US Sens. Tammy Duckworth and Dick Durbin are demanding federal immigration agents stop arresting people filming them.
In a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, the senators requested that she keep federal agents from arresting people exercising “a core First Amendment right.”
“Failure to do so would be an admission that you are purposefully seeking to suppress free speech and impede government accountability through malicious, unlawful arrests intended to terrorize and silence American citizens who disagree with government actions,” they wrote in the letter. “Public safety officers must be accountable to the very Americans they are supposed to serve and protect.”
The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately return a request for comment.
Late last month, Chicago journalist Steve Held was arrested during a protest at the ICE processing facility in Broadview while standing on a public parkway and filming officers detaining a protester. Officers tackled and threw Held to the ground before handcuffing him and escorting him inside the ICE facility; he was released without charges hours later, according to a lawsuit filed on his and other journalists’ behalf.
In the letter, the senators denounced the notion from DHS that filming agents while they are working is a danger to them, pointing to the department’s extensive use of cameras and film equipment in operations around the city.
So far that has included camera-toting agents on the Chicago River and at a military-style raid in South Shoreas well as having right-wing internet personality Ben Bergquam — among others — and television figure Dr. Phil rode along with agents as they chased and detained people.
“Recording and posting public civil immigration enforcement activities of agents and officers of (ICE) and (CBP) is not only protected First Amendment activity, but it also poses no threat to ICE and CBP personnel,” Duckworth and Durbin wrote in the letter. “If recording operations and publicly disseminating them was dangerous to CBP and ICE agents, you would not be wasting taxpayer dollars to deploy film crews and photographers for the explicit purpose of recording and posting images and videos of ICE and CBP personnel engaged in civil immigration enforcement activities.”
Previous letters to Trump administration leaders, including Noem and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, have gone unanswered, said a spokesperson for Duckworth. Those letters have demanded federal immigration agents not use Chicago’s waterways for “partisan ends” and provide answers on the use of Naval Station Great Lakes by federal immigration agents.
The new letter comes within days of Duckworth and Durbin, along with Senate colleagues, calling for the Congressional Budget Office to probe the cost of National Guard deployments around the country, saying they have come with “substantial cost implications that have not been publicly disclosed or formally justified to Congress.”
“The American people deserve full transparency regarding how their tax dollars are being used, especially as it pertains to the deployment of military personnel for missions on US soil without a declared emergency or state request,” the senators wrote in their request.
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