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

Even without the national guard, law enforcement agencies of the federal government have been using military hardware and tactics on civilian targets.

At a low-rent apartment complex on Chicago’s south shore, people started hearing the boots hit the roof around one in the morning. The oh-dark-thirty immigration enforcement raid in the early hours of 1 October featured an air assault from helicopters. Officers went door to door in the building, using charges to blow the hinges off doors and flashbang grenades to clear apartments. They hauled men, women and children from the building in zip ties and often little else, ostensibly to capture undocumented gang members.

The troubled apartment building at 7500 S South Shore Drive hadn’t passed an annual inspection since 2022. With the remains of doors and furniture and the bloodied, scattered belongings of former tenants in tatters, it may struggle to pass another.

“So many of these people remain without shelter or a place to live because it essentially rendered their homes and that entire apartment complex uninhabitable,” said Colleen Connell, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois. She described the apartment raid as a military-style attack. Days afterward, the building looked like a war zone, which may be the point.

Addressing an assembly of high-ranking military officers last week, Donald Trump in impromptu comments called for the military to use American cities as “training grounds for our military”. The comment was a continuation of his belligerence toward cities full of Democratic voters and nonwhite populations, delivered a couple of weeks after he meme-posted an image cribbed from the war movie Apocalypse Now about going to “war” in Chicago.

For those on the receiving end of federal force from masked agents in military fatigues, a flashbang grenade thrown by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agent or a soldier may be a distinction without a difference.

Mónica Solórzano was standing next to the mayor of Carpinteria, a farm town in southern California, watching Ice raid a marijuana farm when a flashbang grenade went off at her feet.

“The canister flashed and made a loud explosive sound, like a firecracker. The noise hurt my ears,” she wrote in a deposition for a suit filed by the Los Angeles Press Club in July, seeking an injunction against attacks on the press, protesters and observers there during the administration’s immigration enforcement surge. “When the flashbang detonated, the people around me started screaming and running. I fell to the ground and thought I was going to be trampled.”

Solórzano, a Carpinteria city council member, was one of dozens of witnesses who described homeland security officers wearing military-style fatigues, using armored personnel carriers and military equipment as they rolled through communities as part of Ice’s surge.

Flashbang grenades are standard tools for clearing a room when soldiers conduct military operations on urban terrain. But the use of them by civilian police officers has been sharply curtailed, with many jurisdictions banning them entirely.

“The use of flash-bang or stun grenades for crowd control is an example of the inappropriate, inadequately regulated use of military weapons for crowd management,” wrote California physician Rohini J Haar, offering expert testimony for the LA Press Club suit. “While the stated objective of stun grenades is to cause disorientation and a temporary sense of panic, the potential for severe blast injuries and even death caused by the pressure of the blast or by shrapnel from the fragmentation of plastic and metal constituents of the grenade is disproportionately high. The blinding light and deafening sound they produce can also cause injuries indiscriminately.”

Haar is the author of Lethal in Disguise: The Health Consequences of Crowd-Control Weapons, a report cataloguing deaths from flashbang use.

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

“Treating a US city like a war zone is intolerable,” wrote a group of eight Democratic lawmakers on the US House homeland security committee, asking the Department of Homeland Security to produce arrest or search warrants for the operation, arrest figures, confirmation of anyone they claim was a member of Tren de Aragua, and a justification for the “heavy-handed” tactics employed. “Please detail why helicopters were needed for this operation,” they asked. “Which agency provided the helicopters and agents manning them?”

DHS has not responded to their questions, nor to those of the Guardian.

Gil Kerlikowske, former commissioner of Customs and Border Protection and former Seattle police chief, reviewed the testimony offered in support of the LA Press Club suit, concluding that DHS had regularly engaged in excessive use of force.

“Some of the agencies involved have no responsibility for urban crowd control, such as Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), which is an investigative agency within DHS, that typically does fraud investigations and human trafficking investigations,” Kerlikowske wrote in an affidavit. “Similarly, the Special Response Team (SRT) is a tactical unit with DHS that is part of CBP Office of Field Operations that executes dangerous warrants. It also provided security for me, when I was head of CBP. These officers are not accustomed to policing urban civil unrest; nor are they trained to do so.”

A preliminary injunction was granted last month barring LA police from arresting journalists and limiting their use of force.

Even without reference to the use of national guard troops and equipment in support of enforcing the law – a proposition by Trump that federal courts have rejected multiple times this year – the use of military equipment and military tactics like armored vehicles, Black Hawk helicopters, Predator drones and military weapons by civilian law enforcement in the administration has drawn notice and condemnation.

The police agencies of large cities have experience with street protests, and the crowd-control tactics permitted to those agencies are often the result of arduous, deeply argued policy debates by locally elected leaders.

That’s not what Chicago is seeing on the ground.

“What we have seen in particular is the shooting of projectiles, so-called nonlethal rounds, at protesters and at members of the press,” said Connell of the ACLU. “Rather than shooting at the ground, we’ve seen actual incidents of protesters and the press being hit by those projectiles. … We’ve seen an exacerbation of the sort of display of military-style equipment and tactics, whether it’s an armored vehicle with an armed, masked, camouflaged Ice agent or other federal law enforcement agent atop the turret, armed with heavy military-style equipment.”

Journalists from Block Club Chicago, the Chicago Headline Club and other press organizations filed suit Monday in federal court, seeking an injunction against the federal government for actions against journalists outside the Broadview Ice facility. Four of Block Club’s journalists were “indiscriminately shot with pepper-spray bullets and tear-gassed by federal agents” while covering the raid. The lawsuit is an attempt to bar federal agents from, among other things, indiscriminately using chemical weapons against journalists asserting their first amendment right to report.

While federal agencies could fly a helicopter in for a raid on an apartment building in Chicago, many civilians in the Windy City have been locked out of their drones for two weeks.

Citing “special security reasons”, the Federal Aviation Administration imposed a 12-day-long ban on drone flights by anyone without a special commercial operating exemption across a 15-nautical-mile radius around the Ice facility near Chicago. As a practical matter, it denies anyone except news stations with a helicopter from observing federal operations from the air. Practiced drone operators – and journalists – have little experience with this kind of airspace control.

“I’ve had a drone license basically with the FAA for almost as long as that program has existed – at least eight years – and I’ve never seen anything like that before,” said Adam Rose, press rights chair of the LA Press Club and deputy director of advocacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation. “They’re trying to basically take their militarization techniques to the sky. They’re trying to keep the enemy out of the sky, the enemy being anyone who is observing them.”

Rose notes that the no-fly space above Los Angeles during the protests earlier this year was 900 times smaller than Chicago, but that DHS filled that airspace with Predator drones drawn from the border to surveil crowds.

“It doesn’t matter what uniform they wear, whether they are federal agents or troops, they are bound by 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 need to be held accountable”.