A Chicago federal judge appeared poised Friday to order at least a portion of the thousands of people detained in \u201cOperation Midway Blitz\u201d released on electronic monitoring while litigation continues over whether immigration officials have violated a consent decree restricting so-called warrantless arrests.<\/p>\n
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Cummings asked for simultaneous briefs next week that will lay out how many of the some 3,000 people arrested since early September would qualify for automatic detention under federal law, including those with prior criminal convictions or removal orders, as well as others that federal law enforcement argues should stay in custody as a safety threat.<\/p>\n
The plaintiffs have accused federal officials of repeatedly breaking the terms<\/a> of the consent decree and asked that Cummings issue a blanket order releasing most of the detainees on ankle monitoring. The government, meanwhile, said plaintiffs were trying to \u201cpaint with a broad brush\u201d and that the validity of detaining someone should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.<\/p>\n During Friday\u2019s 90-minute hearing, Cummings ruled that the consent decree, which was originally hashed out in 2022 with only the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, now covers all agents participating in Chicago immigration operations, including Customs and Border Patrol. It also applies to other immigration enforcement going on in cities nationwide.<\/p>\n Cummings also had tough questions for government lawyers about the treatment of people swept up in the Chicago area, asking at one point whether they could certify that detainees were being held in \u201csafe and sanitary conditions\u201d and had access to an attorney.<\/p>\n When William Weiland, civil litigation attorney for the Department of Justice, argued the plaintiffs were attempting to \u201cshoehorn\u201d issues into the consent decree that don\u2019t belong there, Cummings pointed out that it was the defendants that brought it up in their own brief, which accused the plaintiffs of \u201cexaggerating\u201d the detainees\u2019 maltreatment.<\/p>\n \u201cCan you certify to me as an officer of the court that potential class members who are being detained are being held in safe and sanitary conditions in detention facilities?\u201d Cummings asked.<\/p>\n \u201cNo I cannot,\u201d Weiland said, offering to retract it from the filing.<\/p>\n \u201cThen why would you put that in your brief?\u201d Cummings said. \u201cDon\u2019t make that statement if you can\u2019t back it up.\u201d<\/p>\n Cummings said he\u2019d rule on the detention issue after receiving the updated briefs, which are due Oct. 31.<\/p>\n Known as the Casta\u00f1on Nava settlement agreement, the consent decree issued by Cummings during the Biden administration bars agents from making warrantless immigration arrests unless they have probable cause to believe someone is in the U.S. unlawfully and that the person is a flight risk.<\/p>\n It was originally supposed to sunset in March. Instead, after the Trump administration began ramping up immigration enforcement efforts in January, lawyers for the National Immigrant Justice Center and ACLU alleged dozens of violations, mostly involving \u201ccollateral arrests,\u201d or the detaining of individuals who are not targets.<\/p>\n In his Oct. 7 order<\/a> extending the consent decree until February, Cummings said ICE had improperly told its field offices over the summer that the consent decree had been canceled. He also called into question the recent immigration raid on an apartment building in South Shore<\/a>, where agents in military gear burst through doors and zip-tied residents regardless of citizenship.<\/p>\n And the judge also took particular issue with a practice by ICE agents of carrying blank warrant forms known as I-200s with them on missions and filling them out at the scene.<\/p>\n In his opinion, which extended the consent decree until February, Cummings ordered ICE to produce names, detainee tracking information known as \u201cA-numbers,\u201d and arrest documents for anyone arrested in northern Illinois without warrants since June. He also ordered ICE to broadcast the conditions of the consent decree order to its offices nationwide.<\/p>\n In his ruling, Cummings gave a lengthy interpretation of the importance of probable cause, which he said is \u201cheightened by ICE\u2019s embrace\u201d of the race- and employment-based standards set forth recently by the Supreme Court.<\/p>\n Cummings said foreign nationals are \u201cinterwoven\u201d with legal residents throughout Chicago, putting U.S. citizens and noncitizens with legal status in jeopardy of being \u201csubjected to ICE questioning for sometimes lengthy periods of detention\u201d during indiscriminate immigration sweeps.<\/p>\n To make his point, the judge referenced the raid in South Shore on Sept. 30, where roughly 300 immigration officers and other law enforcement personnel, supported by Black Hawk helicopters, ransacked the apartment building at 7500 S. South Shore Drive, detaining dozens of people for questioning.<\/p>\n DHS claimed the raid targeted the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua and said 37 people were arrested on immigration violations, but have since provided no further details.<\/p>\n Cummings said in his ruling that many details of the raid remain unknown, including the number of warrantless or collateral arrests that were made and whether any of the true targets of the mission were even found there.<\/p>\n \u201cHowever, one thing seems clear: ICE rousted American citizens from their apartments during the middle of the night and detained them \u2014 in zip ties no less \u2014 for far longer than the \u2018brief\u2019 period authorized by the operative regulation,\u201d Cummings wrote.<\/p>\n jmeisner@chicagotribune.com<\/p>\n Originally Published: October 24, 2025 at 4:43 PM CDT<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Chicago federal judge appeared poised Friday to order at least a portion of the thousands of people…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":330230,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5124],"tags":[960,5295,5386,1818,163989,409,1370,50,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-330229","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-chicago","8":"tag-chicago","9":"tag-crime-and-public-safety","10":"tag-il","11":"tag-illinois","12":"tag-immi","13":"tag-immigration","14":"tag-latest-headlines","15":"tag-news","16":"tag-politics"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115431695019579135","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=330229"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330229\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/330230"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=330229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=330229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=330229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}