On October 23, 2025, Chicago, Illinois, resident Christian Buie-Gentry was working at a coffee shop in the city’s predominantly Latine Little Village neighborhood when he received messages from a rapid response chat alerting the community that Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Border Patrol agents were in the area. It was the seventh consecutive week of the federal immigration authorities’ Operation Midway Blitz, a targeted immigration campaign during which federal agents used aggressive and violent tactics throughout the city and its surrounding suburbs.
Gentry, who was only two miles away at the time, biked to the location where masked agents were detaining people; by the time he arrived, the agents had deployed tear gas at the rapid responders who were filming them and demanding they leave the neighborhood. As the agents left the scene in their vehicles on a path cleared by Chicago Police Department (CPD) officers, Gentry and others protested from the side of the road. That’s when Gentry says an agent pointed a handgun at his head and said “Bang! You’re gonna die, lib.”
Gentry, a former U.S. Army military police officer, sought help from several nearby CPD officers whom he believed saw the interaction. But the police responded with indifference. “The cops told us, ‘These are feds, we can’t do anything to stop them,’ kind of thing,” he says. “To me it shows that if [they] have a badge, [they] can do whatever crime they want to, right? It’s so clear that the police have zero desire to protect citizens or enforce laws as long as someone has a badge.”
Despite public calls for accountability, government attorneys and local police departments in Illinois have been resistant to charge federal immigration agents for crimes they committed during Midway Blitz, citing a lack of authority over federal powers. But after an incident similar to Gentry’s occurred in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) campaign there earlier this year, a county attorney charged an ICE agent with pointing a gun at a motorist. Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty described it as the first case of its kind in the country since the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term, during which threats of retribution from the federal administration have led many local prosecutors to avoid bringing criminal charges against federal agents.
In California, neither the attorney general nor any law enforcement agency has announced investigations into the fatal ICE shootings of Keith Porter Jr. and Isaias Sanchez Barboza.
In May, Moriarty’s office—whose jurisdiction includes the headquarters for ICE operations in the state—filed charges on four counts of second degree assault against ICE agent Christian Castro, as well as one count of falsely reporting a crime against Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, an immigrant from Venezuela who was shot in the leg during an attempted immigration arrest. Eleven days after the charges were filed, Castro was taken into custody in Texas.
“Mr. Castro is an ICE agent, but his federal badge does not make him immune from state charges for his criminal conduct in Minnesota,” Moriarty, whose office filed the charges, said in a press release announcing the charges.
Gentry says seeing the charges filed in Minnesota has made him question why authorities in Illinois have failed to use the same mechanisms of accountability.
“Maybe it’s a veteran thing—I have some belief in the institutions of our government to some level, that if you're going to do terrible things, someone’s going to actually hold you accountable,” he says. “Hearing my local police department and state’s attorney say ‘We can’t,’ and then seeing other people do it, it’s like, either you can and you’re choosing not to, or you’re lying to me.”
On the municipal level, Chicago has long positioned itself as an unabashedly immigrant-friendly city, and Illinois officials have held a similar policy line. In 2012, the city of Chicago approved the Welcoming City Ordinance, which prohibits city agencies from enforcing federal immigration laws or collaborating with ICE. Five years later, in 2017, Illinois signed into law the TRUST Act, which restricted local law enforcement from collaborating with federal immigration agents, making Illinois a “sanctuary state” for immigrants.
When ICE charged into the state this past September, Governor JB Pritzker appeared to take a hard stance against the Trump Administration. Days before Trump announced Midway Blitz, the governor publicly condemned the President’s threats to send immigration troops and the National Guard into Chicago, stating “Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator.” Soon after, he met with local immigrant rights organizations to share information about the coming federal onslaught. The governor urged Chicagoans to record ICE agents conducting immigration enforcement and condemned the agents’ violent actions. And during an interview with MSNBC in October, Pritzker addressed the President, saying “If you come for my people, you come through me.”
