CHICAGO and PORTLAND, Ore.—ICE agents’ violent and vicious assaults on people, citizens and non-citizens, journalists and innocent bystanders are facing judicial and union flak in Chicago and in Portland, Ore.
In Portland, the city and the state already obtained a federal judge’s temporary restraining order preventing President Donald Trump from sending more troops to occupy the city, ostensibly to protect federal property, but in reality causes disruption to everyday life that helps divide and conquer the working-class majority in the country.
In Chicago, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Cummings planned a hearing last week on whether ICE is breaking a three-year-old agreement banning ICE agents from arresting and deporting people without a warrant unless the agents have “probable cause” to believe the person is illegally in the U.S. and is a flight risk. The hearing was postponed due to the partial federal government shutdown.
Judge Cummings may not wait for the government to reopen before deciding the case, since he already has written documents and exhibits from both the National Immigrant Justice Center and the Chicago branch of the ACLU on one side, and the Trump regime on the other. ICE is “systematically violating the law,” the lead attorney for the justice center told the Chicago Tribune.
Judge Cummings’s hearing on the consent decree is not the sole court case ICE faces in the Windy City.
The Chicago suburb of Broadview, site of ICE’s detention center, marched into federal court for an order telling Trump’s Homeland Security Department to tear down an 8-foot-high steel wall the agency erected in front of it, splitting Beach Street and thus closing it to emergency vehicles.
And The Illinois Press Association, Local 41 of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, the Chicago Headline Club and the Block Club of Chicago also sued ICE on October 3 for its violation of the Constitution’s 1st Amendment freedom of the press, by beating, harassing and shooting tear gas and pepper balls at reporters covering arrests and follow-up protests at the ICE detention center in Broadview. The Chicago Newspaper Guild is finalizing a statement supporting that suit, too.
“The Headline Club is aware of incidents of journalists being shot intentionally with bean bags, chemical munitions, and at least one working journalist being taken into custody,” its board’s statement said. “Journalists have a constitutionally protected right to cover stories as afforded by the First Amendment. No federal or state agency should interfere with that right either by threats or action taken against working journalists.”
Broadview went nowhere in bargaining with ICE’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, over ICE’s closure of Beach Street by erecting an 8-foot-high steel fence splitting the street in the middle of the block in front of the detention center. So it sued, too, at Acting Fire Chief Matthew Martin’s request.
Meanwhile, the ICE agents are still gleefully dragooning people off the streets, out of cars, invading schools and churches, and nabbing people like an Ecuadoran family in Chicago, including their 5-year-old daughter—while beating up migrants, peaceful protesters, and news reporters.
The National Immigrant Justice Center and the Chicago branch of the ACLU are handling the case in Judge Cummings’s court, the Chicago Tribune reported.
In Portland, U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut, whom Trump put on the bench during his prior term, had scathing words for ICE—and Trump—and their charge that Portland is, in Trump’s words, a war zone. The judge found, instead, that the protests in Portland were “small and uneventful.”
“This country has a longstanding and foundational tradition of resistance to government overreach, especially in the form of military intrusion into civil affairs,” the judge wrote. “This historical tradition boils down to a simple proposition: This is a nation of Constitutional law, not martial law.”
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