A federal appeals court temporarily blocked a judge’s order on Thursday that had called for the release of hundreds of people arrested by immigration agents in the Chicago area.
The administrative stay issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, which the Trump administration requested, halts the release of those detainees while the government’s appeal moves forward. Appellate judges are scheduled to hear oral arguments in the case on Dec. 2.
Last week, Judge Jeffrey Cummings of the U.S. District Court ordered that most of the detainees in a group of 615 people be released on bond by this Friday while their immigration cases move forward. The order did not apply to people in that group who had already been deported, or to a handful of those detainees who were deemed by the government to pose a high risk to public safety.
Judge Cummings’s ruling came in a long-running case that was filed in 2018, during President Trump’s first term, and resulted in a consent decree during the presidency of Joseph R. Biden Jr. That consent decree restricted the circumstances in which immigration enforcement agents in six states, including Illinois, could apprehend and hold people without a warrant.
Judge Cummings said several of the people arrested during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in the Chicago area, known as Operation Midway Blitz, had been held in violation of that consent decree. “It stands to reason that a significant number of additional violations will be uncovered as plaintiffs receive and analyze the arrest records of the remaining arrestees,” the judge wrote.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs in that lawsuit, whose clients maintain that they were wrongly arrested by immigration agents, said they believed that many of the recent arrests had been carried out without warrants and in violation of the terms of the decree.
Mark Fleming of the National Immigrant Justice Center, one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers, said last week that he believed the case would show that “this whole operation the last two months — the terrorizing of our neighborhoods, the brutalizing of people here — has all been unlawful.”
Officials at the Department of Homeland Security criticized the district judge’s decision last week and said it put lives at risk.
“At every turn, activist judges, sanctuary politicians and violent rioters have actively tried to prevent our law enforcement officers from arresting and removing the worst of the worst,” Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the department, said in an emailed statement.
Federal immigration agents flooded the Chicago area for more than two months, arresting thousands of people and sometimes clashing with residents. That crackdown appears to have slowed in recent days as federal officials began carrying out new immigration operations in North Carolina.
Judge Cummings, who was nominated to his seat by Mr. Biden, was one of several federal judges in Chicago who raised concerns about the government’s actions during the immigration crackdown.
One judge described what he considered “unnecessarily cruel” conditions inside an immigration detention center and ordered the government to make improvements. Another temporarily blocked Mr. Trump from deploying National Guard troops over the governor’s objections. And another, saying that immigration agents were using force in a way that “shocks the conscience,” imposed limits on when agents could use tear gas and other riot control weapons.
The Trump administration has repeatedly defended its work in Illinois.
The stay issued on Thursday by the Seventh Circuit was the administration’s second appellate success this week. On Wednesday, a three-judge panel of the Seventh Circuit blocked the restrictions that were imposed in the case concerning tear gas and use of force, saying the district judge’s limits were “overbroad” and “too prescriptive.”
Mitch Smith is a Chicago-based national correspondent for The Times, covering the Midwest and Great Plains.
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