Enforcing US immigration laws using military equipment and tactics on civilians Trump administration

Even without the National Guard, federal government law enforcement agencies have used military equipment and tactics against civilian targets.

At a low-rent apartment complex on Chicago’s South Shore, people started hearing shoes hitting the ceiling around 1 a.m. Immigration enforcement raid in the early hours of October 1 It was characterized by an air attack from helicopters. Officers went from door to door in the building, using bombs to blow off door hinges and grenades to evacuate apartments. They dragged men, women, and children from the building with zip ties and often little else, ostensibly to catch unregistered gang members.

the troubled The apartment building at 7500 S South Shore Drive has not passed an annual inspection since 2022. With the remains of doors, furniture and scattered, blood-stained belongings of the previous tenants in tatters, it may have a hard time passing another.

“A lot of these people are still without shelter or a place to live because it has made their homes and the entire apartment complex uninhabitable,” said Colleen Connell, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois. The raid on the apartment was described as a military-style attack. Days later, the building looked like a war zone, and that may have been the point.

Addressing a gathering of senior military officers last week, Donald Trump in offhand comments called on the military to use American cities as “training grounds for our military.” The comment was a continuation of his hostility toward cities filled with Democratic voters and non-white residents, which he made two weeks after he posted an image taken from the war movie Apocalypse Now about going to “war” in Chicago.

For those who receive federal force from masked agents in uniform, a grenade thrown by an ICE agent or soldier may be a distinction without a difference.

Monica Solorzano was standing next to the mayor of Carpinteria, a farming town in Southern California, watching Ice raid a marijuana farm when a grenade exploded at her feet.

“The device flashed and made a loud explosive sound, like a firecracker. The noise hurt my ears,” she wrote in testimony to a lawsuit filed by the Los Angeles Press Club in July, seeking an injunction against attacks on the press, protesters and observers there during the administration’s increased immigration enforcement. “When the explosion went off, people around me started screaming and running. I fell to the ground and thought I was going to get run over.”

Solorzano, a Carpinteria City Council member, was one of dozens of witnesses who described Homeland Security officers wearing military fatigues, using armored personnel carriers and military equipment as they drove through communities as part of the icy wave.

Flashbang grenades are standard room-clearing tools when soldiers conduct military operations on urban terrain. But their use by civilian police officers has been sharply curtailed, with many jurisdictions banning them entirely.

“The use of stun grenades or stun grenades for crowd control is an example of the inappropriate and insufficiently regulated use of military weapons for crowd management,” wrote California physician Rohini J. Har, who provided expert testimony in the Los Angeles Press Club lawsuit. “While the stated purpose of stun grenades is to cause confusion and a temporary feeling of panic, the potential for serious blast injury and even death from blast pressure or shrapnel from fragments of the grenade’s plastic and metal components is disproportionately high. The blinding light and deafening sound they produce can also cause indiscriminate casualties.”

Haar is the author of the book Disguised killer: The health consequences of crowd control weaponsa report classifying deaths resulting from flash use.

Federal agents used grenades to disperse crowds of protesters in California in July, and as room-clearing munitions during a raid on an apartment building in Chicago last week.

“Treating an American city like a war zone is intolerable.” books A group of eight Democratic lawmakers on the US House Homeland Security Committee are asking the Department of Homeland Security to provide arrest or search warrants for the operation, arrest numbers, confirmation of anyone they claim is a member of the Tren de Aragua, and justification for the “heavy-handed” tactics used. “Please explain why helicopters are needed for this operation,” they asked. “What agency provided the helicopters and the agents who operated them?”

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to their questions, nor to those of the Guardian.

Gil Kerlikowski, the former commissioner of Customs and Border Protection and former Seattle police chief, reviewed testimony submitted in support of the Los Angeles Press Club’s lawsuit and concluded that the Department of Homeland Security regularly engaged in excessive use of force.

“Some of the agencies involved do not have any responsibility for crowd control in urban areas, such as Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), an investigative agency within the Department of Homeland Security, which typically conducts fraud investigations and human trafficking investigations,” Kerlikowski wrote in an affidavit. “Similarly, the Special Response Team (SRT) is a DHS tactical unit that is part of CBP’s Office of Field Operations that executes serious arrest warrants. It also provided security for me when I was chief of CBP. These officers are not accustomed to monitoring civil unrest in urban areas, nor are they trained to do so.”

A preliminary injunction was issued last month barring the Los Angeles Police Department from arresting journalists and limiting their use of force.

Even without mentioning the use of National Guard troops and equipment to support law enforcement — a proposal made by Trump and rejected by federal courts several times this year — the use of military equipment and military tactics such as armored vehicles, Black Hawk helicopters, Predator drones and military weapons by the administration’s civilian law enforcement has drawn attention and condemnation.

Police agencies in major cities have experience dealing with street protests, and the crowd control methods allowed for those agencies are often the result of arduous and deeply debated policy debates by locally elected leaders.

This is not what Chicago sees in reality.

“What we’ve seen in particular is projectiles being fired, so-called non-lethal rounds, at protesters and at journalists,” said the ACLU’s Connell. “Instead of shooting on the ground, we’ve seen actual incidents of protesters and the press being hit by these projectiles… We’ve seen an exacerbation in the kind of display of military equipment and tactics, whether it’s an armored vehicle with an armed, masked, camouflaged snow agent or some other federal law enforcement agent on top of the tower, armed with heavy military-grade equipment.”

Journalists from Block Club Chicago, Chicago Headline Club and other journalism organizations Suit filed Monday in federal court, seeking an injunction against the federal government for actions against journalists outside the Broadview Ice facility. Four Block Club journalists were “randomly shot with pepper spray and tear gas by federal agents” while covering the raid. The lawsuit is an attempt to prevent federal agents from, among other things, indiscriminately using chemical weapons against journalists who assert their First Amendment right to report.

While federal agencies can use a helicopter to launch a raid on an apartment building in Chicago, several civilians in the Windy City have been banned from using their drones for two weeks.

The Federal Aviation Administration, based on “special security reasons,” imposed a flight ban 12 day ban On drone flights by anyone without exception private commercial operation within a 15 nautical mile radius around the ice facility near Chicago. In practice, it deprives anyone except news stations with a helicopter from observing federal operations from the air. Drone operators — and journalists — don’t have much experience with this type of airspace control.

“I’ve had a drone license from the FAA for almost as long as this program has been in existence — at least eight years — and I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Adam Rose, press rights chair of the Los Angeles Press Club and deputy director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation. “They’re basically trying to take their militarization techniques into the sky. They’re trying to keep the enemy out of the sky, and the enemy is anyone watching them.”

Rose points out that the no-fly zone over Los Angeles during protests earlier this year was 900 times smaller than Chicago, but the Department of Homeland Security filled that airspace with Predator drones pulled from the border to monitor crowds.

“It doesn’t matter what uniform they’re wearing, whether they’re federal agents or soldiers, they’re bound by the Constitution,” said Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project. “People need to know that if any member of the federal force violates their rights, they must be held accountable.”