CHICAGO — In his highly anticipated appearance in a federal courtroom Tuesday, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino — who has become the face of the Trump administration’s ongoing “Operation Midway Blitz” Chicago-area immigration enforcement campaign — did very little of the talking.
U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis had ordered Bovino to her courtroom after allegations he’d personally thrown canisters of tear gas into a crowd last week in violation of Ellis’ Oct. 9 temporary restraining order restricting agents’ use of force on protesters. And Tuesday’s appearance won’t be the last; the judge ordered Bovino to appear in front of her each evening for the next week.
Read more: Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino ordered to testify in federal court
Ellis began the hearing by reading the oaths of office both she and Bovino took before beginning their respective federal appointments. She then mused that because they’d sworn “essentially the same oath” to uphold the Constitution, Border Patrol agents’ apparent violations of her temporary restraining order couldn’t be due to Bovino and his colleagues either not reading it, or reading it and deciding to ignore it.
“It must be that it’s not clear,” Ellis said.
She then read her entire temporary restraining order, stopping at times to relate its various elements to recent incidents. The judge was particularly upset at agents’ deployment of tear gas in Chicago’s Old Irving Park neighborhood Saturday morning shortly before children were supposed to march down the same block in a Halloween parade.
“So kids dressed in Halloween costumes walking to a parade do not pose an immediate threat,” Ellis told Bovino. “They just don’t. And you cannot use riot control weapons against them.”
The judge had just read portions of her order that prohibit using nonlethal weapons like tear gas, pepper balls, rubber bullets, flashbang grenades and tasers on protesters who don’t pose “an immediate threat to the safety of a law enforcement officer or others.”
Read more: Immigration officials seek to justify use of force on Chicago-area protesters | Judge grants restraining order protecting protesters, journalists in Chicago-area clashes
"These kids, you can imagine — their sense of safety was shattered on Saturday,” the judge said. “And it’s going to take a long time for that to come back, if ever. And not only was their sense of safety shattered, it’s connected to what should’ve been a really happy day.”
‘The camera is your friend’
Ellis’ questioning of Bovino was more a rhetorical monologue than an interrogation, though Bovino is also scheduled to sit for a deposition later this week. After ordering his deposition last week along with two other high-ranking officials running Operation Midway Blitz, the judge expanded the two-hour time limit for Bovino’s deposition to five hours.
She didn’t directly ask Bovino whether he had been hit in the head with a rock like he’d claimed prior to throwing the first tear gas canister into a crowd last week in Chicago’s Little Village, a neighborhood heavily populated by Mexican immigrants. In an interview with Telemundo later that day, Bovino asked whether “Judge Ellis (got) hit in the head with a rock like I did this morning? Maybe she needs to see what that’s like before she gives an order like that.”
Nor did Ellis ask Bovino why video of him deploying tear gas doesn’t appear to show him giving two loud warnings before deploying it, as is required in her restraining order. She also didn’t ask why he threw one of the canisters over the heads of the crowd — a direct violation of her order.
But the judge did ask whether Bovino had a body-worn camera like most of the roughly 200 Border Patrol agents under his command.
“I do not,” Bovino answered. “I have not received a body-worn camera nor the training.”
Ellis told Bovino to get a camera by the end of the week and said that when she represented the Chicago Police Department years ago when cameras were installed in interrogation rooms, she’d remind detectives: “The camera is your friend.”
“If someone’s throwing a rock at your head, the camera’s going to catch it,” she said.
A body-worn camera on a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agent standing guard outside the Dirksen Federal Courthouse on Oct. 28. Under a federal judge’s temporary restraining order governing immigration agents’ use of force on civilians, agents must have their body cameras turned on when carrying out enforcement actions. (Capitol News Illinois photo by Andrew Adams)
Justifying use of force
Plaintiffs’ attorneys claimed Bovino lied about being hit by a rock and said the Trump administration generally has lied about the situation on the ground in Chicago. White House officials have claimed the only way to protect immigration agents from protesters that DHS officials have called “violent” and “rioters” is by deploying the National Guard. But a federal judge has blocked the troops’ activation in Illinois — at least until the U.S. Supreme Court weighs in.
Read more: Judge’s block on deploying National Guard extended indefinitely as Supreme Court weighs case | Judge calls feds ‘unreliable,’ temporarily blocks National Guard deployment to Illinois
Ellis’ temporary restraining order stems from a lawsuit filed early this month by protesters, journalists and clergy, mostly pertaining to their treatment by agents outside a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Chicago’s suburb of Broadview. But since then, neighborhood-level confrontations have become more common between civilians and Border Patrol agents carrying out arrests of undocumented immigrants.
In another hearing last week, a pair of Border Patrol and ICE officials told Ellis earlier use-of-force incidents, including tear gas, were justified because protesters were endangering them and impeding agents' ability to perform their mission.
The judge also went through other alleged violations over the past week, including deployment of tear gas in Chicago’s Lake View neighborhood on Friday and an agent putting a man in a chokehold during the Old Irving Park clash Saturday.
While Bovino initially said chokeholds were allowed, Ellis pulled up Border Patrol’s use of force policy and read they’re “prohibited unless deadly force is authorized.”
Ellis also highlighted more incidents from Thursday’s clash in Little Village, where a woman was thrown to the ground and a pair of agents used their body weight — including a knee in her back — to keep her restrained. Attorneys also filed photos and video documenting a man who was hit in the neck with a pepper ball while filming CBP agents, and a combat veteran who was standing on the side of the road protesting the agents as they drove by.
According to a weekend filing, the agents first pointed a pepper ball gun at the man, then a real gun and said “bang, bang ... you’re dead, liberal.”
Ellis asked whether agents could truly be feeling threatened by that man if they were already driving away from the scene.
Read more: Court scrutiny of ICE mounts as judge rules warrantless arrests violated order
“Well, your honor, I think that each situation is based on the situation,” Bovino replied. “And, you know, I’d like to know more about what happened.”
The judge agreed that she’d also like to know more. But she said, “on its face,” the evidence accompanying the allegations seems to violate her order.
“And based on the oaths we took, no one wants to do that, right?” she asked, referring to willfully violating a judicial order.
“Right,” Bovino said curtly.
Daily appearances ordered
Ellis’ temporary restraining order is set to expire Nov. 6, but she scheduled a Nov. 5 hearing on whether to convert it to a preliminary injunction. The judge ordered Bovino to show up in court every day until then to give a status update on agents’ compliance with her order, beginning Wednesday evening.
“Under the First Amendment, we cannot have people be afraid,” she told Bovino before he left the witness stand. “They don’t have to like what you’re doing. They wish you would leave Chicago and take your agents with you. And they can say that. But they can’t be tear gassed for it.”
After Bovino left the courtroom, Ellis declined to take up plaintiffs’ attorneys’ request to expand the temporary restraining order to ban tear gas altogether, saying she believed Bovino’s daily check-ins would likely curb its use. But she didn’t rule it out in the future.
“If they are using tear gas, they’d better be able to back that up,” the judge said of agents. “And if they can’t, then they will lose that as something they can use.”
Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.
This article first appeared on Capitol News Illinois and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