But as Midway Blitz erupted throughout the Chicagoland area that fall, Pritzker’s show of support did not coincide with meaningful state-level action. During Midway Blitz, federal agents detained about 3,800 people in Illinois, 81 percent of whom had no criminal convictions. Just days after the campaign was announced, an ICE agent killed Silverio Villegas-González, an undocumented immigrant, after he dropped his kids off at school in a nearby Chicago suburb. In October, a U.S. Border Patrol agent shot Chicago resident Marimar Martinez in her car five times, leaving seven bullet holes in her body. Agents regularly terrorized residential neighborhoods across the city and suburbs, deploying tear gas at young children, and inflicting such extreme violence on protesters and journalists that a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order in October to deter them from indiscriminate use of riot control weapons against peaceful protesters and journalists.
But while Midway Blitz was at its peak of aggression, Pritzker insinuated state prosecutors may eventually hold ICE agents accountable, but didn’t publicly push them to do so, and instead called in the Illinois State Police to “monitor and maintain public safety” at protests outside of the Broadview ICE detention facility, which served as the headquarters for the immigration campaign. In October, Pritzker established the Illinois Accountability Commission to create a public record of the conduct of federal law enforcement agents, but the findings—along with any public calls to investigate federal law enforcement misconduct—wouldn’t be released until six months later.
Similar levels of inaction have played out in the city of Chicago. Exactly one week after intensive care nurse Alex Pretti was shot and killed by U.S. Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson signed an executive order titled “ICE on Notice,” which directed the CPD to document misconduct and pursue prosecution of federal agents. But just two months after the order was signed, Johnson said the order wasn’t necessary anymore, stating that the police department would not have to craft and implement a new policy to allow officers to investigate federal agents, because the “policy that they [CPD] have in place” already did so. More than four months after the order was signed, the CPD has not publicly announced any investigations into crimes by federal agents that occurred during Midway Blitz.
Gentry, who used to encourage his family members with mixed status to move to Illinois, says this inaction has impacted his confidence in the state’s sanctuary status.
“It’s made me reliably question if that’s a good decision for them,” he says.
Many Chicago residents have called on Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke, whose jurisdiction covers nearly 950 square miles across the Chicagoland area, to pursue charges against federal agents. O’Neill Burke has authority over the areas where both Villegas-González and Martinez were shot by federal agents. But she has refused to investigate either case, stating that doing so would be “willfully violat(ing) the law.”
In May, eight months after Villegas-González was killed, the Illinois State Police announced it had launched an investigation into the fatal shooting—a move some Illinois residents seeking justice see as progress. By contrast, officials in Minnesota began investigating the killings of Pretti and of Minneapolis resident Renée Good days after their deaths; when the FBI withheld evidence from the state, it continued conducting its own investigation.
O’Neill Burke’s office, on the other hand, released a statement in January saying it “does not conduct independent investigations into criminal conduct and lacks jurisdiction over federal agencies except in extremely narrow and limited circumstances.”
Other district attorneys across the country, however, have taken steps to ensure that federal officials are held accountable by the government when they break the law in those jurisdictions. In January, ten district attorneys across the U.S. formed the Fight Against Federal Overreach, a national coalition of district attorneys working together to compare strategies, coordinate action, and confront federal overreach. District attorneys in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Minneapolis have joined the coalition.
At a press conference in March, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner said he would prosecute DHS agents who commit crimes within his jurisdiction, warning that “the President cannot pardon” them.
Moriarty stated in January that “there is no absolute immunity for ICE agents who violate Minnesota law . . . . State and local law enforcement still have jurisdiction to conduct investigations into potential criminal offenses by any federal agent, just as they would any person who violates Minnesota’s criminal law.”
O’Neill Burke has not announced plans to join the coalition or its efforts, nor have prosecutors in several blue states that have experienced targeted federal immigration enforcement campaigns, including California, Colorado, and New York.
For Francisco Ocegueda, an Illinois resident who has been protesting federal immigration enforcement outside the Broadview ICE detention facility since September, hearing about investigations in Minnesota has made him question O’Neill Burke.
“It tells me that it’s just political games,” said Ocegueda. “You kind of lose hope, because nothing gets done. It’s not the world that I want my kids to live in.”
For Gentry, the lack of action has made him lose faith that the government will enforce its sanctuary laws.
