Article Summary
- After conducting over a dozen investigations, interviewing witnesses, and reviewing hundreds of hours of video footage, the Illinois Accountability Commission is prepared to release its final report to Gov. JB Pritzker on Thursday.
- Through its review of the evidence, the commission identified three “policy directives” that it says guided the behavior of federal agents amid Operation Midway Blitz last fall.
- The commission, which has no direct law enforcement or subpoena power, is expected to make recommendations in its report for policy changes and potential prosecutions of federal agents to the Cook County state’s attorney’s office.
This summary was written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
CHICAGO — The Illinois Accountability Commission has spent the last six months reviewing incidents of alleged misconduct by federal immigration agents in Chicago amid Operation Midway Blitz.
What it has found, commission officials said, is evidence of three major policy directives that permitted and encouraged agent misconduct, stemming from top Trump administration officials.
The last two commission hearings held Monday and Tuesday featured videos and testimony from incidents in neighborhoods touched by the months-long immigration enforcement campaign. These are a subset of 16 investigations conducted by the commission.
“Keep in mind that each … is more than just an investigation, it is a community transformed, families destroyed in an instant, people teargassed, shot at, beaten,” Lead Commission Counsel Ahmed Baset told the packed room on Monday. “This collective violence was not simply improvised on the field. It was greenlit in Washington, DC.”
The three directives identified included militarizing the streets, suppressing speech and assembly and immunity for lawlessness.
The commission, formed through executive order by Gov. JB Pritzker last October, was directed to specifically review the actions of eight current and former heads of the Trump administration, including the now-ousted Customs and Border Patrol “commander at large” Gregory Bovino, White House “border czar” Tom Homan, former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, and Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy.
Earlier this month, commission staff sent letters inviting each of those people to testify in the final hearings. All declined to appear, according to commission officials.
Neighborhood terror
The commission presented evidence from some of the high-profile incidents among their investigations.
Notably, many in the immigrant communities most directly targeted did not offer public testimony due to a fear of retribution and the pain of reliving trauma, according to Baset. The absence of their voices in the room, he said, “is itself part of the harm.”
But Chicago is a city of neighborhoods, and where those targeted could not speak up, their neighbors stood to testify on their behalf.
Open video playlist in new tab
Currently Playing
![](https://media.socastsrm.com/wordpress/wp-content/blogs.dir/2511/files/2026/05/default.jpg"/>
</div>
<div class="jeg_video_playlist_description">
<h3 class="jeg_video_playlist_title">EXH 10 Little Village</h3>
<p> <span class="jeg_video_playlist_category">00:03:40</span>
</div>
<p> </a>
</div>
<div class="jeg_video_playlist_item_wrapper">
<a class="jeg_video_playlist_item " href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfUivArAhz8" data-id="1"></p>
<div class="jeg_video_playlist_thumbnail">
<img src=)
