Local Chicago Cops Investigating ICE For Aggravated Thug Bullsh*t

THEY SEEM DISPLEASED!

One thing you will notice this week, should you be walking around Chicago, is that practically every independent business has a sign in the window or in the doorway informing ICE that they are not welcome here. You’ll see signs in people’s apartment windows as well, wheatpasted flyers telling people what to do should they run into agents, informing them of their rights — expressions of solidarity everywhere.

After 20 ICE agents with helmets and long guns converged to kidnap tamale vendor Laura Murillo from her Back of the Yards, her neighbors took over her stand and sold over 300 tamales to raise money for her and her family.

People across the city and suburbs have even started networks to respond to and document ICE attacks and kidnappings of their neighbors, to track the agents wherever they go.

It’s a really nice thing to see, but it’s really unfortunate that we have to see it.

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Conversely, ICE agents have been making absolute asses of themselves. Gregory Bovino, commander at large for what the administration is calling “Operation Midway Blitz,” literally told a white, male, middle-aged WBEZ reporter that they are arresting people based on what they look like, pointing out that they wouldn’t look like him.

“You know, there’s many different factors that go into something like that,” Bovino said. “It would be agent experience, intelligence that indicates there’s illegal aliens in a particular place or location.

“Then, obviously, the particular characteristics of an individual, how they look. How do they look compared to, say, you?” he added, ostensibly with a straight face.

They don’t even know what they sound like.

They spent Saturday night tear-gassing the living hell out peaceful protesters, journalists, legal observers and medics outside the Broadview ICE facility.

They detained journalist Steve Held, founder of Unraveled Press.

If you are wondering why ICE agents went absolutely apeshit on a bunch of peaceful protesters, that would be because they were mad that Broadview Mayor Katrina Thompson sent a letter to ICE Field Office Director Russell Hott accusing the agents of “making war on my community” and criticizing them for putting her town’s residents in danger, exposing citizens, protesters, first responders, and even the town’s law enforcement to chemical munitions and doing things like trying to run protesters over with their cars.

Also, running over random pedestrians with their cars.

Broadview police chief Thomas Mills is saying that, on top of being required to devote 75 percent of his department to “crowd control” for the ICE facility, ICE agents have verbally attacked him and exposed his officers to pepper spray while they were trying to investigate an incident in which an ICE agent in a pickup truck hit a pedestrian and just continued on his merry way.

Broadview police are also investigating ICE agents who just started pelting CBS News Chicago reporter Asal Rezaei’s car with pepper balls for no reason on Sunday night.

Via Chicago Sun-Times:

The chemical round hit Rezaei’s driver’s-side panel, causing the chemical powder to fill the inside of her truck, leaving white residue on her windshield and causing her face to feel “on fire for at least the last 10 minutes or so,” Rezaei told Broadview police, according to the report. The chemical also caused her to vomit once outside her truck.

“At this moment it’s not really clear why that officer took a shot at me,” she said in a police report cited by CBS News Chicago. “My car has been here several times, although I did not identify myself verbally as a member of the press. There were no protests going on. […] There was actually nobody there except one other person that was a member of a fire department that was there checking in on the buildings around this area.”

In a statement Monday, the Chicago Headline Club — the nation’s largest chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists — said it was aware of several incidents of reporters being shot intentionally with bean bags, chemical munitions and the detention of Chicago journalist Steve Held Saturday.

Many agents spent Sunday “patrolling” the most touristy areas of the city downtown, making a big show of their presence and even attempting to kidnap a food delivery worker.

It’s not clear what they thought they were going to find in the Chicago river, but they “patrolled” that, too.

Were they concerned that some of the tourists on the architecture boat tour may have overstayed their visas?

What did they do next? Go to the American Girl store on Michigan Ave and start taking all the Kirsten dolls into custody? Stand by the Nutella Café to see if anyone got any foreign-sounding names printed on their personalized Nutella jars? Investigate brunch spots serving huevos rancheros?

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They did, however, somehow manage to find and film two whole “Chicago residents” sitting by themselves at Storyville in River North (while they were closed, by the looks of it) thanking them for their service, giving Bovino (gonna point out that this means “bovine” in Italian) the opportunity to say “We work for you!”

Boy, that definitely does not seem staged at all! Surely, there was an entirely normal reason for someone who also loved ICE to be standing there, filming, at that exact moment.

I’d say that ICE agents are embarrassing themselves, but it seems highly unlikely that they are even capable of being embarrassed or feeling shame of any kind.