Chicago Judge Rules ICE Goons Officially Lying Liars After Top Border Goon Admits He Lied F*cking Lied
Lordy, some day let there be consequences!
It’s been a wild week in Illinois courts thanks to Operation Midway Blitz, President Trump’s pro-fascist assault on the residents of Chicago. Here’s updates to the three most conscience-shocking court thingys going on.
Gregory Bovino, DHS agents officially liars
On Wednesday in the federal District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, Judge Sara Ellis heard from a parade of witnesses who described DHS goons trying to make chaos and chill speech by attacking journalists, priests, and children with pepper balls, rubber bullets, and tear gas with no warnings.
And Judge Ellis reviewed footage and last week’s deposition of 5’4”-ish Border Commander Op At Large Gregory Bovino, who has been in charge of incursions into Chicago and Los Angeles, and who answers directly to Kristi Noem.
YESTERDAY!
Then on Thursday, following a reading of the Carl Sandburg poem “Chicago,” Judge Ellis extended the restrictions that she issued last month, with no stay for appeal, ordering agents to wear body cameras, give at least two audible warnings before using riot control weapons, and to use those weapons only to “preserve life or prevent catastrophic outcomes.” And she determined that Bovino was a bald-faced liar, and that the government’s evidence was “simply not credible.”
So. Many. Lies.
Bovino admitted that he lied about getting hit in the head with a rock before personally throwing not one, but two tear gas canisters at high schoolers who were running away, and only admitted he lied after he got caught caught on camera, she noted.
And agents lied about somebody in a crowd setting off fireworks as a justification for using tear gas. That somebody was … themselves! Setting off flash-bang grenades! And not only did agents violate her order by issuing no warning, they laughed and mocked a retreating crowd with “HAVE FUN” while they threw tear gas at them.
Judge Ellis noted Bovino lied about getting kicked in the nuts, and even if he hadn’t, punching the person in the head repeatedly and bashing his head on the pavement was not an appropriate amount of force. The entire squad, just indulging their sick fantasies, wilding out and lying shamelessly, operating as if cameras and consequences do not exist.
And Judge Ellis was extra-disgusted with how Bovino had personally slammed Oak Park Township Trustee Juan Muñoz to the ground with no warning, kneed him in the back, zip-tied him and held with no charges, and paraded him in front of Kristi Noem like a prized show dog. “They grabbed us for a photo op. We were on display for her,” Muñoz said. Then he was detained for eight hours with no charges before being dumped at a remote gas station.
Noted Judge Ellis, “The use of force shocks the conscience.”
Other judge: Clean up your shit, ICE
While Judge Ellis was busy being shocked and appalled in the Northern District, in a different courtroom, so was Judge Robert Gettleman, who heard a lawsuit from detainees at the Broadview ICE facility.
Protesters have been gathering there daily since this whole incursion began, and that was also where on October 3 DHS Secretary Kristi Noem strutted about on the roof, licking her rubber lips at the sniper rifles trained at people. Turns out that beneath those Louboutin heels was literal mountains of shit from overflowing toilets.
Maybe she needs all those pairs of high heels to stay above the crap rivers she has to wade through at her torture prisons!
Judge Gettleman noted that detainees are being held with inadequate places to sleep, no mattresses, in cells with no clocks. They haven’t been getting enough food, water, or hygiene products, are being denied access to medical care, lawyers, telephones, and translators and translated documents, and have been getting disappeared into the system without being entered into the Detainee Locator System. In other words, the same Geneva Convention-violating conditions that have been described in all of their other facilities, like the one those 300-something poor South Korean workers were stuck at for more than a week in Georgia.
PREVIOUSLY!
All people not charged with anything, many of them US citizens, or with the proper work papers, like the day care care worker they arrested in an armed raid in front of children like she was some kind of Al-Qaeda. Because they are not checking anybody’s papers, just shoving them indiscriminately in vans, after Kavanaugh-stopping them for looking suspicious.
And so Judge Gettleman literally ordered DHS to clean up their shit, and quit starving people, and fix the rest of those things. Will they? Let’s see!
And finally,
ICE agent OOPS destroyed evidence in the case of the woman he shot
And as if all that was not enough to shock the conscience of anybody who has one, there’s the ongoing case of Marimar Martinez and Anthony Ian Santos Ruiz, who were also back in court Wednesday.
