Illinois Police Department Charges ICE Agent Over Alleged Assault on Unhinged Agitator Who Was Following and Filming Him While He Was Off Duty (VIDEO)

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent has been charged with misdemeanor battery following an altercation with a leftist activist who was filming him while off duty at a suburban Chicago gas station.

Chicago-based attorney Robert Held was following and filming agent Adam Saracco as he got gas in Brookfield after his shift on December 27.

Held has previously been arrested during an anti-ICE protest and is a known agitator.

“He put the gas hose down, and he started briskly walking towards me. When he got closer, he broke into a run, and I was stunned. He put his hands on me. He threw me to the ground and aggressively was on top of me, trying to grab my phone,” Held told the Riverside-Brookfield Landmark. “I’m 68. I have an artificial hip. My strength and flexibility are not great, and I used all my might to hold onto my phone.”

The encounter, but not the altercation, was captured on video by the activist and posted to social media in a strange propaganda mash-up video.

The video concludes with a call for people to join the “resistance,” as if they’re in some corny comic-book film.

Held admitted that he did not actually know for sure if the man he was harassing even actually worked for ICE.

The Riverside-Brookfield Landmark reports, “In the video, he refers to the man as an agent of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He later said he believed the man to be an employee of a federal immigration agency but did not know for certain if that was the case or have details about which agency he might work for.”

Saracco had just gotten off work at the nearby immigration detention center.

The Hill reports:

Kuruvilla said in the statement that the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office reviewed the case and declined to file felony charges, advising that it would be more appropriately charged as a misdemeanor.

Saracco cooperated with investigators and was subsequently “charged, cited, and released on one count of misdemeanor battery with an assigned court date,” Kuruvilla added.

DHS, for its part, is firmly standing behind the officer.

“It is gross that our officer is facing charges for responding to a direct threat against him and his safety. We stand firmly behind our officer. We won’t accept this … stay tuned,” a spokesperson for DHS said in a statement to the outlet.

The spokesperson said that Saracco had been “targeted and aggressively harassed by a known ICE agitator.”

“While off duty and driving home in his personal vehicle, the officer was stalked by this individual to a local gas station. The agitator confronted the officer, filmed him at close range, and recorded the officer’s personal license plate,” the spokesperson continued, noting that Held’s actions were “clear attempts to dox” the officer.

“The officer, who was alone and without protective equipment, acted to protect himself when faced with this threatening behavior,” the statement continued.

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