Chicago-area law enforcement officers worked with Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations to secretly surveil an April 2 talk at the Co-Prosperity gallery in Bridgeport that featured Minneapolis activists resisting federal immigration surges. A 14-officer joint task force - eight HSI Chicago agents and six local cops from Chicago, Aurora, Downers Grove, Cook County, and Kane County - used undercover operatives, live audio transmission, license-plate-reader data, CCTV requests, and other electronic surveillance to identify attendees, log 219 nearby vehicles, and link participants to other anti‑ICE protests. Recordings were shared with HSI personnel in Minneapolis (including supervisor Kenneth Popovits) and fed into the federal conspiracy case against 15 Twin Cities activists tied to Operation Metro Surge; remarks from the April 2 event appear in the indictment. Defendants and defense attorneys obtained these investigative documents through discovery.
The revealed cooperation raises legal and civil‑liberties concerns because Illinois’ sanctuary rules bar local participation in immigration enforcement even as departments argue criminal HSI probes fall outside those limits. Chicago Police say the joint work was permitted and that no First Amendment notifications were routed through CPD command or general counsel, while local task‑force protocols and their application to federal partnerships remain unclear. Civil‑liberties groups call the spying on constitutionally protected organizing “very troubling,” and discovery shows HSI also monitored other stops on the Crimethinc tour (Ann Arbor, Seattle), underscoring HSI’s expanding role in policing internal dissent.
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