After two days of tear gas deployment from Little Village to Lake View, a federal judge has finally ordered the public face of President Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement campaign, Gregory Bovino, into her courtroom at the Dirksen Federal Courthouse.
U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis, who has shown increasing frustration with the feds’ tactics and already ordered lower-ranking officials into court, fired off a terse, two-sentence order Friday afternoon after agents turned their attention to Chicago’s North Side.
She set a status hearing in an ongoing lawsuit for Tuesday morning. And, she ordered the Trump administration “to produce Defendant Gregory Bovino, in person, for this hearing.”
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said “DHS can think of nobody better to correct Judge Ellis’ deep misconceptions about its mission, and we thank him for his service.”
The order set up another dramatic hearing at the downtown courthouse, where only two weeks ago a separate judge handed down a ruling that blocked President Donald Trump from deploying National Guard troops within Illinois.
Unlike the spectacle that’s often created when Chicago officials are charged with a crime, Bovino might not have to stroll through the Dirksen lobby on his way to Ellis’ courtroom. Two lower-ranking officials appeared before Ellis Monday, but neither was spotted in the lobby.
That means Bovino might have the option of using a less-public entrance. Still, it’s hardly the Border Patrol commander’s style to avoid the horde of cameras that will likely be waiting for him if he takes the public path.
Ellis is presiding over an ongoing lawsuit about the feds’ treatment of protesters amid the immigration blitz. The lawsuit was brought by media organizations such as the Chicago Headline Club, Block Club Chicago and the Chicago Newspaper Guild, which represents journalists at the Chicago Sun-Times.
The case has already led to orders forbidding agents from using gas and other “riot control” weapons without two warnings or against people who pose no immediate threat. The judge also ordered agents “currently equipped and trained with body-worn cameras” to activate them when participating in enforcement activity.
Ellis earlier this week said the plaintiffs’ lawyers could spend two hours deposing Bovino, limiting his under-oath questioning to “how” federal officers are enforcing the law, and whether they are violating people’s constitutional rights. She said at the time that Bovino should not be asked “why” Chicago has been targeted for the immigration campaign.
But Thursday, Ellis more than doubled the time limits on Bovino’s deposition, expanding it to five hours. She did so moments before attorneys in the case accused Bovino of violating one of her earlier orders by tossing tear gas into a crowd in Little Village without justification.
Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that Bovino on Thursday participated in the deployment of “riot control measures” after a crowd “grew more hostile” and began throwing rocks and other objects at agents, “including one that struck Chief Greg Bovino in the head.”
She said Border Patrol agents “repeated multiple warnings” to the crowd. She also claimed that agents were surrounded by a crowd of 75 to 100 “rioters” and were “boxed in” by a large truck.
A Sun-Times reporter and photographers who were in Little Village at the time did not witness federal officers being “boxed in” by trucks. Officers were in multiple vehicles and held back a crowd of about 50 protesters.
A Sun-Times photographer said Bovino stepped out of a vehicle and stood in line with the other agents, staring at protesters while holding a tear-gas canister in his hand. After a few minutes, he was escorted back into the vehicle and drove off.
The photographer did not witness Bovino deploying tear gas Thursday.
Judges at the Dirksen Federal Courthouse have been given fuzzy answers this week about who is in charge of Operation Midway Blitz. At least one of them specifically told Ellis that Bovino was the man in charge, though.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection Incident Cmdr. Kyle Harvick answered Ellis when she asked him “so, the person that ultimately is in charge of this operation in Chicago is Greg Bovino, is that correct?”
“Yes, your honor,” Harvick said.
Shawn Byers, the deputy field office director for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement contradicted Harvick when answering the judge’s questions. He told her ICE and CBP have been siloed and are “running parallel but independently.”
In a separate hearing Friday, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Cummings asked Justice Department lawyers who was in charge of Midway Blitz. William Weiland of the civil division simply pointed to DHS writings online that called it an “ICE operation.”
Bovino, who sports a tight-cropped hairdo and roams the city in military fatigues but no mask, came to Chicago after running the similar “Operation At Large” in California. That operation led to a controversial U.S. Supreme Court ruling last month that allowed federal agents to continue stopping people based on race, language and other factors there.
The Supreme Court majority did not explain itself. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a controversial concurrence that ethnicity alone isn’t enough for reasonable suspicion, but it can be a “relevant factor” along with language and where people gather for work.
Bovino has since told a WBEZ reporter that agents in Chicago were stopping people based partly on “how they look.”
Contributing: Cindy Hernandez and Anthony Vazquez.
Neither the reporter who authored this story nor its editors — who include some represented by the Newspaper Guild — have been involved in the lawsuit described in this article.