UPDATE: Consent Decree Extended. See below and here for more details.
Over a six-day period in May 2018, ICE arrested and detained more than 100 people across the Chicago area in “Operation Keep Safe.” Among other tactics, ICE stopped people who officers thought may be Latino, made warrantless arrests, and posed as local police stopping cars for minor traffic issues.
Within weeks of this operation, two Chicago residents who had been swept up by ICE’s unlawful practices sued in federal court. Through their counsel at the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC), the plaintiffs sought to represent a class of individuals who had been or would be similarly unlawfully stopped and detained by ICE.
These men were soon joined by additional individual plaintiffs and two organizations, Illinois Coalition for Immigration and Refugee Rights (ICIRR) and Organized Communities Against Deportations (OCAD), which serve the communities affected by ICE’s unlawful invasions.
The federal government asked the court to dismiss the case, and the ACLU of Illinois joined as co-counsel to oppose that request and further support the plaintiffs’ demands for injunctive relief.
On December 1, 2021, a federal judge granted preliminary approval to a settlement agreement between our clients and the Department of Homeland Security. The judge granted final approval of the settlement agreement, making it a consent decree in February 2022.
Among other terms, the consent decree requires ICE to adopt a nationwide policy barring many vehicle stops and warrantless, “collateral” arrests, and provides us a way to advocate for ICE detainees who are arrested without warrants in Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Missouri, Kansas, or Kentucky to challenge detentions that violate the agreement.
In March 2025, with NIJC on behalf of ICIRR and OCAD, we filed an enforcement motion because Defendants had wrongfully arrested at least 22 class members, all Latino immigrants, in Chicago and Liberty, Missouri. We told the court that ICE agents regularly carried blank warrants and filled them out only after detaining someone. In May, we also filed a motion asking the court to extend the decree in light of repeated violations by ICE in the wake of new federal civil immigration enforcement. In September, we filed two notices of 30 more violations of the decree – warrantless arrests of Latino immigrants as part of ICE’s Operation Midway Blitz. On October 7, 2025, a federal court judge granted our motion to enforce the decree and extended the decree until February 2, 2026.
The judge’s ruling requires ICE to reissue its Broadcast Policy on Warrantless Arrests nationwide and produce any information for people arrested in the Chicagoland area since June 2025 so that we can assess if ICE violated the consent decree. The order requires ICE to meet with us about violations of the decree to resolve them, and remedies can include the release of individuals from detention.
On November 13, 2025, the judge ordered the government to release 13 individuals who had been arrested and detained unlawfully under the consent decree. Further, the judge ordered the government to release up to an additional 615 people on or before November 21st at 12:00 p.m. – either with a $1500 bond or under another alternative to detention (such as an ankle monitor) unless the government could justify continued detention as a high public safety risk. The government filed a report showing that only a small handful of those in this 615 list had any criminal record, although others were still labeled as a “high risk” by the government. The release of almost 600 people will mean that they will not endure the horrible conditions of ICE’s detention facilities (as reflected in our case, Moreno Gonzalez v. Noem, where we obtained a Temporary Restraining Order for the Broadview ICE Facility) and any pressure to voluntarily depart the country.
The release of the initial 13 individuals and those from the list of 615 will be followed by an examination of more than 3000 people arrested and detained during “Operation Midway Blitz,” many of whom are believed to have been taken into custody in violation of the consent decree.
The government has appealed both the October 7 order and the November 13 order.
We encourage anyone who believes a loved one or client has been arrested in Illinois without a warrant in violation of the consent decree to report it to ICIRR’s Family Support Network by calling (855) 435-7693. If the person was arrested in Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, Wisconsin, or Southern Illinois, please complete this referral form (available in English and Spanish).
