CHICAGO (WLS) — A lawsuit filed this week is asking a federal judge to order U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to release specific reports and data on all immigration arrests made since President Donald Trump took office, as well as provide weekly reports moving forward.
In the past 60 days, since immigration enforcement has ramped up under President Trump, the public has mostly learned of immigration arrests through social media posts by federal law enforcement agencies.
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For example, the Drug Enforcement Administration announced in a social media post on Friday that an investigation led to the arrest of a Tren de Aragua member in Matteson. The post included no additional details, like the person’s name, the crimes they are accused of or where they are being held in custody – only that the person is in custody “pending deportation.”
This throws into sharp relief the historically opaque practices of ICE and the Department of Homeland Security’s investigations arm – Homeland Security Investigations.
But this week, four civil rights advocacy groups in Chicago filed a lawsuit against ICE, asking a judge to change that pattern of keeping arrest information in the dark.
The National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC), Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR), American Civil Liberties Union Illinois and Organized Communities Against Deportations (OCAD) sued ICE, accusing the agency of violating the terms of a past legally binding agreement surrounding how agents conduct immigration enforcement.
According to the lawsuit, nearly two-dozen people in Chicago have accused ICE agents of arresting them illegally in the past two months, violating the 2022 federal court “Castañon Nava settlement.”
That settlement, stemming from a 2018 lawsuit, requires the Chicago Field Office of ICE to “document the facts and circumstances surrounding a warrantless arrest or vehicle stop in the individual’s arresting documentation,” among other requirements.
At a news conference this week, Yolanda Orozco, one of the plaintiffs in the new lawsuit, said the agency has recently flouted the “Castañon Nava” agreement that requires prior warrants and proof that an individual is a flight risk before agents can take a person into custody.
Orozco said she saw this firsthand, when agents recently arrested her husband, Abel Orozco, without a warrant. She said her husband was on his way home after buying tamales for the family when he was pulled over by ICE in Lyons.
“Since that da,y my family has been facing a lot of challenges,” Yolanda Orozco said. “We have been living in a crisis.”
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Professor Kathleen Arnold, DePaul University’s Refugee and Forced Migrations Studies director, said the release of arrest data by ICE would provide valuable insight into who’s being targeted and which communities agents are focused on.
“The worry would be that despite the fact that we’re being told that criminals are the ones who are the targets, that there’s no adjudication process, no independent verification that this is true,” Arnold said.
What’s at issue, Arnold explained, is whether ICE and the federal government are unfairly targeting Chicago and Illinois with raids and roundups or engaging in racial and ethnic profiling when making arrests.
“The inability of the public to scrutinize this information or contest it, which is a normal democratic right to be able to examine evidence, and we don’t have that evidence,” Arnold said.
Without disclosing that data, the plaintiffs in the Castañon Nava lawsuit said it’s impossible to hold ICE accountable.
“Because of the number and scale of violations which occurred in just a few weeks after Trump took office and the likelihood that violations will continue, the plaintiffs also ask the court to produce a report of all immigration arrests since January 20, 2025, and to provide weekly reports going forward of all immigration arrests,” a press release from the National Immigrant Justice Center states.
Looking at ICE’s arrests and removals webpage, where the agency has previously touted sharing this kind of information, the I-Team found the most recent publicly available details on immigration arrests and removals are from last year.
Arnold said this is why that information needs to be released and updated.
“We need that data,” Arnold said. “Unless the government has something to hide, they should be willing to share this information.”
Last year, the Government Accountability Office criticized ICE’s data release practices, concluding in a report that “ICE should strengthen (the agency’s) data reporting.”
But because of the agency’s authority and foreign policy mandate, ABC7 Chicago chief legal analyst Gil Soffer said there is a high bar to force ICE to report any specific details on the people it has in custody.
“What can force ICE to provide data is a judicial order to provide data,” Soffer said. “If such an order is issued, then under our systems of laws, ICE is obligated to provide it. That is not to say that ICE won’t fight it, and fight it at all levels of the courts, including up to the Supreme Court.”
ICE has not formally responded to the lawsuit accusing it of violating the Castañon Nava settlement.
The U.S. District Court judge overseeing the case has given ICE an April 3 deadline to respond.
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