The Latest: Federal immigration officers in Chicago area required to wear body cameras, judge says
News > Politics & Government News
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8:16 AM on Thursday, October 16
By The Associated Press
Federal immigration officers in the Chicago area will be required to wear body cameras, U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis said Thursday after seeing tear gas and other aggressive steps used against protesters. Community efforts to oppose U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have ramped up in the nation’s third-largest city, where neighborhood groups have assembled to monitor ICE activity and film incidents involving agents. More than 1,000 immigrants have been arrested since September.
Separately, President Donald Trump’s administration has tried to deploy National Guard troops, but the strategy was halted last week by a different judge.
Ellis last week said agents in the area must wear badges, and she banned them from using certain riot control techniques against peaceful protesters and journalists. “I’m having concerns about my order being followed,” the judge said.
U.S. Justice Department attorney Sean Skedzielewski laid blame on “one-sided and selectively edited media reports.” He also said it wouldn’t be possible to distribute cameras immediately.
The Latest:
The University of Pennsylvania is the latest campus to reject President Donald Trump’s higher-education “compact.”
The Ivy League university told Trump officials that it “respectfully declines” to sign the agreement, according to a campus message from Penn President J. Larry Jameson. The message cited “substantive concerns” but did not elaborate.
It follows other rejections from Brown University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Penn faced pressure to turn the deal down, including from its faculty senate and state Democrats.
The Trump administration invited nine universities to become initial signatories of the compact, offering “multiple positive benefits” including favorable access to federal funding. In exchange, universities were asked to make commitments aligned with Trump’s agenda.
It asked for commitments to remove race from admissions decisions, to promote conservative views on campus, to limit protests and to ensure “institutional neutrality” on current events, among other provisions
President Donald Trump on Thursday warned Hamas “we will have no choice but to go in and kill them” if internal bloodshed persists in Gaza.
The grim warning from Trump came after he previously downplayed the internal violence in the territory since a ceasefire went into effect last week.
Trump said Tuesday that Hamas had taken out “a couple of gangs that were very bad” and had killed a number of gang members. “That didn’t bother me much, to be honest with you,” he said.
▶ Read more about Gaza
President Donald Trump said Thursday that he’ll meet with Russia’s Vladimir Putin in Hungary to try to resolve the war in Ukraine, but a date has yet to be determined.
Trump spoke with Putin on Thursday as he considers Ukraine’s push for long-range missiles. The call comes ahead of Trump’s meeting on Friday at the White House with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has been pressing Trump to sell Kyiv Tomahawk missiles that would allow Ukrainian forces to strike deeper into Russian territory. Zelenskyy has argued such strikes would help compel Putin to take Trump’s calls for direct negotiations between Russia and Ukraine to end the war more seriously.
▶ Read more about Russia-Ukraine War
Democratic Gov. Maura Healey on Thursday dismissed U.S. President Donald Trump’s threats to move World Cup matches scheduled to take place in Massachusetts as “political theatre.”
“Oh, God. Come on. You know, that’s just more political theater, so I don’t really pay that too much mind,” she said, when asked about Trump’s comments by a reporter at a press conference in Boston.
Healey said “it doesn’t make any sense” for the matches to be moved, and emphasized that Massachusetts has some of the lowest crime statistics in the U.S. She said Patriots Owner Robert Kraft and others have been working hard planning for the events, set to take place at Gillette Stadium, and they have safety measures “under control.”
“But that’s another day, another Donald Trump comment. So you got to understand what that is,” Healey told reporters.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker is praising a federal judge’s ruling requiring federal immigration agents in the Chicago to wear body cameras.
Pritzker, a Democrat, told reporters Thursday that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s statements about arrests are often inaccurate.
That includes last month’s fatal shooting of a suburban Chicago man. DHS officials initially said an officer was “seriously” injured but local police body camera showed him saying his injuries were “nothing major.”
“They clearly lie about what goes on,” Pritzker said. “It’s hard for us to know right away what the truth is.”
Judge Lewis A. Kaplan said in a ruling Thursday that the Republican administration’s decision to withhold the earmarked money, based on the Big Apple’s “sanctuary city” protections for illegal immigrants, was “arbitrary, capricious, and a blatant violation of the law.”
The post-9/11 Transit Security Grant Program, Kaplan noted, was created with instructions that money be allocated solely on the basis of terrorism risk. The judge had previously issued an order temporarily freezing the move.
The state sued Department of Homeland Security after it said last month that it was eliminating funding for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the city’s transit system.
The MTA said its allocation, the largest of any transit agency, pays for targeted counterterrorism patrols, security equipment, infrastructure enhancements, cybersecurity technology and weapons detection technologies.
A new initiative launched Thursday seeks to provide immigrants with free access to lawyers by donating funds to legal service providers that work in legal deserts, areas near U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement detention centers, or communities with large immigrant populations.
Defending Our Neighbors Fund, created by the American Civil Liberties Union, United We Dream and Abundant Futures Fund, aims to raise $30 million. It already raised $10 million before its public launch.
Money will go to nonprofit legal service providers that have seen their budgets shrink, such as those providing representation for unaccompanied child immigrants.
“So one lawyer can mean one more family kept whole. One fund can mean one more future protected,” Greisa Martinez-Rosas, executive director of United We Dream, said.
The U.S. president wrote on his social media site that he is on the phone with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
“I am speaking to President Putin now. The conversation is ongoing, a lengthy one, and I will report the contents, as will President Putin, at its conclusion. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” Trump said on Truth Social late Thursday morning.
