excessive force

PARK RIDGE, Ill. — It was 3:30 a.m. when 10 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers gathered in a parking lot in the Chicago suburbs for a briefing about a suspect they were hoping to arrest. They went over a description of the person, made sure their radios were on the same channel and discussed where the closest hospital was in case something went wrong.

“Let’s plan on not being there,” said one of the officers, before they climbed into their vehicles and headed out.

Across the city and surrounding suburbs, other teams were fanning out in support of “Operation Midway Blitz.” It has unleashed President Trump’s mass deportations agenda on a city and state that has had some of the strongest laws preventing local officials from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement.

ICE launched the operation Sept. 8, drawing concern from activists and immigrant communities fearful of the large-scale arrests or aggressive tactics used in other cities targeted by the Republican president. They say there has been a noticeable increase in immigration enforcement agents, although a military deployment to Chicago has yet to materialize.

The Associated Press went on a ride-along with ICE in a Chicago suburb — much of the recent focus — to see how that operation is unfolding.

A predawn wait, then two arrests

A voice came over the radio: “He got into the car. I’m not sure if that’s the target.”

Someone matching the description of the man whom ICE was searching for walked out of the house, got into a car and drove away from the tree-lined street. Unsure whether this was their target, the officers followed. A few minutes later, with the car approaching the freeway, the voice over the radio said: “He’s got the physical description. We just can’t see the face good.”

“Do it,” said Marcos Charles, the acting head of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations.

Agents in multiple vehicles soon overtook the car and boxed it in. After talking to the man, they realized he was not the person being sought but concluded that he was in the United States illegally, so they took him into custody.

Eventually, a little after dawn broke on the one- and two-story brick houses, the man they were looking for came out of the house and got into a car. ICE officers closed in. The man got out of the vehicle and was arrested. ICE said both men were in the country illegally and had criminal records.

Charles called it a “successful operation.”

“There was no safety issues on the part of our officers, nor the individuals that we arrested. And it went smoothly,” he said.

‘ICE does not belong here’

Activists and critics of ICE say that’s increasingly not the norm in immigration operations.

They point to videos showing ICE agents smashing windows to apprehend suspects, a chaotic showdown outside a popular Italian restaurant in San Diego, and arrests like that of a Tufts University student in March by masked agents outside her apartment in Somerville, Mass., as neighbors watched.

Charles said that ICE is using an “appropriate” amount of force and that agents are responding to suspects who increasingly are not following commands.

There has been “an uptick in people that are not compliant,” he said, blaming what he characterized as inflammatory rhetoric from activists encouraging people to resist.

Alderman Andre Vasquez, who chairs the Chicago City Council’s committee on immigrant and refugee rights, strenuously objected to that description, faulting ICE for any escalation.

“We’re not here to cause chaos. The president is,” Vasquez said. He accused immigration enforcement agents of trying to provoke activists into overreacting to justify calling in a greater use of force such as National Guard troops.

“ICE does not belong here,” he said.

Shooting by ICE agent raises tensions

Chicago was already on edge when a shooting Sept. 12 heightened tensions even more.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said an ICE officer fatally shot Silverio Villegas González, whom it described as a Mexican immigrant who tried to evade arrest in a Chicago suburb by driving his car at officers and dragging one of them. The department said the officer believed his life was threatened and therefore opened fire, killing the man.

Charles said he could not comment because there is an open investigation. But he said he met with the officer in the hospital, saw his injuries and thought that the force used was appropriate.

The officer was not wearing a body camera, Charles said.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a Democrat, has demanded “a full, factual accounting” of the shooting. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum condemned the death and said Mexico is demanding a thorough investigation.

“These tactics have led to the loss of life of one of our community members,” said Democratic Illinois state Rep. Norma Hernandez.

In another use-of-force incident under Midway Blitz that has drawn criticism, a U.S. citizen was detained by immigration agents alongside his father and hit by a stun gun three times Tuesday in suburban Des Plaines, the man’s lawyer said.

Local advocates have also condemned ICE agents for wearing masks, failing to identify themselves, and not using body cameras — actions that contrast with Chicago Police Department policy.

