Leo Feler’s message to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Friday began with him quoting the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Standing at a downtown news conference with local elected leaders, the 45-year-old Lakeview resident then said masked federal agents violated that foundational language that sets warrant requirements and prohibits illegal searches by bursting onto his property last week and leaving a bloody scene in his garage while trying to arrest construction workers who were installing windows on his building.
“I think many of you and many of the viewers who are watching this will have similar experiences as me,” Feler said. “Across the United States, these types of jobs are done disproportionately by Hispanic and Latino workers. So I have a question for all of you and for all of the viewers: Should the U.S. government be allowed to invade your property, to jump over a locked fence, to come on to your home?”
Feler, an economist, showed the Tribune security footage time-stamped to Oct. 24 that featured what appeared to be federal agents, faces shielded with bandanas, running through a gangway and struggling to pull down a man who was straddling a fence mid-escape.
One worker was detained inside his garage, Feler said, adding that the agents did not appear to have a warrant at any point.
“I spent most of last weekend cleaning up blood at my property,” Feler said. “Every now and then, I’ll still be walking around and there will be a spot of blood I failed to clean up, and I will clean that up.”
Neighbors blowing whistles — as well as Feler yelling, “ICE, you are not allowed on my property. Get off my property. This is the United States. You are going into people’s homes” — dominated much of the audio in his security camera footage.
In one video, an agent hops over a fence and a voice off-camera then remarks, “You made me cut myself, and when I cut myself, I get mad.”
DHS spokespeople did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
However, Feler also had gripes with local leadership in Chicago.
He said he filed a police report Monday accusing the federal agents of criminal damage to property but received a call from a sergeant that afternoon saying “his higher-ups told him not to pursue it.”
Feler then addressed the media gaggle directly: “So I am asking you to come with me to the police precinct after this press conference to help me.”
A Chicago police spokesperson clarified later Friday that in fact “a police report was generated and the victim was provided a Victim Information Notice.”
But Feler then showed the Tribune his phone records from the day he said the sergeant called him with the disappointing message. The Chicago police Area 3 detective bureau was listed as the caller ID.
Chicago is bound by a sanctuary city ordinance that prohibits local police from cooperating with federal immigration officials. And as President Donald Trump’s unpopular deportation campaign in the nation’s third-largest city progresses, residents have grown increasingly emboldened to confront federal agents directly and try to physically block them from carrying out raids.
Mayor Brandon Johnson has nodded to that sentiment, signing a flurry of executive orders banning immigration agents from using city land or private property to carry out their deportation operations. He has even called for criminal charges against federal officers who violate his municipal decrees, and bristled at the notion that they were merely “symbolic.”
But the mayor has yet to offer specifics on how he thinks enforcement against such agents should work. At the time Johnson signed the orders, Chicago police Superintendent Larry Snelling said that cops will not and cannot arrest federal agents “because someone deems what they are doing is illegal.”
Chicago Police Department spokespeople didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday about Feler’s complaint. His alderman, Bennett Lawson, walked out with him after the news conference and promised to contact police district leadership on his behalf.
Friday’s news conference at the Cook County Building was convened by U.S. Rep. Mike Quigley, a Chicago Democrat who called for DHS’ Office of the Inspector General to investigate abuses by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection during their operations in the Chicago area.
Quigley stopped short of saying federal agents should be prosecuted under a future Democratic president but noted that “documentation” was a good first step.
“ICE and CBP have blatantly violated the rights of Chicagoans since they arrived in our city,” Quigley said. “They have racially profiled citizens.”
Another speaker the congressman brought up was Vanessa Aguirre-Avalos, the owner of the Luna y Cielo Play Cafe in Logan Square. She choked back tears as she laid out the lasting effects of the tear gas deployment from early this month outside her business as well as Funston Elementary School.
“My business has suffered deeply because our families are too afraid to go out. I am behind on rent, and may soon have to close my business, a space built to keep our culture and our language and our children’s joy alive,” Aguirre-Avalos said.
Aguirre-Avalos said one 3-year-old girl who has attended her day care since she was an infant clung tightly to her mother that afternoon and asked, “Mommy, what happened?”
“Now whenever she sees police lights, she freezes, reliving that trauma from Oct. 3,” Aguirre-Avalos said. “I’m deeply worried about the trauma this is causing our children.”
All the while, arrests by federal immigration officers mount — including at O’Hare International Airport, where a waiting area for rideshare drivers has been the grounds for more than 50 arrests. That parking lot is city property; the Johnson administration has responded to the immigration raids there by installing signage and security to keep the federal agents out, but they aren’t working.
Johnson, asked by the Tribune this week what he will do about immigration officers flouting his executive orders, said “we’ll have to look at every single tool to hold this administration accountable.”
Asked how soon, the mayor said: “Soon. As soon as possible.”
