US immigration enforcement using military hardware and tactics on civilians | Trump administration

Even without the national guard, the federal government’s law enforcement agencies use military hardware and tactics against civilian targets.

At a low-rent apartment complex on Chicago’s southside, people began hearing boots pounding on the roof around 1 a.m. Ah-dark-thirty immigration enforcement raid in the early hours of October 1 An air attack was launched from helicopters. Officers went door to door in the building, using bombs to blow door hinges and throwing flash grenades to clear apartments. Ostensibly to capture undocumented gang members, they removed men, women, and children from the building with zip ties and often with very little.

problem The apartment building at 7500 S South Shore Drive had not had an annual inspection since 2022. With the remains of doors and furniture and the bloody, messy belongings of former tenants shattered into pieces, one might have a hard time getting past another.

“Many of these people are without shelter or a place to live because it has made their homes and entire apartment complexes uninhabitable,” said Colleen Connell, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois. He described the apartment raid as a military-style attack. Days later, the building looked like a battlefield, which may have been the real purpose.

Speaking to a meeting of senior military officers last week, Donald Trump made impromptu remarks calling for the military to use American cities as “training grounds for our military.” The comment was a continuation of his aggression against cities filled with Democratic voters and non-white populations, and came just weeks after he meme-posted an image from the war movie Apocalypse Now about going to “war” in Chicago.

For those exposed to federal force by masked agents in military fatigues, a flash grenade thrown by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officer or a soldier may be a distinction without a difference.

Mónica Solórzano was standing next to the mayor of Carpinteria, a Southern California farm town, watching Ice raid a marijuana farm when a flash grenade exploded at her feet.

“The pole glowed and made a loud booming sound, like fireworks. The noise hurt my ears,” he wrote in a lawsuit filed in July by the Los Angeles Press Club, seeking an injunction against attacks on the press, protesters and observers there during the administration’s immigration enforcement. “When the flashbang went off, people around me started screaming and running. I fell to the ground and thought I was going to be crushed.”

Solórzano, a Carpinteria city councilman, was one of dozens of witnesses who described homeland guards wearing military-style clothing, using armored personnel carriers and military equipment as they moved through communities as part of Ice’s rise.

Flashbang grenades are standard tools used to clear a room when soldiers are conducting military operations in urban terrain. But their use by plainclothes police officers has been sharply restricted, and many jurisdictions have banned them entirely.

“The use of flash bangs or stun grenades to control crowds is an example of the improper, inadequately regulated use of military weapons for crowd management,” wrote California physician Rohini J Haar, who testified as an expert witness for the Los Angeles Press Club case. “Although the stated purpose of stun grenades is to create disorientation and a temporary sense of panic, the potential for serious blast injuries and even death from shrapnel resulting from the pressure of the explosion or the fragmentation of the grenade’s plastic and metal components is disproportionately high. The blinding light and deafening sound they produce can also cause indiscriminate injuries.”

Author of Haar Deadly in Disguise: Health Consequences of Crowd Control WeaponsA report cataloging deaths resulting from flashbang use.

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

“It is unacceptable for a US city to be treated as a war zone” wrote A group of eight Democratic lawmakers on the U.S. House of Representatives homeland security committee is demanding that the Department of Homeland Security provide arrest or search warrants for the operation, arrest figures, confirmation of individuals they claim are members of Tren de Aragua, and a justification for “hardcore” tactics employed. “Please explain in detail why helicopters are needed for this operation,” they asked. “Which agency provided the helicopters and the agents manning them?”

DHS did not respond to either their questions or the Guardian’s.

Gil Kerlikowske, former commissioner of Customs and Border Protection and former Seattle police chief, reviewed testimony submitted in support of the LA Press Club lawsuit and concluded that DHS regularly used excessive force.

“Some of the relevant agencies, such as Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), which is an investigative agency within DHS and typically conducts fraud investigations and human trafficking investigations, have no responsibility for urban crowd control,” Kerlikowske wrote in a statement. “Similarly, the Special Response Team (SRT) is a tactical unit that is part of CBP’s Office of Field Operations, which executes dangerous orders alongside DHS. It also provided security for me when I was chief of CBP. These officers are not used to policing urban civil unrest and are not trained to do so.”

An injunction was issued last month banning LA police from arresting journalists and limiting their use of force.

Even without reference to the use of national guard troops and equipment to support law enforcement (a proposal Trump has rejected multiple times this year in federal courts), 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 agencies has attracted attention and condemnation.

Police departments in major cities have experience with street protests, and the crowd control tactics authorized by these agencies are often the result of difficult, deeply debated policy debates by locally elected leaders.

That’s not what Chicago sees on the field.

“We have seen so-called non-lethal rounds being fired, particularly at protesters and members of the press,” said the ACLU’s Connell. “Instead of shooting into the ground, we’ve seen actual incidents where protesters and press have been hit by these rounds….Whether it’s an armored vehicle with an armed, masked, camouflaged Ice agent or another federal law enforcement agent in the turret armed with heavy military-style equipment, we’ve seen some sort of deterioration in the display of military-style equipment and tactics.”

Journalists from Block Club Chicago, Chicago Headline Club and other media outlets lawsuit filed A request for injunctive relief was filed Monday in federal court against the federal government over actions taken against journalists outside the Broadview Ice facility. Four Block Club journalists were “indiscriminately shot with pepper spray bullets and tear gassed by federal agents” while covering the raid. The case is an attempt to prevent federal agents from using chemical weapons indiscriminately against journalists who, among other things, are claiming their First Amendment right to report.

While federal agencies were able to fly helicopters to raid a Chicago apartment building, many civilians in the Windy City were kept away from drones for two weeks.

The Federal Aviation Administration imposed a sanction, citing “specific security reasons.” Banned for 12 days Drone flights by anyone without a special commercial enterprise exemption within a 15 nautical mile radius around the Ice facility near Chicago. Practically speaking, no one except helicopter news stations is prohibited from observing federal operations from the air. Experienced drone operators and journalists have little experience with this type of airspace control.

“I’ve had a drone license from the FAA for almost as long as this program has existed — at least eight years — and I’ve never seen anything like it before,” said Adam Rose, president of press rights at the LA Press Club and deputy director of advocacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation. “They’re actually trying to take militarization techniques into the sky. They’re trying to keep the enemy out of the sky, the enemy could be anyone who observes them.”

Rose notes that during the protests earlier this year, the no-fly zone over Los Angeles was 900 times smaller than Chicago, but DHS filled that airspace with Predator drones pulled over the border to monitor crowds.

“It doesn’t matter what uniform they wear, whether they’re federal agents or soldiers, they are subject to 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.”