President Donald Trump’s administration is facing a lawsuit seeking the release of all video footage filmed during the high-powered overnight immigration raid of a Chicago apartment complex in September.
The images captured by a government camera crew were later used in highly edited Hollywood-style videos — which experts called “propaganda” — that were published by the federal government to win support for its deportation campaign.
Democracy Forward, a Washington D.C.-based legal organization that has challenged the Trump administration, state and local governments and right-wing movements over the past decade, filed a public records request for all original footage from the raid in the South Shore neighborhood. That request has gone unfulfilled, the group said, so it filed a seven-page federal complaint in the U.S. District court in D.C. late last month.
The suit seeks to compel the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to search for and release any available footage.
“The administration cannot ignore the Constitution in their pursuit of social media clicks. The public deserves to see the full extent of the horror inflicted on American neighborhoods by the Trump-Vance administration’s unconstitutional and unlawful PR stunt,” Skye Perryman, President and CEO of Democracy Forward, was quoted as saying in a news release. “The government cannot legally hide the footage captured at the raid, nor can they cover up the public documents used in the raid’s preparation and execution. We are eager to argue this case in court.”
In an emailed statement, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said the agency does does not comment on “existing FOIA [Freedom of Information ACT] litigation.”
The immigration agencies’ filming of their military-style operations was central to their strategy of gaining public support for the raids in Chicago and the suburbs. Experts have argued that the use of force in South Shore was not necessary, only serving to dramatize the scale of danger posed by immigrants and portray the government’s military strength to outsiders who didn’t understand the city’s landscape.
“There’s no operational need for any of these techniques,” Gil Kerlikowske, a former commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which oversees the U.S. Border Patrol agency, told the Sun-Times in October. “This is all about showboating.”
Surveillance footage from a school near a South Shore apartment complex raid in September shows a team of Homeland Security photographers capturing footage of the raid that later was used in highly produced videos. The school’s footage was obtained via a Chicago Sun-Times public records request.
Chicago Public Schools; annotation by Justin Myers/Sun-Times
A camera crew of at least nine people filmed the South Shore raid, according to security footage from a nearby elementary school that was obtained by the Sun-Times through a public records request. The photo and video team wore street clothing, some with neon Department of Homeland Security Office of Public Affairs vests.
Kerlikowski said DHS “can’t burn barrels of cash fast enough” since getting a funding infusion from Congress this year.
“It’s abhorrent to me to see the taxpayer dollar being used in this way, in propaganda and show,” he said.
DHS posted videos to its social media accounts with action music and agents with large guns climbing ladders to get inside the building and smashing down apartment doors. The posts included glamour shots of Border Patrol Cmdr. Gregory Bovino.
Democracy Forward said the videos were “valorizing the dangerous and unjustified action.”
“The video splices together footage of the raid from numerous camera angles, indicating that it was a compilation of a substantial quantity of footage edited for public relations purposes,” the lawsuit states.
The push to release footage from the raid comes as the Trump administration has limited the release of information to the public since he took office in January.
The administration has not shared comprehensive data on arrests, detentions and deportations since Trump’s inauguration. And DHS has not produced public data in response to repeated requests from Sun-Times and WBEZ reporters. It also did not respond to questions about the lack of updates to its dashboard.