Appeals Court Blocks Chicago Judge's Border Patrol Order

UPDATE Oct 29, 2025 5:33 PM CDT

An appeals court intervened Wednesday and blocked an order that required a senior Border Patrol official to give unprecedented daily briefings to a judge about immigration sweeps in Chicago. The one-page suspension by the 7th US Circuit Court of Appeals came before Greg Bovino's first late-afternoon meeting with US District Judge Sara Ellis at the courthouse in downtown Chicago. Ellis ordered the meetings Tuesday after weeks of tense encounters and increasingly aggressive tactics by government agents working Operation Midway Blitz, Bovino told Fox News that he was eager to talk to Ellis. But government lawyers were appealing her decision at the same time, calling it "extraordinarily disruptive," the AP reports.

Oct 28, 2025 9:00 PM CDT

A judge in Chicago took the rare step Tuesday of ordering a senior US Border Patrol official to brief her every night, an unprecedented bid to impose real-time oversight on the government's immigration crackdown in the city after weeks of tense encounters and tear gas thrown by officers.

• Greg Bovino, who has become the public face of the Trump administration's city-by-city immigration sweeps, must sit for a daily 6pm briefing to report how his agents are enforcing the law and whether they are staying within constitutional bounds, US District Judge Sara Ellis said.
• Ellis also demanded full use-of-force reports from agents involved in Operation Midway Blitz, which has netted over 1,800 arrests since September. "Yes, ma'am," Bovino responded to each request.

• Bovino got an earful from Ellis as soon as he settled into the witness chair in his green uniform, the AP reports. The judge quickly expressed concerns about video and other images from the campaign against illegal immigration. The hearing was the latest in a lawsuit by news outlets and protesters who say agents have used too much force, including tear gas, during demonstrations.
• Ellis zeroed in on reports that Border Patrol agents disrupted a children's Halloween parade with tear gas on the city's Northwest Side over the weekend. Neighbors had gathered in the street as someone was arrested.
• "Those kids were tear-gassed on their way to celebrate Halloween in their local school parking lot," Ellis said. "And I can only imagine how terrified they were. These kids, you can imagine, their sense of safety was shattered on Saturday. And it's going to take a long time for that to come back, if ever."
• The judge wants him to meet her in person daily "to hear about how the day went." "I suspect that now knowing where we are and that he understands what I expect, I don't know that we're going to see a whole lot of tear gas deployed in the next week," Ellis said.
• The judge has already ordered agents to wear badges, and she's banned them from using certain riot control techniques against peaceful protesters and journalists. She subsequently required body cameras after the use of tear gas raised concerns that agents were not following her initial order.
• Phillip Turner, a former federal prosecutor in Chicago, says the judge's order is extremely unusual. "I've been a lawyer for almost 50 years, and I've never seen anything like this," Turner tells the AP.