Protesters clash with police outside Chicago as court allows National Guard troops to stay
As a court battle continues over whether President Trump can legally deploy the National Guard in Illinois, a brawl broke out between protesters and state police at an immigration detention facility near Chicago on Saturday night.
The protest, which was largely a peaceful gathering of a few hundred people at the facility in Broadview, quickly turned chaotic, with protesters jumping a series of concrete barriers, stopping traffic and violating police orders to stay off the street.
By 8 p.m., 15 people had been arrested, according to Matthew Waldberg, spokesman for the Cook County Sheriff’s Office and the unified command of the protests, which includes local and state police. Eight of the arrests occurred during the evening chaos, while seven took place in the early hours of the same day.
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility has been a flashpoint for weeks as protesters express their anger and frustration over Trump’s crackdown on immigrants with slogans, signs and shaking fists. Law enforcement has responded with tear gas and plastic pellets multiple times in the past two weeks. Last week, police attacked a priest in the head with a plastic pepper ball.
Tensions rose last week when Trump announced his intention to deploy federal National Guard troops from Illinois and Texas to protect ICE and its facility.
An appeals court on Saturday paused a lower court’s decision that halted the deployment of the National Guard in Illinois for two weeks. The new order says 300 troops from Illinois and 200 from Texas can remain under federal control but cannot be deployed.
White House officials commemorated “Ongoing violent riots and lawlessness” that local law enforcement has been unable to suppress as justification for deploying troops. Twenty soldiers from California were also sent to Illinois to provide “refresher training.”
At the ICE facility in Broadview on Saturday night, police pulled out wooden batons and pushed the crowd into the street, threatening to use tear gas if people did not disperse and go home. Protesters largely retreated, but a few threw objects at police lines and clashes broke out.
A woman was knocked to the ground by police and her head hit the concrete pavement. A man wearing all black and a gas mask was grabbed by police and pushed to the ground before being handcuffed and taken away.
The clashes in the Chicago area come as Trump stepped up enforcement against immigrants and deployed federal troops in several Democratic-run cities this summer, starting with Los Angeles. The National Guard patrolled with local police in Memphis last week, while troop deployments were put on hold in Portland after the state of Oregon objected to the move. The administration claims the city has become lawless, while Oregon officials claim Trump manufactured a crisis to justify calling in the National Guard.
More than 100 locations throughout the Chicago area 1000 people arrested by federal immigration officials since the Trump administration stepped up its “Midway Blitz” program to deport immigrants last month. on friday, Chicago TV news producer He was pushed to the ground and arrested during the ICE raid. Two women were arrested by ICE agents outside an elementary school. In previous weeks, an ICE-A Blackhawk helicopter flew over a Southside apartment building in one operation. This resulted in dozens of people, including children and the elderly, being zip-tied and temporarily detained. Thirty-seven people were arrested.
The mayor of Broadview issued a citywide order banning protests before 9 a.m. and after 6 p.m., and that order was enforced.
“It was intense, it was overwhelming,” said Dominique Dandridge, who lives across the street from the detention center and watched the vans come and go at all hours of the night.
Between clashes with law enforcement, there were many outages where social media influencers tried to make their mark. Selfie sticks were as common at the Broadview protests as gas masks, balaclavas, goggles and flags.
Don Lemon, a former CNN journalist and now YouTuber, wandered through the small crowd on Friday and Saturday, followed by a cameraman, two crew members and a security guard.
Then there was Cam Higby, a conservative social media influencer from Seattle who toured college campuses and challenged students to debate him. His presence angered some protesters, who chanted “Temu Charlie Kirk,” suggesting he was a cheap version of the conservative influencer who was fatally shot while speaking on a college campus in Utah in September.
Also there was 23-year-old conservative influencer Nick Shirley. On Friday, he was escorted to the ICE facility by armed agents. Protesters jeered him as he walked, following him with their phone cameras as he pointed his own camera at them.
He told a reporter that he was at the facility for training and that he would be livestreaming an ICE raid that weekend.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
