On January 31, one week after Border Patrol agents fatally shot Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Mayor Brandon Johnson signed an executive order directing Chicago police to investigate and document alleged illegal activity by federal immigration agents and identify the agents involved.
“This executive order will make Chicago the first city in the country to set the groundwork to prosecute ICE and Border Patrol agents for criminal misconduct,” Johnson said at the signing ceremony, to cheers from assembled supporters. “We need to send a clear message: if the federal government will not hold these rogue actors accountable, then Chicago will do everything in our power to bring these agents to justice.”
What that power is remains to be seen. Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neil Burke released a statement saying her office was not consulted on the executive order. “Because this order changes the process of how felony charges are evaluated, a thorough analysis is being conducted to assess its legality,” it read. The statement added the State’s Attorney’s Office is “committed to doing all we can under the law to support and review law enforcement investigations of that conduct and prosecute when appropriate.”
In an internal email obtained by WTTW, Burke wrote that Johnson’s order is “wholly inappropriate.” She has also declined to join Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner’s coalition, the Project for the Fight Against Federal Overreach, which includes DAs from Texas, Virginia, Arizona and Minnesota. One of the coalition’s goals is for states to effectively investigate and prosecute federal immigration agents when they are accused of state crimes like assault or homicide—a process the Trump administration has obstructed by instructing the FBI to take over investigations into shootings by federal agents and claiming those agents have “absolute immunity.”
Burke’s office has not brought charges against the still-unidentified federal agent who fatally shot Silverio Villegas González in suburban Franklin Park in September, or against Charles Exum, a Border Patrol agent who shot and wounded Marimar Martínez in Chicago in October. Only one federal agent has been charged with a crime in Cook County since Operation Midway Blitz began last year: ICE agent Adam Saracco, who faces a misdemeanor count of battery for allegedly shoving a protester to the ground in Brookfield, IL while off duty.
Can police and prosecutors be relied on to reign in federal agents? It doesn’t seem likely. Outside Minneapolis’s Whipple federal building, Minnesota state police have arrested and beaten nonviolent protesters, echoing scenes outside the ICE detention center in Broadview, IL, where Cook County sheriffs and Illinois state police arrested and brutalized demonstrators in the fall. In Los Angeles, the county sheriff and LAPD have said their departments—both of which have arrested anti-ICE protesters—will not enforce a statewide ban on immigration agents wearing masks.
In Chicago, Police Superintendent Larry Snelling hasn’t commented on Johnson’s executive order, but he has been publicly reluctant to charge federal immigration agents, saying his officers “cannot and will not” arrest them. Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) President John Catanzara decried the executive order as potentially placing cops in legal jeopardy. The Civilian Office of Police Accountability claims it doesn’t have the purview to investigate Chicago cops who’ve been accused of violating the Welcoming City Ordinance. The Community Commission on Public Safety and Accountability (CCPSA) has been reticent, prompting hundreds of residents to pack a hearing last month and excoriate commissioners for what they deemed a lack of proper oversight.
Police and prosecutors are part of the same criminal-justice apparatus that the federal government is using to detain, dehumanize, and deport our neighbors. The tactics used by ICE and Border Patrol in their campaigns of terror have their roots in the strategies used by local police against Black and brown residents for decades.
As the speakers at the CCPSA meeting repeatedly asserted: only we can keep each other safe.