You may recall this incident from October 4, a day after Kristi Noem got agents all pumped up by demanding they GO HARD and strutting around on that roof, and after hours of protesters and federal agents facing off in the streets.
Marimar Martinez, 30, and Anthony Ian Santos Ruiz, 21, were arrested and federally charged after Martinez got shot five times by federal agents after they claim she hit their car with hers.
Also a correction/update from a previous story, it turns out the video of car-ramming that was we posted which had been circulating labeled as this incident was actually from a different, separate incident that coincidentally happened six blocks away at almost the same time and also on Kedzie Avenue! And that driver is still at large. That’s the kind of chaotic shit going on in Noem’s wake.
Anyway, below, video of the cars before THIS incident from security cameras. Martinez is driving the grey Nissan Rogue sedan, and Ruiz is in the black GMC Envoy. Which contradicts DHS’s assertion that the agents were being menaced by a group of 10 cars. And Martinez seems to be staying in her lane.
Let us note, DHS has lied about damn near everything in this case, in their rush to get out a narrative. Spokesclown Tricia McLaughlin had claimed that Martinez drove herself to a hospital, but then DHS’s complaint said she was taken in an ambulance. Agents had claimed that they shot Martinez because she was brandishing a semi-automatic weapon, but there wasn’t one, though Martinez did have a legally licensed handgun, which her lawyer says had remained in her purse. And Martinez was not charged with any weapons violations, only the alleged car-ramming.
The agents had claimed they were forced to shoot because they were in fear for their lives, but one of the officers, Supervisory Border Patrol Agent Charles Exum, had taken the time to shout before firing, “Do something, bitch!” before shooting at her seven times. Which would sure seem to imply she had not yet actually done anything worth Exum shooting her for.
And while Exum had claimed that Martinez had rammed them, a curious thing happened to the DHS Chevy Tahoe involved. First Martinez’s lawyer says he was not allowed to examine it closely, and then government lawyers told the court that whoops, the vehicle was no longer in their custody. It had been photographed, but then within days Exum drove it on a field trip to his hometown in Maine! Where his buddies at the car shop buffed out all of the damage.
And photographs of the Tahoe show scuffing of a sideswiping. Is this evidence she was ramming them so hard that Charles Exum had no other choice but to start blasting? You be the reconstruction expert!
And so now a new hearing will determine if evidence was mishandled, with testimony from FBI agents, a US attorney, and an actual professional accident reconstruction expert who will opine as to who hit whom. Sure sounds like the government doesn’t want anyone figuring that out. But oops, the car’s computer will show if he was speeding up or slowing down too, won’t it? Unless it is now under some beaver dam in Maine!
And Exum’s texts came out, because he is not a smart man, it would seem. He bragged to a co-worker about the shooting and savored what an unhinged asshole he had been, sending them a link to a Guardian story with the headline “Federal agents taunted Chicago woman to ‘do something’ before shooting her, attorney claims.”
“Read it, 5 shots, 7 holes,” he crowed. “Put that in your book, boys.”
“Oh well, shit happens.”
“I’m up for another round of ‘fuck around and find out.’”
“Sweet. My 15 minutes of fame. Lmao”
Yes, indeed, Bovino and these dumbshit agents are having their 15 minutes of fame! No wonder they hate body cameras and being filmed and don’t want agents to show their faces in public. Maybe nobody will figure out it is them! But derp, technology, uh, finds a way.
Hopefully someday they will all have a period of accountability for the abuses they’ve been heaping on the people of Chicago, though the White House and certain six scuzzos on the Supreme Court will sure do everything they can to keep that from happening.
And as Judge Ellis concluded her Thursday hearing, via John Adams, “Liberty once lost is lost forever.” The three legs of liberty’s stool have all been kicked out from under us, so legal reckoning could be a long time coming. But we are trying to not be cynical!
[Chicago Sun-Times / Heather Cherone on BlueSky]
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OT: I'm watching a young PD completely embarrass a sheriff's deputy -- a sergeant, no less -- on the witness stand. This kid is gonna make a cop cry some day soon. He's a fucking star.
Judge Ellis began giving her ‘Use of Force Shocks the Conscience’ ruling yesterday reading Carl Sandburg’s poem “Chicago,” then saying “This is a vibrant place, brimming with vitality and hope, striving to move forward from police brutality and gun violence. The government would have people believe, instead, that the Chicagoland area is in a vice hold of violence, ransacked by rioters and attacked by agitators. That simply is untrue.” https://poets.org/poem/chicago