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a senior border Patrol officers who have become the face of trump administration’s immigration action los angeles And chicago He is scheduled to appear in court Tuesday to raise questions about the enforcement campaign in the Chicago area, which has resulted in more than 1,800 arrests and complaints of excessive force.
The hearing comes after a judge earlier this month ordered uniformed immigration agents to wear body cameras, the latest step in a lawsuit by news outlets and protesters who say federal agents used excessive force, including using tear gas, during protests against immigration crackdowns.
Greg Bovino, chief of the Border Patrol region in El Centro, California, one of nine regions Mexican The protesters themselves are accused of throwing tear gas shells at the border.
U.S. District Judge Sarah Ellis initially said agents would have to wear badges, and she banned them from using certain riot control techniques against peaceful protesters and journalists. She later said she was concerned that agents were not following her order after seeing footage of street confrontations involving tear gas during the administration’s Operation Midway Blitz, and she revised the order to also require body cameras.
Ellis last week extended Bovino’s questioning from two hours to five because she wanted to hear about a recent use of force by agents in Little Village, the city’s Mexican enclave. During an enforcement operation in Little Village and the nearby suburb of Cicero last week, at least eight people, including four US citizens, were detained before protesters gathered at the scene, local officials said.
Lawyers representing news outlets and a coalition of protesters claim that Bovino himself violated the order in Little Village and filed a still image of video footage where he was allegedly “throwing tear gas into the crowd without any justification.”
Over the weekend, masked federal agents and unmarked SUVs were seen in the city’s wealthy, predominantly white neighborhoods of Lakeview and Lincoln Park on the North Side, where footage showed chemical agents deployed on a residential street. Federal agents have been seen and videotaped firing tear gas on residential streets several times over the past few weeks.
Bovino also led an immigration crackdown in Los Angeles in recent months, leading to thousands of arrests. Agents broke car windows, blew down the door of a house, and patrolled MacArthur Park on horseback. In Chicago, similar Border Patrol operations have led to footage of tense confrontations with protesters that have gone viral.
At a previous hearing, Ellis questioned U.S. Customs and Border Protection Deputy Incident Commander Kyle Harwick and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Deputy Field Office Director Shawn Byers about their agencies’ use of force policies and the distribution of body cameras. Harwick said there are about 200 Border Patrol deputies in the Chicago area, and those who are part of Operation Midway Blitz have cameras. But Byers said expanding the use of the cameras beyond the agency’s two field offices would require more money from Congress.