This story originally appeared in Block Club Chicago on Feb. 26. You can subscribe to Block Club Chicago’s neighborhood newsletters by clicking here. Since the story was published, prosecutors dropped charges against an additional 21 protesters.
CHICAGO — Samuel Coffey ran from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in suburban Broadview with Cook County Sheriff’s deputies chasing him for blocks.
The 20-year-old college student had been protesting outside of the facility when the officers tried to get him and another protester to leave, he said. The officers chased them and arrested them in a nearby alley.
“They didn’t even know what to arrest us for. I heard them talking to each other, like, ‘What do we charge him with? What do we do?’ They seemed so confused as to why they were even doing this,” Coffey told Block Club.
Coffey’s Oct. 19 arrest came about two and half weeks after the launch of Gov. JB Pritzker’s Unified Command, a joint effort by local law enforcement agencies that the governor said would protect Broadview protesters’ First Amendment rights. State officials created a “free speech zone” and enlisted officers from the Illinois State Police, the Cook County Sheriff’s Office and the Broadview Police Department to keep protesters within the designated area.
But after the Unified Command began watching the Broadview demonstrations, local police officers arrested more than 100 protesters for minor offenses. Officers reported those arrested were sitting or standing on concrete barriers, not moving out of the way fast enough or moving away from officers trying to handcuff them, according to police records and interviews with attorneys.
Months later, many of their cases are still unfolding in Cook County courtrooms as the office of State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke prosecutes them.
One protester is charged with felony criminal damage to property for allegedly painting on a concrete barrier, and another is charged with felony assault, accused of spraying an officer with clear liquid from a water bottle.
Most are charged with misdemeanors. Police arrested Coffey for jaywalking and disorderly conduct, though the State’s Attorney’s Office dropped that second charge.
In many cases, the police arrest reports give few or no details about the incidents, Block Club found.
In a statement O’Neill Burke said her office “strongly supports freedom of speech protections and respects every person’s constitutional right to peacefully assemble, protest and express their views.”
“At the same time, we have an obligation to review the evidence of each misdemeanor case that is referred to us by law enforcement to reach a just and appropriate resolution.”
But some attorneys and legal observers say these cases are part of a broader effort by police and prosecutors to punish nonviolent protesters speaking out against the Trump administration’s immigration operations. Such actions could violate constitutional rights and chill future protests, they argue.
“Many of the crimes alleged are crimes of the government’s making by instituting a very limited free-speech zone, protest curfews and a giant police presence for the stated purpose of protecting our clients from ICE and Border Patrol agents,” said civil rights attorney Amanda Yarusso, who represents several Broadview protesters.
“People have a right to protest. That’s all that was happening here. … It’s just very clear that this is not where we should be spending our time; these are not the people that we should be prosecuting in our criminal courts.”
Minor allegations, conflicting accounts
Pritzker’s decision to deploy state and local law enforcement to Broadview came in early October, after federal agents used tear gas, pepper-balls and flash-bang grenades against protesters in a series of tense clashes.
“After seeing this, I could not in good faith allow federal agents to continue inciting [violence on] people who were there to express their First Amendment rights,” Pritzker said at an Oct. 5 press conference.
By Nov. 21, Unified Command police had arrested more than 100 protesters.
State police made more than half of those arrests, records show.
Block Club filed public records requests for police arrest reports.
The state police ignored the requests for several months, even after the Illinois Attorney General’s Office determined state police had violated the state’s Freedom of Information Act. Finally, in February, the state police turned over reports for the arrests of 41 protesters, representing nearly 70 percent of the total state trooper arrests.
The reports contain few details about each arrest. When they do, the accounts are sometimes at odds with body-camera footage.
For example, a report for the arrest of Nicholas Milkovich on Oct. 18 describes the 29-year-old as part of “a large, organized and increasingly unruly crowd.”
The group “moved from the designated protest area and began impeding vehicular traffic on Lexington/Beach St,” wrote the arresting officer, Sgt. K. Weber. Officers issued “multiple loud and clear orders” for protesters to move back, but Milkovich “failed to comply.”
“I removed Milkovich from the front of the line. Milkovich attempted to conceal his hands to obstruct the arrest but I was able to gain control and apply restraints on his wrists with his arms placed behind his back,” Weber wrote in the report.
State troopers charged Milkovich with resisting arrest, obstruction and disobeying a police officer.
But Milkovich said he was in the crowd looking for a friend who had gone missing when officers tackled and handcuffed him.
Publicly shared video of the demonstration shows protesters shouting at officers as the officers give orders to disperse and attempt to clear the street to enforce curfew.
The scene devolves into chaos as officers use batons to push back the crowd and arrest several people, including Milkovich.
The footage shows “the entire crowd is moving back” at the time of Milkovich’s arrest, said his attorney Amanda Yarusso, who volunteers for the National Lawyers Guild of Chicago, an organization handling the bulk of the Broadview protester cases.
Similarly, 27-year-old Monica Breslin said she was trying to comply with officers’ orders to move back when she was handcuffed.
Video of the arrests shows Breslin in front of the crowd yelling at state troopers. But Breslin’s attorney, Tayleece Paul, said body-camera footage released during discovery in the case shows she had her back to the state trooper at the time she was arrested. Officers began pushing people back with wood batons and tackling people to ground, Paul said.
State troopers “created a really dangerous situation — approaching folks, then allowing them to stay and then all of a sudden rushing the crowd,” Paul said.
“The folks who were up in the front lines of that crowd were then arbitrarily picked up.”