‘It was time to hit Chicago’

Charles said there is no timeline for the ICE-led operation in the Chicago area to end. As of Thursday, immigration enforcement officials had arrested nearly 550 people. Charles said 50% to 60% of those are targeted arrests, meaning they are people whom immigration enforcers are specifically trying to find.

He rejected criticism that ICE randomly targets people, saying agents weren’t “going out to Home Depot parking lots” to make indiscriminate arrests. Such arrests have been widely seen in recent months at Home Depots and other places of business in the Los Angeles area.

Charles said ICE has brought in more than 200 officers from around the country for the operation.

He said that for too long, cities such as Chicago that limited cooperation with ICE had allowed immigrants, especially those with criminal records, to remain in the country illegally. It was time to act, he said.

“It was time to hit Chicago.”

Santana writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Christine Fernando in Chicago contributed to this report.

Merrick Bobb, one of the godfathers of the modern police oversight movement in Los Angeles and beyond, has died. He was 79.

Bobb, whose health had deteriorated in recent years, died Thursday night at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in L.A., his two children, Matthew and Jonathan, confirmed Friday.

A Los Feliz resident for more than 40 years, Bobb had four grandchildren, was fluent in several languages and was respected as one of the earliest champions of civilian oversight of law enforcement.

He had a long career, shining a light on problems within major law enforcement agencies from L.A. to Seattle. And he accomplished his most significant work without the use of his hands or legs, which became effectively paralyzed after he contracted a rare and debilitating autoimmune condition called Guillain-Barré syndrome in 2003.

“He was always a person who was really engaged in the world,” Jonathan said in an interview with him and his brother. “I think that growing up in the 1950s and 1960s with the civil rights movement and other associated movements was very seminal for him in terms of instilling belief in justice [and] understanding the voices of traditionally underrepresented groups.”

For two decades beginning in 1993, Bobb served as special counsel to the L.A. County Board of Supervisors. In that position, he delivered semiannual reports that detailed pervasive issues within the department, from widespread violence in the county’s jails to excessive force, driving a number of reforms in the department.

In 2014, the board created the Office of Inspector General and dismissed Bobb from his role with the county. That decision came in the wake of criticism that he and Michael Gennaco, the then-head of the Office of Independent Review, had not done enough to stop the problems in the jails, which had become a major scandal.

Two years earlier, a federal judge had appointed Bobb to serve as independent monitor of the Seattle Police Department’s consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice. He held that position until 2020, when he resigned in protest of the department’s use of force and “powerful and injurious” crowd control weapons against protesters in the months following George Floyd’s killing by a white Minneapolis police officer.

In 2001, he founded the Police Assessment Resource Center, a nonprofit that provides “independent, evidence-based counsel on effective, respectful, and publicly accountable policing,” the center’s then-vice president Matthew Barge wrote in 2015.

Before that, Bobb served as deputy general counsel for the Christopher Commission, which examined use of force within the Los Angeles Police Department in the wake of the 1991 beating of Rodney King. The commission published a sweeping report that year that called on then-LAPD Chief Daryl Gates to step down and found the department had a persistent and pervasive problem with excessive use of force.

Bobb graduated from Dartmouth College in 1968, then received his law degree three years later from UC Berkeley, according to his curriculum vitae. He worked for private law firms between 1973 and 1996. Bobb was named one of the top 50 lawyers in L.A. by the Los Angeles Business Journal that year, when he left a major law firm to focus on his law enforcement oversight work.

But for many people he met, according to his sons, it was Bobb’s kindness that made the strongest impression.

“No matter who it was in his life he was engaging with at that point, he focused in on them and developed a personal connection,” Matthew said. “You never knew if he was going to be having lunch with the former chief of police or his former handyman who came by once a week, and everyone in between.”

Bobb is survived by his children and grandchildren, his ex-wife Aviva Koenigsberg Bobb — a former judge with whom he remained close — his sister Gloria Kern and his longtime assistant and caretaker, Jeffrey Yanson.

Bobb’s funeral will take place at 10 a.m. Sept. 5 at Mount Sinai Hollywood Hills, 5950 Forest Lawn Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90068.