CHICAGO — Federal immigration agents illegally arrested nearly two dozen people earlier this year without warrants in violation of a 2022 consent decree, a federal judge in Chicago ruled late Tuesday.
Immigration and civil liberties advocates based in Chicago sued federal authorities in March over the arrests of 26 people in the Midwest — including one U.S. citizen — during the opening days of President Donald Trump’s second term in January.
They claimed that such arrests violated a three-year consent decree banning warrantless arrests unless agents have probable cause to believe someone is in the United States unlawfully and is a flight risk. On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Cummings concluded that attorneys for the National Immigration Justice Center and the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois provided enough evidence to show that ICE arrested 22 people without a warrant in violation of the consent decree and federal law.
Cummings also extended the settlement agreement to Feb. 2 and ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to begin making monthly disclosures of how many warrantless arrests agents make each month until the agreement’s new expiration date.
The original 2018 lawsuit that led to the consent decree — referred to as the Castañon Nava consent decree — stemmed from a large-scale ICE enforcement operation in the Chicago area that led to 156 arrests during a weeklong period. Of those arrests, more than 100 were made without a warrant.
According to the lawsuit, ICE instructed its agents to circumvent federal law on warrantless arrests by having them create “post-hoc” warrants in the field for people who were already under arrest.
ICE officials previously denied that its agents violated the agreement, which it asserted expired earlier this year. It asserted that agents had probable cause to believe that the people it arrested without warrants would likely escape before they could get a warrant for their arrest. In other cases, warrants were prepared while people were detained for questioning, ICE officials said.
Cummings wrote Tuesday that issuing warrants to arrest people in the field was a “new policy that has never been implemented by ICE” prior to the consent decree. In 12 cases from Missouri that were cited in the lawsuit, the judge wrote, ICE later prepared post-arrest forms that Cummings said did not include any facts that would provide probable cause that any of the detainees were likely to escape before arrest warrants could be obtained. Subsequent forms provided a month later reflected details ICE agents did not know at the time they made the arrests, Cummings added.
According to Cummings’ order, the 22 people subject to illegal warrantless arrests have since been released on bond and are no longer in the custody of ICE. But Cummings ordered ICE to reimburse all bond payments and lift any imposed conditions of release.
ICE began violating the agreement with the January operation and completely ceased compliance in June, when its principal legal adviser sent an email to all ICE employees stating that the agreement was terminated despite pending litigation. On Tuesday, Cummings ordered ICE to reissue a broadcast that the agreement is again in effect “to all ICE officers nationwide.”
The judge also ordered ICE to, within 10 days, produce a tally of all foreign nationals subjected to warrantless arrest in the Northern District of Illinois from June 11-Oct. 7. It must continue to produce that data on the first day of each month between Oct. 22 and when the agreement expires.
Attorneys: Family’s Millennium Park Detention Was Also A Violation
Prior to Cummings’ ruling, attorneys also filed multiple notices to the court of additional consent decree violations in which they alleged that ICE had “dramatically escalated” its enforcement in Chicago.
One high-profile case cited was the recent arrests of a family in Millennium Park.
Federal agents detained Noemi Chavez; her husband, Jaime Ramirez; their 8-year-old daughter, Dasha Ramirez; and their 3-year-old son at Millennium Park during a family outing on Sept. 28. Chavez told the Tribune that federal agents surrounded her and her husband as her children played in the Crown Fountain and asked if they had their “documents.” Chavez said that when she asked to see a warrant, her request was ignored.
In a Sept. 30 court filing, attorneys with the National Immigrant Justice Center wrote that the arrest was among many made this year “without warrants or any flight risk determinations.”
The Chavez-Ramirez family was detained as large groups of border patrol agents marched through Downtown. During the Sept. 28 patrol, Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino told WBEZ some of the people his agents are arresting are chosen based partly on “how they look.”
More than 1,000 people have been arrested in the Chicago area since the Department of Homeland Security launched Operation Midways Blitz at the start of September. The National Immigration Justice Center has identified more than 30 recent examples of warrantless arrests “lacking sufficient probable cause,” according to court documents.
The Castañon Nava consent decree was supposed to sunset in May. However, in March, the National Immigration Justice Center and the ACLU of Illinois filed a motion to enforce the consent decree and extend it for three more years. At a hearing in June, Cummings stated that the consent decree remained in effect while the motions were pending.
Last week, attorney Keren Zwick with the National Immigration Justice Center filed a habeas corpus petition with the U.S. District Court on behalf of the Chavez-Ramirez family. Originally from Guatemala, the family came to the United States in 2023 “in search of protection,” Zwick said. She said the family has an asylum hearing date set for October 2027.
During a Monday status hearing, Zwick told U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis she believed the family was “stopped because of their skin color.”
“I know I have no jurisdiction as to how ICE operates its enforcement procedures, but I will just say as an aside, I find it extremely troubling that there is no other indication that this family was not here legally and clearly they were stopped based on their appearance which, absent any other factors, is unconstitutional,” the judge said Monday.
After their detainment, the Chavez-Ramirez family was taken to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing center in Broadview before Chavez and the children were moved to O’Hare’s immigration-customs enforcement area at Terminal 5, according to the Tribune.
Chavez and the children were released Wednesday. But Jaime Ramirez was transferred from Broadview to the Port Isabel Immigration Processing Center in Texas and then to a facility in Clay County, Indiana, according to Zwick.
Jaime Ramirez originally came to the United States in the early 2000s, but he was deported. He returned in 2014 and was convicted of illegal entry and was served an order of removal, Zwick said. Jaime Ramirez returned with his family in 2023.
On Monday, attorney Craig Oswald, who is representing Bovino on behalf of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, said he believed federal agents discovered Jaime Ramirez’s past entries after the family was detained.
Marcos Charles, acting head of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, said last month that about 50-60 percent of arrests in ICE’s ongoing Chicago operation were targeted arrests. Yet in a recent filing in the Castañon Nava case, the National Immigration Justice Center wrote the remaining 50-60 percent of arrests are collateral arrests “which means they were warrantless and likely failed to comply” with the consent decree.
Filings from the National Immigration Justice Center describe cases where people were arrested on their way to and from work and church, an early morning raid in Elgin where two U.S. citizens were detained and an incident where a 5-year-old girl and her parents were arrested as they loaded groceries into their car.
“Together, the violations we describe in our court filing paint a picture of increasingly violent and dangerous arrests by [Department of Homeland Security] and other federal officers who show no regard for people’s safety or constitutional rights,” Mark Fleming, associate director of litigation at the National Immigration Justice Center, said in a recent news release. “We urgently need the court to hold the Trump administration accountable for the fear, family separation and physical harm these arrests are causing.”
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