbors who had linked their arms together, blocking the agents’ path, video of the encounter shows.
The video shows agents then deploying tear gas into the crowd. The crowd then disperses, though one resident grabbed a canister and threw it back at officers, hitting their car. An officer wrestled that person to the ground, but then let him go, according to witnesses. Federal agents then jumped into their cars and left the scene.
The whole confrontation lasted about 30 minutes, Paez said. Photos obtained by the Sun-Times show tear gas canisters left at the scene.
Ald. Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez (33rd) and state Sen. Graciela Guzman rushed to the scene Sunday after receiving alerts from the Northwest Side Rapid Response Network, but by the time they arrived, the federal agents were gone. Rodriguez-Sanchez said the pair had spent much of the three-day holiday weekend responding to similar alerts across Chicago as immigration enforcement activity intensified.
Although neighbors were able to prevent one man from being detained, another person was reportedly taken into custody. Rodriguez-Sanchez said Monday she was still working to confirm that person’s identity. She praised the neighborhood’s swift response, saying she was deeply impressed by how quickly residents rallied to protect one another.
“Neighbors were incredibly brave, and they came out in numbers,” Rodriguez said. “There was even a woman in a bathrobe, barefoot, who came out of her house to protect her neighbor.”
The officers use of tear gas and smoke comes despite a court order prohibiting those tactics — evidence, Rodriguez-Sanchez added, that federal agencies are operating in open defiance of judicial limits.
A federal judge’s temporary restraining order issued last week restricts how agents can use crowd-control tactics. It mandates that officers give two verbal warnings before deploying tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets or flash-bang devices. The order also prohibits targeting demonstrators, journalists or clergy members and allows the use of physical force, such as tackling, only when someone poses an immediate danger.
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to an immediate request for comment Monday afternoon.
“What happened on that block shows both the risks our neighbors face and the strength they’ve built to face them together,” Rodriguez-Sanchez said.
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