A federal judge has ordered Gregory Bovino, a senior border patrol official leading the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Chicago, to appear in federal court each weekday to report on the day’s incidents in an exceptional bid to impose oversight over the government’s militarized raids in the city.
The order came following a terse hearing on Tuesday morning.
“Kids dressed in Halloween costumes walking to a parade do not pose an immediate threat to the safety of a law enforcement officer,” US district judge Sara Ellis told Bovino. “They just don’t. And you can’t use riot control weapons against them.”
Ellis was referring to an incident over the weekend, when federal agents deployed chemical irritants against residents, including in a neighborhood where dozens of children were planning to march in a Halloween parade.
The order today is the latest of several attempts to maintain oversight over Bovino and his agents, who have appeared to repeatedly violate court orders to curb their use of force amid a heavily militarized immigration crackdown in Chicago. The administration has dubbed the movement in Chicago as “Operation Midway Blitz” and it’s resulted in at least 3,000 arrests since September.
The use of force by federal agents in Chicago first came before Ellis after media organizations, protestors and clergy members filed a lawsuit accusing agents of “extreme brutality” in an attempt to “silence the press and civilians”. She ordered agents to avoid using tear gas in a crowd without first issuing two warnings.
When agents repeatedly deployed pepper balls, smoke grenades and tear gas against protesters and local police despite the order, Ellis ordered agents to wear body cameras. During the hearing on Tuesday, she told Bovino that he must personally get a body camera and complete training on the use of a body camera by Friday.
Bovino – who appeared in his green fatigues with Customs and Border Protection (CBP) insignia – agreed to each request, responding: “Yes, ma’am.”
“My role is not to tell you that you can or cannot enforce validly passed laws by Congress … My role is simply to see that in the enforcement of those laws, the agents are acting in a manner that is consistent with the constitution,” Ellis said.
Bovino, chief of the border patrol sector in El Centro, California, along the US-Mexico border, has become the face of Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement in cities including Chicago and Los Angeles.
In LA, agents smashed car windows and blew open a door to a house while a woman and her two young children were inside. Immigration advocates and lawyers have raised concerns about border patrol agents flooding US cities, as the agents are trained to block illegal entries, drug smugglers and human traffickers at the country’s borders, and not to conduct civil immigration enforcement in urban communities.
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The Department of Homeland Security, which encompasses the CBP, did not immediately respond to the Guardian’s request for a comment on Ellis’s latest order.
In hearings, federal officials have said that they used riot control gear and tear gas in response to threats. They have not offered proof that these were valid threats.
Ellis questioned Bovino’s own use of tear gas, after he was captured on video throwing a canister of gas into a group of residents of Little Village, a largely immigrant and Mexican American neighborhood on the city’s Southwest Side.
She also questioned his agents’ use of force in the Old Irving Park neighborhood, which she described as “a fairly quiet neighborhood [with] a lot of families, a lot of single-family homes”.
“These kids, you can imagine, their sense of safety was shattered on Saturday,” she said. “And it’s going to take a long time for that to come back, if ever.”
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