The Trump administration made erroneous claims to the Supreme Court, mischaracterizing the responsiveness of local police and the actions of protesters in a filing asking the justices to sign off on the deployment of hundreds of National Guard troops to Chicago, a New York Times investigation found.
The emergency request, filed by the solicitor general, D. John Sauer, which draws heavily from court declarations made by two Homeland Security officials, misstates what happened in the aftermath of a car crash and shooting on Oct. 4 in Chicago that involved Border Patrol agents.
A Times analysis of hours of police radio and hundreds of videos posted to social media refutes the federal government’s claims that the Chicago Police Department didn’t respond quickly to the scene, leaving federal agents to fend for themselves during what they called a riot.
That contention is central to the administration’s legal rationale for deploying the National Guard: that “violent protests” are preventing agents from enforcing immigration law.
The Trump administration appealed to the Supreme Court on the fast-track emergency docket after lower courts granted Illinois’s request to block the troop deployment. The court could rule any day. If the justices decide in favor of the Trump administration, the emergency ruling, although temporary, could lay the legal groundwork for the deployment of National Guard troops to more U.S. cities.
The chaotic events in Chicago began when a resident, Marimar Martinez, was honking, yelling and aggressively trailing an S.U.V. carrying Border Patrol agents to protest their presence. The two vehicles collided in a neighborhood on the Southwest Side of Chicago, and an agent then shot her five times while she was in her car. Ms. Martinez, 30, drove a mile away and called 911. A protest formed at the scene where she had been shot and lasted for hours. About 90 minutes after the shooting, in the same area, a civilian car rammed into an Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicle.
How the police responded to these events is bitterly disputed between Chicago officials and the Trump administration. A key element of the administration’s argument appears to hinge on a police radio call. After federal agents requested assistance with the protest, a Chicago police officer told one district that “we’re not responding” to the scene.
Mr. Sauer apparently refers to this call in his filing, writing that the Chicago Police Department’s “initial refusal” to respond was “emblematic of a troubling pattern” where “local forces provide a tepid response, at best, when federal officers are attacked and obstructed.”
But the filing claimed that police officers didn’t respond for more than an hour after the shooting, wrongly implying that the call took place just after Ms. Martinez was shot, when in fact it was two hours later. The filing also falsely suggested that the entire police department was told to stay away from the site. Additionally, it portrays protesters as aggressive throughout the day.
The Times’s investigation found that Chicago officers responded to the shooting within seven minutes and were present at the ensuing protest. While at 12:30 p.m. one police district was ordered not to respond to the protest, other districts sent officers to the scene. The analysis also found that the protesters were peaceful for the first two hours, before a forceful federal response.
The administration cited the declarations by the Homeland Security officials 30 times in its Supreme Court filing. The veracity of those declarations was questioned by a district court judge in her opinion granting a temporary block on the Chicago deployment. Judge April Perry noted the officials’ “potential lack of candor” and questioned “their ability to accurately assess the facts.”
The Supreme Court will decide based on filings alone, without oral arguments or the trial court judge building a clear factual record, and likely with the police investigation still ongoing. It’s also likely that more evidence about Oct. 4 will emerge — and be contested — during the district court trial.
The Homeland Security Department “stands fully behind the testimony we gave in this case, which was given under penalty of perjury,” Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman, wrote in an email. A spokeswoman for the Justice Department declined to comment. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
A Chicago police spokesman declined to answer questions from The Times but said an internal investigation was ongoing.
The Times fact-checked three claims in the Trump administration’s filing about Oct. 4. Here’s what the evidence shows.
Claim: The police did not immediately respond to the shooting.
This is inaccurate.
The filing states that the police in Chicago “eventually responded more than an hour after the shooting.”
Officers responded within minutes of the shooting at two locations. First, officers went to the site that Ms. Martinez drove to after she was shot, a police radio recording shows. They reached her within four minutes.
Around the same time, federal agents flagged down a police car near where Ms. Martinez was shot. Radio communications show that officers were at the site by 10:36 a.m., seven minutes after the shooting. Additional officers arrived 12 minutes later.
By 10:55 a.m., footage shows that at least four patrol cars had arrived. The footage, along with other videos analyzed by The Times, has since been removed from social media. For over an hour, officers secured the scene as dozens of onlookers and protesters gathered.
At 11:34 a.m., a Chicago officer relayed a message from the chief of patrol, telling officers that they were handing over to federal agents at both locations. Videos show officers leaving the shooting site by 11:55 a.m.
Approximately five minutes later, and seven blocks north of the shooting site, a driver filmed a black S.U.V. crashing into a white pickup truck driven by an ICE agent and pushing the vehicle off the road. A Border Patrol vehicle pulls up behind the civilian vehicle, and those two vehicles also collide.
A police report shows officers were notified about the ramming at 12:12 p.m. Footage from police body cameras and bystander videos shows nine officers arriving on the scene about 10 minutes later.
Mr. Sauer’s assertion that the police did not respond for an hour after the shooting was based on a court declaration provided by Russell Hott, the then-director of ICE’s Chicago field office. The Times’s analysis shows there are discrepancies in both Mr. Hott’s account and Mr. Sauer’s summary of it.
Mr. Hott refers to the police district’s 12:30 p.m. “we’re not responding” call multiple times in his declaration. In one case he gets the timing right, providing a time stamp and transcript for part of the call. But he also erroneously reverses the timing of the call and the ramming of the ICE truck elsewhere in the document.
Mr. Sauer then jumbled the timeline in the administration’s filing to the Supreme Court.
Claim: The police refused to assist federal agents.
This needs context.
The filing states, “The initial refusal of the Chicago police to respond to the October 4 shooting is emblematic of a troubling pattern.”
