Feds ask appeals court to block 'extraordinary' order restricting use of force against protesters
The Trump administration Monday asked Chicago’s federal appeals court to block a lower court’s sweeping order restricting agents’ use of force against protesters and journalists during the feds’ aggressive deportation campaign here.
The Justice Department complained to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis took “a complaint by journalists and protesters” and transformed it “into an instrument for judicial micromanagement of federal law-enforcement operations in the Chicago area.”
“This overbroad and unworkable injunction has no basis in law, threatens the safety of federal officers, and violates the separation of powers,” they wrote.
The commentary appeared in a 22-page motion seeking both a short-term administrative stay and a longer-term stay pending appeal. It’s not clear when the appeals court will rule, but it gave opposing lawyers in the case until Thursday to respond to the long-term stay request.
The Justice Department also noted that the 7th Circuit has already had to intervene once in the case. Ellis last month told U.S. Border Patrol Commander-at-Large Gregory Bovino she wanted to meet with him every weeknight over seven days to discuss his agents’ daily actions.
In that instance, the 7th Circuit, in an unsigned two-page order, found that the judge’s regular check-ins with Bovino would infringe on the separation of powers.
“The district court has now issued an extraordinary preliminary injunction that no less reflects an improper aggrandizement of the judicial role and a violation of the separation of powers,” the government’s lawyers wrote Monday.
Opposing counsel noted in an initial eight-page response that Bovino and others insist their actions comport with Ellis' orders, meaning "their operations are not hindered by complying with the injunctive relief."
Ellis handed down her order Thursday, in a case brought over the treatment of protesters and journalists during the feds’ “Operation Midway Blitz” campaign. The lawsuit was filed by media organizations such as the Chicago Headline Club, Block Club Chicago and the Chicago Newspaper Guild, which represents journalists at the Chicago Sun-Times.
The order followed an eight-hour hearing featuring emotional testimony from witnesses who spoke of jarring encounters with armed federal agents. It also included portions of a videotaped deposition by Bovino who said the use of force by federal agents had been “more than exemplary.”
The judge dismissed the government’s claim that the Chicago area “is in a vice hold of violence, ransacked by rioters and attacked by agitators.” She said that “simply is untrue,” finding that the Trump administration’s arguments “lack credibility.”
Ellis laid that partly at the feet of Bovino, who she said “admitted that he lied about whether a rock hit him before he deployed tear gas in Little Village.”
Ellis’ order forbids agents from using “riot control weapons” against protesters or observers who pose no immediate threat, and without two warnings. It also includes a restriction on “chokeholds, carotid restraints, neck restraints, or any other restraint technique that applies prolonged pressure to the neck that may restrict blood flow or air passage.”
Such restraints can only be used if they're "objectively necessary to stop an immediate threat.”
The order also requires agents to display identifying star or badge numbers “conspicuously” in “two separate places.”
Ellis said that “The unlawful activity by a few protesters does not transform a peaceful assembly into an unlawful assembly.”
And, she said, "the public has a strong interest in having a government that conducts itself fairly and according to its own stated regulations and policies.”
Neither the reporter nor editors who worked on this story — including some represented by the Newspaper Guild — have been involved in the lawsuit described in this article.