“It has made me believe really heavily that the Illinois sanctuary state status is just words, because as long as it’s that the state is not going to make any attempts to hold ICE agents accountable for their crimes, that it doesn’t matter any laws we have on the books,” he says.
Activists are now looking for alternatives to O’Neill Burke. In March, a coalition of more than 400 elected officials, faith leaders, community organizations, and residents—including two U.S. Representatives and fourteen members of the Illinois General Assembly—signed a petition demanding an independent special prosecutor be appointed instead of O’Neill Burke to investigate and prosecute alleged crimes committed by federal agents during Midway Blitz.
The petition claims a special prosecutor replacing O’Neill Burke is necessary not only due to her inaction, but also due to a conflict of interest and political obstacles that bar her from effectively investigating. Attorneys for the petitioners accuse O’Neill Burke’s office of failing to hold federal agents accountable in order to protect its relationships with federal agencies. They point to an email sent by O’Neill Burke’s office to other Cook County officials shortly before Midway Blitz began, the day after Trump threatened to deploy the National Guard to Chicago. The officials had been organizing to release a joint statement condemning Trump’s attacks on the city, which O’Neill Burke’s office refused to sign onto.
“We obviously share concerns about Trump’s actions, rhetoric, and bluster,” O’Neill Burke’s spokesperson Matt McGrath wrote in the email. “At the same time, the State’s Attorney’s top priority remains combating illegal guns, and to continue doing that effectively we need to maintain our excellent working relationships with the local [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives] and other federal partners. So we will not be able to sign on.”
Daniel Massoglia, legal director at First Defense Legal Aid and one of the attorneys for petitioners, says he believes O’Neill Burke wants to avoid possible political retaliation from the Trump Administration.
“As an elected official, the state’s attorney faces the threat of political reprisal from a federal government that has shown itself to be all too eager to retaliate against perceived enemies,” Massoglia says. A special prosecutor, he says, would be shielded from these conflicts of interest.
O’Neill Burke’s office responded to the petition, calling it “frivolous,” and arguing that appointing such a position would make it “more difficult” for her office to prosecute and win convictions against federal agents who break the law. Chicago Alderman Byron Sigcho-Lopez, whose ward includes a large immigrant community, says the Cook County State’s Attorney’s lack of action tells the public that there will be impunity in Illinois for federal agents.
“It sends a message that these agents can come and just do as they please,” Sigcho-Lopez says.
On May 21, a county judge denied the request to appoint a special prosecutor, ruling the petitioners did not prove O’Neill Burke abandoned her duty to investigate federal agents.
Meanwhile, Chicago-based nonprofit Increase the Peace is helping to connect community members harmed or injured during Midway Blitz with an attorney to file a lawsuit against ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
On April 30, Pritzker’s Illinois Accountability Commission published its findings of its investigation into misconduct by federal law enforcement during Midway Blitz. The commission reported that its findings demonstrate “patterns of illegal and violent conduct by federal immigration enforcement agents,” including “high-speed vehicular pursuits, extreme physical force, indiscriminate use of chemical agents, shootings, beatings, and other violent acts.” The commission submitted the report and a referral letter to the Cook County State’s Attorney and local police departments.
According to Pritzker, the hope for the commission is that “law enforcement agencies will review this evidence and take any steps in their power to deliver justice to Illinoisans impacted by Operation Midway Blitz, including Marimar Martinez . . . . We can’t let people forget the atrocities that happened here in our cities and the erosion of our democracy happening in the United States.”
As of May, the Illinois State Police probe into Villegas-González’s death was the only investigation.
Allison Galvan, co-founder and executive director of Grito Latino Addison, a community-based organization that provides assistance to immigrant communities in Chicago, says seeing this violence and lack of accountability being perpetuated onto people with brown skin has a consequence.
She says Midway Blitz has had continuous, reverberating effects on immigrants in Chicago, with people still fearful of leaving their homes and the economies of these communities suffering.
“You see our people who consistently have their rights being taken away, them being judged because of the color of their skin, them being shot and killed in cold blood,” Galvan says. “It consistently shows that we will never be able to have a pathway to succeed, to be able to be more than half a human being.”