Ricardo Aguayo Rodriguez was bicycling home from a grocery store in Melrose Park, where he has lived for decades, when U.S. Border Patrol agents approached him.
Aguayo, 54, ditched the bike and ran. When the feds caught up with him, he “violently” resisted, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which says the agents used pepper spray and “delivered strikes.”
One agent struggled to handcuff Aguayo after bringing him to the pavement under the window of an apartment whose occupant recorded video of the agent’s arm locked around Aguayo’s neck — a type of restraint many law enforcement agencies have banned because it can be deadly.
“Por favor, amigo,” Aguayo pleaded in Spanish, gasping and struggling.
After being hospitalized with serious injuries, Aguayo is now locked up in a detention facility in Oklahoma.
He’s among thousands of people whose lives have been upended by President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign targeting the Chicago area, the latest front in his war on undocumented immigration.
Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol chief who has helped lead the campaign, Operation Midway Blitz, told Fox News on Thursday that he left Chicago to train in West Virginia with several hundred agents but could redeploy to New York, Chicago or Charlotte, North Carolina.
Still, the Department of Homeland Security says its deportation operation in Chicago will continue.
A source in that federal agency told the Chicago Sun-Times that four times as many Border Patrol agents could return to Chicago in March.
Over the past three months, immigration agents wearing masks and military-style garb have crisscrossed the Chicago area, from the diverse Far South Side to the tony north suburbs. They’ve arrested people without legal status and occasionally U.S. citizens as well.
Two people have been shot, one fatally. Rubber pellets and pepper balls have often been fired into crowds. And neighborhoods have been enveloped in clouds of noxious gas from canisters, tossed by federal agents, that have sickened residents and police officers, too.
Agents have been involved in eight car chases and used force in at least 76 incidents, according to an analysis by WBEZ and the Sun-Times based on a review of hundreds of court documents, videos and news reports. The examination focused on 18 types of force and also vehicle chases and collisions from Sept. 8 through Nov. 10 in the Chicago area, including northwest Indiana.
Experts say those tactics often are at odds with professional policing practices, heighten safety risks and erode public confidence in police officers that could result in people being less willing to cooperate with them.
Craig Futterman, a University of Chicago law professor, was among the attorneys for a group of protesters, journalists and clergy members filing a federal lawsuit asserting that agents were indiscriminately using force. For now, the suit has led to a court order reining in the use of chemical irritants and other force against people who pose no immediate threat.
Futterman says the Trump administration’s sweeping actions in Chicago evoke those of “authoritarian regimes.”
“Everything that the federal agents have been doing as part of Operation Midway Blitz has been with the express purpose of assaulting our most fundamental freedoms in America,” Futterman says.
Bovino and other agents have said they are using the force that’s necessary to protect themselves from “hostile crowds” and “dangerous criminal illegal aliens.”
The Department of Homeland Security, given more than two dozen questions about use-of-force policies and particular incidents, didn’t respond.
Brian Orozco, a civil rights lawyer hired by Aguayo’s family, says the agents who arrested his client “should have been focusing on getting his arms behind his back, as opposed to putting him in a chokehold and punching him repeatedly.”
Aguayo was hospitalized until the following day.
When Orozco met Aguayo, he says he saw stitches and caked blood around one eyebrow, his face was swollen, he had one arm in a sling, and he was marked with various bruises, cuts and scrapes.
“The force they used was ridiculous, excessive, inappropriate and not necessary,” Orozco says. “He didn’t attack them. He didn’t strike them or rush at them.”
Agents in Midway Blitz have used chokeholds in at least five incidents, WBEZ and the Sun-Times found.
In 2023, with President Joe Biden in office, the Department of Homeland Security updated its use-of-force policy, barring the use of chokeholds and physical restraint of a person’s neck “unless deadly force is authorized.”
“Chokeholds and carotid restraints must not be used as a means to control noncompliant subjects or persons resisting arrest,” according to the policy.
Agencies under DHS were required to draft and issue their own use-of-force directives to comply with the updated policy.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued a new use-of-force policy later in 2023, but much of the document posted online was redacted. U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which includes the Border Patrol, hasn’t updated its policy since 2021, though it includes a similar restriction on chokeholds.
Thor Eells, executive director of the National Tactical Officers Association, a nonprofit organization that provides law enforcement training, says analyzing agents’ actions should start with confirming whether there was a “lawful reason” for making a stop, such as having a judicial warrant.
If a stop was proper but grew contentious, Eells says, “the reasonableness of the force” would be judged by the behavior of the person who was stopped. Agents can escalate their tactics in response to perceived resistance or aggression.
“Absent the ability to articulate a deadly force scenario, then that would be subject to some sort of investigation,” Eells says. “They’re going to say: Was that an appropriate application of that technique given the totality of the circumstances at the time?”
Suane, Aguayo’s sister, says she couldn’t watch the video of her brother being choked: “I didn’t want to hear my brother screaming because he couldn’t breathe.
“He’s a good brother and a good person, too,” says Suane, recalling his 1988 arrival in the United States from north-central Mexico and the construction work he took to support two teenage children, both deaf. “He’s never done nothing to nobody.”
