His face uncovered and wearing dress clothes in place of his military fatigues, U.S. Border Patrol Agent Paul Delgado strode to the front of a federal courtroom Wednesday morning to testify about a cut on his leg and a slammed car door that preceded the arrest of a Lakeview comedy club manager and U.S. citizen.
The three-hour preliminary examination hearing, held in a 25th-floor courtroom before U.S. District Judge Holleb Hotaling, offered a narrow window into the operations of a pair of federal teams whose enforcement actions Oct. 24 unleashed chaos around Chicago’s upscale North Side.
“It is clear that the agents were not on a frolic,” Hotaling said after nearly an hour of consideration and a relatively rare hearing into whether it was appropriate to forward Nathan Griffin’s assault charges on to a grand jury. “The government has met its very low burden … to determine there is probable cause.”
It also showed the aftermath of one of the day’s highest-profile arrests: that of an American citizen working as manager of the Laugh Factory comedy club, whom federal prosecutors accused of slamming the door on Delgado’s leg.
Agents’ body camera footage that captured Griffin’s arrest and transport back to the Chicago FBI headquarters mostly shows Griffin handcuffed between two agents and unleashing a steady stream of invectives about the morality of Operation Midway Blitz and the agents’ personal role in the enforcement surge, about to enter its third month in and around Chicago.
At one point, Griffin apparently remarks on the agents’ race, saying, “all of you guys are Hispanic, huh? All of you guys are just an (expletive) disgrace.”
He is evidently aware that he is being recorded, at one point leaning into the lens and saying “you see me, camera? I’m an American (expletive) citizen.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeff Snell played lengthy portions of the footage to argue his point that Griffin was hostile toward the agents and had intentionally assaulted them, although Hotaling toward the end questioned the point of doing so since she didn’t know “how much of that is going toward what we are here for.”
“I think the defendant’s expressed views go toward intent,” Snell said.
But federal defense attorney Akane Tsuruta zeroed in on a few seconds of footage just before Griffin’s arrest and used her line of questioning to cast doubt on whether the agents had in fact been performing their official duties in the moments leading up to the tussle with Griffin.
Delgado testified that he and another agent, Alfonzo Garcia, were part of a “quick reaction force” meant to provide security for a different carload of agents known as “strike team one.”
On the witness stand, Delgado was nearly indistinguishable from the thousands of men who stream into Loop office buildings every weekday. His neatly parted hair, white dress shirt and blue slacks were a marked contrast with how he appeared on the bodycamera footage — in the black face mask and military dress that have become the de facto face of the Trump administration’s “blitz.”
His appearance was very much unlike the recent one involving his boss, Cmdr. Gregory Bovino, who appeared at the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse in fatigues and looking the part of a commander of a militarized force.
Delgado spoke in a deep, slow voice to answer attorneys’ questions and recount the events of Oct. 24, when he and a group of other agents were coming back from conducting an arrest at Belmont and Broadway.
One agent had dropped his body camera, Delgado testified. Delgado had forgotten he had picked it up when the agents returned to the scene a few minutes later, he said.
Delgado’s car, carrying him and three other agents, was tailing the car of “strike team one” when he testified he saw a crowd of people forming around the other vehicle and tried to get out of the car.
He testified that he has been in Chicago since Oct. 19, driving with different federal officers almost every day in rental cars organized by the government. The cars usually stay consistent, he testified — but “In certain circumstances we change vehicles,” he said. He did not elaborate on what those circumstances were.He described the quick reaction force’s job as to “provide a perimeter around (strike team one) … so that nobody gets close to them.”
Neither Delgado nor Garcia, the second agent to testify, were able to recall how far away their car had been from the first vehicle whose team they were charged with protecting.
But in a still-image from the body camera, the first car carrying strike team one wasn’t immediately visible. Nor was the crowd around the car Delgado had testified about earlier.
“If you didn’t know where vehicle one is at this time, how are you protecting strike team one is?” Tsuruta said. “How are you protecting strike team one when they’re not there?”