One police precinct close to where Ms. Martinez was shot — the Ninth District — did not respond immediately after federal agents’ requested backup at approximately 12:30 p.m.
But another district dispatched officers around the same time as the request.
At 12:24 p.m., a dispatcher for the neighboring Eighth District asked cars to report to the shooting site. The dispatcher mentioned that the Ninth District, which had been responding earlier in the day, was backlogged.
About five minutes later, a Ninth District dispatcher reported that federal agents were requesting assistance to manage the growing crowd of protesters at the shooting site. Initially, the Ninth District sent six cars to handle this request. But minutes later, an officer diverted them from the site.
The same Ninth District officer who ordered the cars away from the protest clarifies that other officers should still respond to the nearby ICE truck ramming site, offering more assistance to a colleague there.
By 12:34 p.m., an Eighth District vehicle was stationed at the protest’s north end, visuals show, and 10 minutes later, more Eighth District officers were at the south end. Additionally, an officer from the Seventh District radioed just before 1 p.m. that he was activating a group of officers to respond to the protests.
It’s unclear why, but at 1:05 p.m. a Ninth District lieutenant returned to the shooting site. Thirty minutes later, nine other officers from his district who had been responding to the ramming of the ICE truck also arrived. Dozens of officers from across Chicago followed throughout the afternoon.
The Chicago Police Department would not explain why the Ninth District received an order not to respond. The State of Illinois’s filing, in its response to Mr. Sauer’s Supreme Court appeal, states that “at no point did CPD leadership instruct officers to refuse to help federal agents.”
Body cameras worn by Ninth District officers at the ramming site captured conversations about the day’s events. One officer called the situation a “shitshow” and another said “as soon as they get all done, we’re out of here.” One officer expressed surprise when a colleague said they had been instructed to do “nothing” about the protest.
Attorney General Kwame Raoul of Illinois declined to comment on The Times’s findings but said, “We are confident in the facts being laid out when this case goes to trial in the district court and expect to succeed in protecting the people of Illinois from federalized National Guard troops being deployed in our streets.”
Claim: Protesters were ‘rioters’ and were throwing objects after the shooting.
This is misleading.
The administration’s Supreme Court filing said, “Approximately 200 rioters gathered in the area after the shooting, throwing glass bottles and other objects at the besieged federal agents.”
But the analysis — and a lower court judge — found that the protesters were largely peaceful that morning. Videos show that tensions escalated only hours later, with a few protesters throwing water bottles and rocks, in tandem with a more aggressive federal response.
For most of the morning, protesters gathered south of the scene of the shooting, behind police tape. Around noon, a small group of people had also gathered half a block north of the site, where they were shouting at agents, videos show.
By 12:30 p.m., a couple of minutes after federal agents asked the police for assistance, the crowd at both locations combined had grown to roughly 150 people. Hourslong livestreams of the southern demonstration show that protesters were chanting, but not throwing any objects before the agents requested help.
A livestream that begins at 12:24 p.m. shows that demonstrators at the northern protest were also not throwing objects between that time and the call for assistance.
Protesters are not seen crossing the police tape in either location.
While waiting for additional police officers to arrive, federal agents send in an armored vehicle and dozens of unmarked cars, videos show. The crowd grows agitated by the increased federal presence. A few protesters are seen kicking federal vehicles and throwing plastic water bottles toward agents.
In the afternoon, the northern protest grew bigger and more unruly. Some protesters threw rocks and moved barriers. Federal agents shoved people, fired pepper balls at protesters’ feet and deployed tear gas repeatedly, even as more police officers arrived.
Errors have appeared in other Trump administration court filings.
Cameras worn by federal agents show the protesters on Oct. 4 “generally acting peacefully,” Judge Sara L. Ellis of the Northern District of Illinois wrote in a ruling on a different case concerning some of the same protests. She also found that the agents were “indiscriminately deploying tear gas, without providing any warning to the protesters.”
Judge Ellis also found that Mr. Hott had later walked back assertions made in his declaration — assertions that also appear in the declaration cited repeatedly in Mr. Sauer’s filing. “Violent agitators,” Mr. Hott claimed, “broke off plumbing and downspouts” at an ICE facility.
Judge Ellis wrote that Mr. Hott, when later questioned about the vandalism, “acknowledged that he did not even know if it was a person that caused the damage to the downspout, much less a protester.”
There are also questions about the collision between Ms. Martinez and Border Patrol agents, which Mr. Sauer described as a ramming in his filing to the Supreme Court. In a November hearing for the criminal case against Ms. Martinez, Charles Exum, the Border Patrol agent who shot her, testified that “ramming is the front of a vehicle striking another vehicle. And that is not what happened.” Rather, he said, the collision was “side to side.” Ms. Martinez’s lawyer told the court his client was “adamant” that it was the agents who had swerved into her. Prosecutors later moved to drop the charges against her.
While inaccurate claims sometimes turn up in Supreme Court filings and opinions, J. Michael Luttig, a retired federal appeals court judge and a critic of the administration’s approach to law, said that the factual errors that made their way from Mr. Hott’s declaration to the Trump administration’s filing would appear to be particularly serious. Mr. Luttig is a prominent conservative jurist for whom Mr. Sauer clerked early in his career. He was nominated to the bench by President George H.W. Bush.
“It is the responsibility of the solicitor general to ensure that declarations cited before the Supreme Court are truthful and accurate,” Mr. Luttig said. The factual issues with the government’s filings were “unsurprising” and “damning for the president, the attorney general and the solicitor general,” he added.
Julie Bosman, Ishaan Jhaveri, Riley Mellen and Robin Stein contributed reporting.
Devon Lum is a reporter on the Visual Investigations team at The Times, specializing in open-source techniques and visual analysis.
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