In response to questions about state troopers’ conduct, Pritzker spokesperson Jillian Kaehler emphasized that federal agents “acted with impunity,” whereas state police officers received training to manage crowds at Broadview.
“ISP officers in the Unified Command wore proper identification, prioritized public safety and took the necessary and critical steps to safeguard the First Amendment rights of the public — while the federal government was actively violating them,” Kaehler said in a statement.
Paul and other attorneys wouldn’t share footage with Block Club for fear it could impact their pending cases.
Police gave no details of Breslin’s arrest in their report, saying only that she was arrested for “disobeying a peace officer.”
Many of the other police reports are nearly identical, often using boilerplate wording.
“It’s copy-and-paste with all of these reports,” said Paul, who represents several protesters arrested on Oct. 18. “It seems for a lot of the folks that [police] just started tacking on any charges they could, regardless of whether these charges are actually going to stick.”
State Police spokesperson Melaney Arnold didn’t answer Block Club’s specific questions about the disconnect between reports and body-camera footage, or what kind of training officers received to manage crowds at Broadview.
“While the vast majority of demonstrators have remained peaceful, there have been isolated incidents in which individuals have attempted to engage in unlawful activity,” Arnold said in a written statement. “In those instances, law enforcement responds in accordance with Illinois law and adheres to use-of-force training, policies and operations that are predicated upon using no force, or the lowest level of force, when absolutely necessary to protect public safety.”
Breslin said the ordeal has shaken her faith in the Constitution.
“You’re told by the system you have these protected rights, you can do all these things, we have protected speech, we’re so free. But you pull up to a protest and it’s mild, the vibes are good, there’s no violence against officers, there’s no weapons being drawn, there’s nothing remotely violent happening from the protesters,” Breslin said. “And it ends in the night of [Oct. 18] where [13] people are arrested, people are injured, people are trampled. It’s just a really mind-bending experience. It’s caused me a lot of psychological distress, honestly.”
The decision to prosecute
On Feb. 4, 19 protesters, including several faith leaders, appeared in court for the third time after being arrested on misdemeanor charges during a clergy-led protest at Broadview on Nov. 14. But this time, prosecutors announced they were dropping the charges.
“Although sufficient evidence exists to support this prosecution, considering the totality of the circumstances, we are declining to proceed,” a prosecutor said during the hearing.
Judge Owen Shelby agreed to dismiss the cases.
Carol Hill, senior minister of Park Ridge Community Church, was one of the faith leaders who was arrested. Hill said while she’s relieved the cases were dropped, she wishes prosecutors had made the decision sooner.
“They have no merit in trying to prosecute people who are trying to protest what is so clearly unjust,” she said.
In 2020, after police arrested large numbers of Black Lives Matter protesters in Chicago, then-State’s Attorney Kim Foxx — O’Neill Burke’s predecessor — dropped all nonviolent misdemeanor cases against them. Foxx called the cases “a waste of judicial resources.”
Asked why O’Neill Burke didn’t do the same, spokesperson Elyssa Cherney said the state’s attorney is instead committing to evaluating each case.
“Prosecutors must exercise discretion at every stage of a case, guided by the interests of justice, fairness and the responsible use of prosecutorial resources,” O’Neill Burke said in a statement.
A former judge, O’Neill Burke was elected Cook County’s top prosecutor in 2024 after vowing to be tough on violent crime and gun offenders.
Yet critics say O’Neill Burke’s approach to the protester cases is a waste of court resources.
“The strategy of the State’s Attorney’s [Office] has appeared to be, ‘We’re in no hurry to try and figure this out. We’re just going to keep making people come back even though people have a right under the constitution to a speedy trial,’” said Janine Hoft, an attorney with the People’s Law Office representing several Broadview protesters.
O’Neill Burke’s decision to push cases forward also comes as nearly half of the 32 non-immigration-related protester cases in federal court have been dismissed. Federal prosecutors haven’t secured a conviction in any case.
Legal experts say it’s unsurprising that federal prosecutors are passing on similar cases because they generally only take on cases they feel they can win. But the comparison underscores that O’Neill Burke is making a policy choice by prosecuting Broadview protesters, they said.
As prosecutors continue to push protester cases along, O’Neill Burke has faced increasing pressure from advocacy groups and other local elected officials, including Mayor Brandon Johnson, to hold federal agents accountable for their actions during Operation Midway Blitz.
O’Neill Burke initially rebuffed Johnson, but her office issued a statement this month saying it’s developing a “protocol” for prosecuting federal agents “should a review of evidence determine that felony criminal charges are warranted.”
Lasting impact and consequences
A small number of the protesters arrested by state and local law enforcement have accepted plea deals to reach a faster resolution and avoid further financial and personal disruptions, attorneys said.
Court records show the deals are identical: They were each placed under four months of court supervision and agreed to pay about $400 in fines and court costs, with the option of doing 20 hours of community service to reduce the amount.
Hoft and other attorneys noted that under state law, those who receive court supervision cannot get their cases expunged for two years after the end of the supervisory period. That means charges can remain on their record for up to a few years.
For many of the Broadview protesters, this was their first time getting arrested. Some are students and new to their jobs, and they worry criminal charges could disrupt their future plans.
Others told Block Club they’re staying away from Broadview protests out of fear they’ll be arrested again and face even harsher charges.
One protester who is currently applying for a new professional license to further their career fears they’ll be denied the credentials now that they’ve been criminally charged. The protester declined to be named because their case is still pending.
“I don’t know if I can safely go back,” they said. “What happens if they decide to arrest me again for not really doing anything?”