CHICAGO (WLS) — Hundreds Wednesday have been ordered released on bond after a federal judge weighed the arrests of those detained by federal agents as part of an immigration “blitz” that has shaken the Chicago area.
Those who will be released must be granted bond by noon on Nov. 21. The exact number of those who will be released will depend on how many have not already voluntarily departed or been deported.
ABC7 Chicago is now streaming 24/7. Click here to watch
The ruling applies to people who have been identified not to have mandatory detention orders and not pose a significant risk.
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Cummings ordered the Department of Justice to review all remaining arrests through Wednesday that fall under the same category and have a list by Nov. 19, and go from there.
Attorneys for the National Immigrant Justice Center have argued hundreds of migrants arrested by federal immigration agents were arrested in violation of a consent decree in place in Illinois and five neighboring states.
That consent decree limits the circumstances in which agents can make warrantless arrests while enforcing civil immigration laws.
Last month, Judge Cummings ruled agents had violated a previously agreed-upon consent decree over warrantless arrests in the Chicago area known as the 2022 Castañon Nava settlement.
Since that ruling, attorneys on both sides of the case have been working to identify how many people arrested by immigration agents this year violated the previously agreed-upon consent decree.
As part of that consent decree, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agreed to certain conditions for arresting someone in the Chicago area without a warrant, including pre-determining whether there is probable cause to believe the person is in the country illegally, and whether they are also a flight risk; two requirements that immigrant advocates say have been flouted in hundreds cases, including the recent arrest at a Chicago day care.
It’s cases like these that Mark Fleming of the National Immigrant Justice Center believes are happening daily.
“As we’re digging into it, we are very concerned that many, if not most [of ICE arrests], are violations of our consent decree,” Fleming told the I-Team.
Fleming said so far, the list of people arrested in violation of the consent decree has grown to more than 3,000 people.
“Our initial analysis is that it’s over 3,000 arrests,” Fleming told the I-Team. “We’ve started to dig into the case file that they produced to us, and the vast majority are violations. If they did not have a prior order of removal, in almost all circumstances, they’ve been uniformly violating the consent decree.”
So far, Fleming said that ICE has produced a list of 3,800 people, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Border Patrol has given a list of 1,200 people, but he stressed that there may be duplicate entries on both lists, so his team does not have a solid total figure yet. Also, those lists were only through the beginning of October, and do not include arrests in the last month.
Attorneys representing the Department of Homeland Security have argued that Congress stripped federal courts of their authority to grant parole to large groups of immigrants in ICE custody.
In their filings, government attorneys argue, “Congress has vested the authority to grant parole solely with the Secretary of Homeland Security… Federal courts cannot order the Department of Homeland Security to release any aliens on parole because Congress has stripped them of that authority.”
In their review of people arrested by agents potentially in violation of the consent decree, Fleming said more than 1,000 people are no longer in the U.S., meaning they may have been deported already after signing voluntary removal orders.
“A lot of these folks have never had any interaction with law enforcement before, nor been subject to detention, and so it’s horrifying,” Fleming explained.
Fleming continued, “What we’ve raised to the court is if you don’t provide this interim relief, there will be no one left. At the end of this, we may find thousands of violations, but there may be no one left.”
Copyright © 2025 WLS-TV. All Rights Reserved.