Border Patrol agents also have drawn criticism for chasing vehicles around Chicago and the suburbs, chases that sometimes have led to them crashing.
In late October, federal agents chased a pickup truck into the parking lot of a Gurnee high school just before the start of classes.
The chase had gone on for nearly 10 minutes after agents tried to pull over the vehicle in Waukegan. The pickup collided with at least three other vehicles during the chase, according to an email from Gurnee police Sgt. Marcos Gomez obtained through a public records request.
At one point, one of the pickup truck’s front wheels flew off and struck another vehicle, Gomez said.
With three wheels left, the truck skidded into a Warren Township High School parking lot before crashing as students made their way into the building.
Two men ran from the vehicle with agents in chase, according to school officials. One of the men tripped and was detained in the lot. The other ran through a school doorway as students were moving in and out.
Two agents in masks followed him into an area of the school “where special education students start their day” and came out about a minute later with the man in cuffs, according to school officials and Gomez’s email. One student was reported by the student’s parents to have been pushed out of the way by federal agents during the arrest, according to Gomez’s email.
Volunteers welcoming students to school included the Rev. Benjamin Squires, pastor of a nearby church.
“When I saw the men being detained outside [the school] that day, my faith required me to say something,” the pastor wrote in a sworn statement for the lawsuit over agents’ use of force. “I pulled out my phone and attempted to record the agents’ actions.”
In response, he said, the agents threatened to pepper-spray him.
Squires said he started to walk away, and again an agent threatened him with pepper spray.
DHS blamed the mayhem that morning on the men the agents chased, saying they had long criminal records and accusing them of driving onto school grounds “to seek protection.”
Garry McCarthy, a former Chicago police superintendent, says he isn’t opposed to the Border Patrol’s mission but is “not a fan of their methods,” including car chases.
Agents in Midway Blitz have been involved in eight chases that resulted in eight crashes, WBEZ and the Sun-Times found. McCarthy says each of those is a “red flag.”
He says it’s not unusual for vehicle pursuits to end with car crashes.
“Sometimes, people get killed,” McCarthy says. “And, if you’re chasing somebody for a minor violation or for an administrative immigration warrant, it’s probably not something that’s authorized based upon the national standards of policing. But they’re not adhering to the national standards of policing because they’re not police.”
McCarthy says Border Patrol agents have acted more recklessly than their counterpart agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“They’re out of control,” he says of the Border Patrol agents.
Customs and Border Protection, the Border Patrol’s parent agency, rescinded its car-chase policy on Jan. 20, the day Trump returned to the White House, apparently leaving agents with no clear restrictions for pursuing vehicles.
CBP’s previous policy, issued in 2023, included requirements that are now common among law enforcement agencies. The policy notably barred boxing in moving vehicles and also banned a tactic known as the “pursuit immobilization technique,” or PIT, in which a law enforcement vehicle hits a fleeing car to force it to spin out and stop.
A Homeland Security spokesperson acknowledged that Border Patrol agents used the maneuver on Oct. 14 after a car allegedly “rammed” the feds’ vehicles on a residential street in the East Side neighborhood on Chicago’s Far South Side.
Gil Kerlikowske, who headed CBP for years under President Barack Obama, says today’s Border Patrol barely resembles the agency he oversaw.
“No legitimate law enforcement agency operates in this manner at all,” says Kerlikowske, who gave a sworn statement in a lawsuit that was used to block Trump’s planned deployment of the National Guard in Chicago. “This is a total abrogation of responsibility, of training.”
The rescinded 2023 chase policy had been put in place after DHS’ Civil Rights and Civil Liberties office recommended changes. That was done after 11 pursuits led to 16 deaths and “numerous” serious injuries between May 2021 and April 2022.
The office urged CBP to “comprehensively review its vehicular pursuit policies, training, and review procedures.” CBP adopted all recommended changes, at least partially.
This year, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, appointed by Trump, shut down the Civil Rights and Civil Liberties office and two other internal watchdog agencies. She reversed course, though, in the face of a lawsuit.
Noem also cut back federal rules governing “immigration officers” on Oct 6.
Until then, the Code of Federal Regulations required “a designated pursuit vehicle” to be equipped with emergency lights and a siren. Now, the rules grant agents broad authority to use force and chase drivers “in order to effectively accomplish their individual missions.”
Kerlikowske says morale among Border Patrol agents has suffered since they’ve shifted from primarily guarding borders to policing urban areas. He says he “never would’ve envisioned seeing this level of reckless use of force.”
He faults Bovino, describing the Border Patrol boss as the only law enforcement leader he’s seen policing “with a Bowie knife in his belt.”
“This is all for show,” Kerlikowske says. “It’s beginning to not play out very well with the public. But then it seems like, with this administration, the only public they care about are their hardcore supporters.”
‘A ball of smoke’
On the Northwest Side, Funston Elementary School teacher Liza Oliva-Perez was walking across the street to grab lunch Oct. 3. She saw commotion around what turned out to be Border Patrol agents in unmarked sport-utility vehicles and joined onlookers recording the agents and blowing whistles to alert neighbors. A man on a motor scooter blocked one of the SUVs. Oliva-Perez kept her eye on an agent inside.
