The first of four unmarked U.S. Border Patrol vehicles rolls onto a narrow one-way street in Albany Park.
An agent in the back seat starts his body camera. At first, the footage includes no audio but shows the driver putting on his face mask.
The vehicle, a black SUV with tinted windows, passes apartments and houses. Then it passes two young men in the street. The agents stop and get out. Both men take off running.
One of the agents draws a pistol while chasing a man, who quickly surrenders, raising his hands. The agent’s body-cam audio starts as he pushes the man to the ground at gunpoint.
“Hands behind your back!” he commands, pulling out handcuffs.
“Por qué estás corriendo?” he asks in Spanish — why are you running?
As the agent walks his detainee back to the SUV, his bodycam microphone picks up two whistles in the distance, the beginning of a brief but intense neighborhood rebellion against the agents that ends with their decision to deploy a riot-control weapon.
Chicagoans have become accustomed to disturbing social media posts showing footage of Border Patrol agents lobbing tear gas at protesters, knocking people to the ground and loading handcuffed detainees into the back seat of unmarked SUVs.
But those images have mostly come from the perspective of residents recording the events with their smartphones.
Now, more than 40 hours of videos from the agents’ own body cameras provide a different point of view — and raise new questions about a Chicago-area deportation campaign dubbed Operation Midway Blitz.
WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times have sorted through those videos, released to the public last month in a federal court case. We focused on the Sawyer Avenue incident, an Oct. 12 clash that ends not with mayhem but a powerful critique of the agents’ mission — condemnation delivered quietly by the detainee himself, speaking Spanish to fellow Latinos as they spirit him away in the federal vehicle.
“I got one,” an agent tells his team about the detainee as a young woman approaches on the 4500 block of North Sawyer Avenue.
“Hey, what are you doing?” she asks him. “What’s your name?”
“Don’t impede,” he snaps back.
“What am I impeding?” she replies.
“Don’t impede,” he repeats.
She presses: “I’m asking questions. What am I impeding?”
“If you don’t get out of the way, I’m going to arrest you for impeding,” the agent warns. “That’s what I’m doing.”
Amid the back-and-forth, people from the block start to converge.
A woman in a skeleton costume whips out her phone to record. A man wearing a black T-shirt — “antifascista” emblazoned across the chest — tells the agents they don’t belong there. A man in a red sweater announces he is a lawyer.
“Who’s the defendant here? Who’s the suspect?” he demands to be told. “I’m an attorney. I’d like to speak with my client!”
Some of the neighbors move in front of the SUV as the agents put a seat belt around the detainee.
But no one locks that door. Before long, one of the neighbors opens it.
The arresting agent, now in the backseat with the detainee, draws his pistol again and points it out the door.
“Hey, what are you doing?” the detainee recoils in Spanish.
“What the f— is that!” Antifascista Man erupts outside the SUV about the weapon.
The agents close the door.
“Hey, we need QRF here ASAP,” one of them tells a boss, using the Border Patrol jargon for “quick reaction force,” a specialized backup unit.
Agents arrive in two more SUVs and a pickup truck, all unmarked.
One of them, recording on a bodycam of his own, rummages around the backseat and grabs a rifle.
The crowd keeps growing.
“Get back!” an agent orders the attorney before pushing him away.
“Ouch, my back!” the attorney yells. “He assaulted me!”
The SUV in front — the one carrying the detainee — rolls slowly through the crowd, including a woman who briefly backpedals with her hands on the front hood before jumping out of the way.
The SUV creeps through the crowd before speeding off. But the other federal vehicles remain on the block. Many of the agents are still on the street.
Antifacista Man approaches one: “He’s a Latino. Look at his face. Latino traitor! This guy’s a traitor!”
A woman in a bathrobe gets in an agent’s face and tells him he has no right to the Chicago Cubs cap he’s wearing.
“You have nothing to do with this city,” she says. “Your mother would be so disgusted. What you are doing right now — bad. Bad karma.”
“You’re a bad person,” she adds. “You’re going to have bad things happen to you, Baby.”
When some of the neighbors form a line in front of the three vehicles, an agent reaches out to a boss through his phone, configured to work like a walkie-talkie.
“Hey, they’re locking arms to try to block us from going out,” he says.
The phone beeps.
“We’re blocked in, bro. We’re blocked in,” another agent says.
“Hey, we have a lot of people here,” another chimes in.
They start talking about tear gas.
“You’re going to get gassed!” an agent shouts into a throng of screaming neighbors in front of the federal vehicles. “You’ve been warned. You’re going to get gassed. You’ve been warned.”
Before anyone can move back, an agent in a bright green shirt pulls out the pin on a grenade made for riot control. He tosses it toward the neighbors who have locked arms. The grenade splits into three canisters that form a big cloud of tear gas.
The attorney picks up one of the canisters and throws it back, hitting one of the federal SUVs.
The neighbors stagger out of the gas.
The agent in bright green throws a bicycle out of the road. He pushes down the woman in the skeleton suit. He grabs the attorney by his red sweater and yanks him away.
All the agents return to their vehicles, several coughing from the gas.
“Go,” one agent tells his SUV’s driver as he tries to clear his lungs of the chemicals. “Go somewhere else.”
It’s been just 10 minutes since they arrived.
An agent reminds people to fasten their seat belts. They drive away.
“Good call, bro,” one agent says about the decision to use tear gas.
But the agent in bright green — the one who tossed the gas grenade — sounds unhappy that no one in his crew cleared the way earlier.
“I don’t know why the f— I have to do that,” he complains.
And something else is frustrating him: “Ideally, I’d have arrested the f— out of that guy in red, but we needed to get out of there.”
In the SUV that left with the detainee, a bodycam video shows him leaning forward to face the agent next to him in the back seat — the agent who chased him down.
The detainee asks him why the Border Patrol is going after hard-working immigrants.
“Do you know how many people there are back there, getting up at four in the morning to go to work to have a future?” he says in Spanish.
The detainee tells the Latino agents in the SUV that they are not that much different from him, except for one thing.
“We don’t have the opportunity that you have.”
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