Carol Stream police say ICE agents appeared during traffic stop
Carol Stream police were in the middle of a traffic stop Thursday morning when federal immigration agents arrived and told them they planned to arrest the woman they’d just pulled over, per a news release from the west suburban police department.
Illinois law prohibits local police departments from assisting with federal immigration enforcement, although the practical meaning of assistance versus obligations to basic public safety has been a subject of intense debate over the year since President Donald Trump’s administration launched Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago and the suburbs.
In its news release, Carol Stream police said they had no advance notice that ICE was going to take enforcement action against the two people in the car, a 24-year-old man and a 30-year old woman who was driving.
“Rather, ICE agents approached Carol Stream officers while the department’s independent traffic enforcement action was already underway,” the release said.
The department’s statement did not discuss whether agents actually arrested either of the two people in the car. Representatives from the Department of Homeland Security didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The department has opened an investigation into the stop to make sure its officers followed the Illinois TRUST Act and local policy, its news release said.
Cops pulled a car over near the intersection of Army Trail Road and Gary Avenue just after 8 a.m. Thursday, and were preparing citations against the driver for cannabis possession and driving on a suspended registration, the release said.
According to the release, ICE agents approached a Carol Stream officer midway through paperwork for those citations. They said they had an arrest warrant for the woman and “intended to take enforcement action” following the traffic stop, the release stated.
Carol Stream police then issued their citations and left the area.
Local police departments throughout the Chicago area, and Illinois as a whole, have repeatedly found themselves navigating grey zones of the TRUST Act since federal authorities stepped up immigration enforcement in the city and suburbs.
Chicago police have alternately been accused of disregarding federal agents’ 911 calls and aiding immigration enforcement through traffic stops and crowd control. The department’s handling of Midway Blitz is currently the subject of a probe by Chicago’s Office of Inspector General.
But former superintendent Larry Snelling insisted throughout Midway Blitz and for months afterward that his cops were focused on the basics of public safety and that “without our officers being there, these scenes would have been way more violent.”
Elsewhere in the Chicago area, west suburban Forest Park leaders and residents have recently debated what constitutes assisting federal agents after an ICE agent briefly tried to get away from a filming protester inside the village police station. In Palatine, after a police officer helped agents physically restrain an arrestee in front of an angry crowd, his department said the cop’s actions was a necessary response to deescalate a tense situation.
Even leaders whose political brands rest in part on their opposition to Midway Blitz have found themselves in grey zones of the TRUST Act. Gov. JB Pritzker, a vociferously anti-Trump politician, has deployed state police to the processing center in Broadview to effect traffic and crowd control amid intense protests that spiraled into deployment of chemical munitions and physical confrontations between federal agents and demonstrators.