The call comes ahead of Trump’s meeting on Friday at the White House with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The Ukrainian leader has been pressing Trump to sell Kyiv Tomahawk missiles, which would allow Ukrainian forces to strike deeper into Russian territory.
In response to a federal judge saying she will require immigration agents in the Chicago area to wear body cameras, an attorney for the federal government said they don’t have body cameras.
Sean Skedzielewski also said the Department of Homeland Security has limited resources to hand those out immediately.
U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis responded: “I understand that. I would not be expecting agents to wear body worn cameras they do not have.”
She said details could be worked out starting at an additional hearing on Monday.
The top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Robert Garcia, is sending a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi that criticizes the Department of Justice’s handling of a congressional subpoena for the investigative files into the late financier Jeffrey Epstein.
“Your response to our bipartisan subpoena has been completely insufficient,” Garcia writes. “The only production of documents by DOJ consisted almost entirely of documents that were either already public or in the Committee’s possession.”
Garcia said that the Justice Department has not turned over any documents since Aug. 22.
House Speaker Mike Johnson has repeatedly pointed to the House Oversight Committee’s inquiry as he tries to stave off an effort to hold a vote on a bill to force the Justice Department to publicly release the files.
A federal judge has dismissed a defamation lawsuit filed by two IRS agents against a lawyer for Hunter Biden.
Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler alleged in their complaint in federal court in Washington, D.C., that attorney Abbe Lowell had defamed them when he complained about leaks of grand jury information about the tax crimes investigation of Biden, who is the son of President Joe Biden.
But U.S. District Judge Richard Leon dismissed the lawsuit Thursday, saying among other things that the statements at issue are constitutionally protected opinions and that the plaintiffs failed to show that Lowell had acted with actual malic
House Speaker Mike Johnson ended his news conference Thursday on the federal government shutdown a bit riled up but quickly caught himself.
“I don’t like being mad Mike. I want to be happy Mike,” Johnson said, prompting laughter from colleagues and reporters in the room. “I want to be a happy warrior, but I’m so upset about this. God bless America. We’re done.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson said he’s at a loss on how to answer an often-asked question from reporters. How will the federal government shutdown end?
“We have no idea,” Johnson said.
Johnson’s comments came as he kicked off the daily news conference that congressional leaders of both parties have been holding as they attempt to shape public opinion on the shutdown, which began Oct. 1
The comments underscore the lack of progress that has been made in resolving the impasse. Johnson said Democrats have offered “no common-sense path forward for ending this situation.”
At Thursday’s federal court hearing, Judge Sara L. Ellis also raised concerns about a high-speed car chase Tuesday on the Chicago’s South Side as Border Patrol agents pursued a driver before using tear gas on protesters and residents who were gathering in the residential neighborhood.
She said that while some agents may be accustomed to working along the U.S.-Mexico border, Chicago is an “urban, densely populated area, where appropriate crowd control is important, where trying to apprehend people is very, very different.”
“I have to tell you there’s a reason the Chicago Police Department has policies about car chases and where they occur and when you need to stop,” she said.
A federal judge on Thursday said she will require that immigration officers in the Chicago area must wear body cameras. She also said they did not follow a previous order from her barring the use of tear gas and other weapons on peaceful protesters and journalists.
U.S. District Judge Sara L. Ellis in Chicago said she was “profoundly concerned” about reports of tear gas use since last her previous ruling last week. That decision also said federal agents must wear badges.
“I’m not happy,” Ellis said. “I’m really not happy.”
Ellis demanded that the operation’s field director appears in court Monday. She noted instances where news outlets have reported that tear gas was deployed without giving people warning and images of federal agents in plainclothes without their alphanumeric identifiers carrying out immigration operations.
“I live in Chicago, if folks haven’t noticed,” she said. “And I’m not blind.”
Sean Skedzielewski, an attorney for the federal government, laid blame with “one-sided and selectively edited media reports.”
Most see it as a significant problem as it stretches through its third week with no end in sight, a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows. And Americans are blaming all of the major players involved.
Roughly 6 in 10 Americans say Trump and Republicans in Congress have “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of responsibility for the shutdown, while 54% say the same about Democrats in Congress, the poll shows.
“Trump’s blaming the Democrats, and the Democrats are blaming the Republicans,” said Jason Beck, a Republican from Utah. “We’re stuck because there’s no middle ground anymore.”
The poll also finds that more Americans favor than oppose extending health insurance subsidies, which Democrats are demanding to end the stalemate. A large share, 42%, have no opinion, suggesting many are not closely following the core dispute.
Miami-based Oceania Cruises, part of Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings, told the Associated Press on Thursday that they are now “revising select itineraries” in Asia and replacing port calls in mainland China, due to new port fees that China imposed on American-owned or -operated vessels, which came into effect this week.
China imposed the tit-for-tat fees in retaliation for similar port fees that the U.S. slapped on Chinese-owned or -operated ships docking in the U.S. American ships are subjected to a 400 yuan ($56) per net ton fee for each voyage if they berth at Chinese ports.
“Ships can no longer effectively visit mainland Chinese ports,” an Oceania Cruises spokesperson said in a statement Thursday.
“We share in the disappointment of these necessary changes and are committed to providing our guests with itineraries that deliver exceptional destination experiences,” the Oceania Cruises spokesperson added.