“I could tell he was getting frustrated,” she says. “Then, he opened the window. I saw the first can come out.”
The agents threw several tear-gas canisters and shot pepper balls.
Oliva-Perez bolted back to the school.
“I turned around, and it was a ball of smoke, this whole area,” she says with a sweep of a hand.
Oliva-Perez says she yelled to other teachers: “Get all the kids inside!”
Within a half hour, she was back in her classroom with her fifth- and sixth-graders, including several whose parents don’t have legal status to be in the United States. They were preoccupied.
“It’s a feeling of shock because they start thinking: What if my parents got picked up by immigration?” she says. “These kids come to school and they just want to be safe. But then they’re worried about, is my mom going to pick me up after school? Is she still going to be here?”
Agents in Midway Blitz have used tear gas in at least 13 incidents, WBEZ and the Sun-Times found. The analysis counted multiple tear gas deployments in one location during a day as a single incident.
Restrictions on the use of “less lethal” weapons, such as stun guns and chemical agents, are limited under the current DHS use-of-force policy. Agents can’t carry “unauthorized” devices and must “demonstrate proficiency” using every weapon they’re authorized to carry.
Under the Customs and Border Protection policy, “less lethal” force is more clearly restricted. Such force “must be both objectively reasonable and necessary” and “may be used in situations where empty-hand techniques are not sufficient, practical or appropriate to control disorderly or violent subjects.”
Agents are told there’s a reason to use stun guns, chemical munitions and air launchers that blast pepper powder — at a minimum to combat a person’s “active resistance” to law enforcement. Still, agents should use a stun gun only if they “reasonably” believe the subject will injure themselves or someone else, according to the policy.
Agents are prohibited from using stun guns and chemical weapons against certain vulnerable people, including young children, the elderly and “visibly pregnant” women.
The use of tear gas in Chicago — and images of people rinsing their eyes and kneeling to vomit — is not unprecedented. In 1968, during a contentious Democratic National Convention, cops deployed tear gas during protests in multiple locations. And the Chicago Police Department still has a tear-gas arsenal.
Officers are also equipped with a chemical agent, Mace, that is sprayed from a handheld device at the face of someone an officer wants to incapacitate.
Oleoresin capsicum, or OC, devices take their name from the pepper spray they contain. Officers carry the devices after training on when and how to use them.
Chicago’s policy says officers can use OC devices only “if there is a threat or attack against department members, the public, or property.”
Examples of those threats and attacks include throwing objects at people, breaking storefront windows and threatening to harm people by “driving erratically near or on designated protester routes.”
An OC device is different from a tear-gas canister, which is dispersed over a wide area and causes indiscriminate irritation to eyes and lungs.
For that reason, McCarthy says he established a policy as police superintendent that only he could authorize the use of tear gas. Since then, massive and rowdy demonstrations have taken place without the use of tear gas in response.
In 2012, thousands of protesters marched from Union Park to Boeing headquarters during the NATO Summit in downtown Chicago. McCarthy was on the front lines when clashes erupted between police and protesters. He told the Sun-Times at the time that department officials “didn’t want to escalate until we had to” and said he never authorized the use of tear gas.
In 2020, during rioting downtown because of the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd, Chicago police Supt. David Brown also opted not to use tear gas.
“Tear gas is highly flammable,” he said at the time. “They were already starting fires. Why would you add more flammable material to an already incendiary situation? We have to be smart.”
Still, police departments in some suburbs, including Aurora, did use tear gas to quell rioters that year.
Bovino testified in a deposition that, when he threw a canister of tear gas at demonstrators last month in Little Village, he would have used more if he had it.
‘Not seen anything like this’
Eells, who formerly was a police commander in Colorado Springs, Colo., says, “There are no best practices” for the types of chaotic incidents that have become common during the Chicago-area deportation blitz.
Eells says federal agents are working under “absolutely unprecedented” circumstances, like being interrupted by an angry group of people while making an arrest or carrying out other “enforcement action.” He says the lack of coordination with the police, who are barred from assisting with immigration enforcement, only complicates matters.
“We’ve not seen anything like this,” Eells says, “at least in the United States.”
Futterman has a different view after fighting in court to restrict the feds’ tactics.
Bovino and much of his Border Patrol team have left for now, but Futterman notes that Trump keeps threatening to use military force in Chicago.
“My fear is that it gets far worse before it gets better,” Futterman says, warning that attacks on the press, protesters and those expressing their religious beliefs can lead to the erosion of rights that can’t be restored. “At the same time, I have really, really been buoyed by our city, by the people of Chicago.”
He says people — from construction workers to doctors — have been “standing up and saying we’re going to fight for America, we are going to fight for our Constitution, we are going to fight for the things that have made America special and all that it has aspired to be.
“It really, really gives me hope,” he says. “But nothing that I’m seeing on the part of the federal government by the executive is showing signs of tamping down — and quite the contrary.”
Contributing: Peter Nickeas