ICE Shot a Man While Trying to Detain Him. He Had No Criminal Record.

The Department of Homeland Security blatantly lied about the victim of a recent shooting committed by an ICE agent during an immigration arrest in Chicago. 

Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, 38, was fatally shot by an ICE agent in Franklin Park during an attempted immigration detention. DHS claimed Villegas-Gonzalez had resisted arrest and dragged an officer for “a significant distance” with his car. Nearby surveillance footage revealed the agent fired two shots, and Villegas-Gonzalez died from his injuries later at a hospital.

But the agency’s justification of deadly force doesn’t quite add up. 

On September 19, DHS published a press release that claimed that Villegas-Gonzalez was “a criminal illegal alien with a history of reckless driving.” But apparently, that’s completely wrong: NBC News reported that he had no criminal history. Villegas-Gonzalez had pleaded guilty to four traffic violations, including speeding, the most recent of which was in 2013.

The federal press release also claimed that the ICE agent responsible for the shooting had been “seriously injured” in the line of duty. But bodycam videos from Franklin Park police officers shortly after the incident showed the ICE agent describing his injuries as “nothing major,” NBC News reported Monday. 

It’s not clear why ICE had targeted Villegas-Gonzalez in the first place. David J. Bier, the  immigration director for the Cato Institute, wrote on X that ICE had manufactured the incident through a needless traffic stop.

“ICE tried to grab him just after dropping off his two little kids at day care. There is no reason why this interaction needed to happen at all,” Bier wrote, adding, “Desperate people in desperate spots can make stupid decisions like this guy did. But ICE shouldn’t manufacture these situations either.”

Additionally, one witness speaking to the Chicago Sun-Times claimed that ICE’s account of the fatal shooting had been inaccurate, and questioned whether the incident would be properly investigated. Neither of the officers involved in the incident were wearing body cameras, even though policy requires they wear them “as soon as practicable at the beginning of an Enforcement Activity and deactivation when the activity is concluded.” 

A group of Democratic lawmakers, including Illinois Representatives Jesús “Chuy” García and Delia C. Ramirez, as well as Senators Dick Durbin, Richard Blumenthal, and Tammy Duckworth sent a letter Tuesday to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and ICE Director Todd Lyons demanding that DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari investigate the shooting. 

It’s not entirely surprising that ICE would pursue an arrest of someone with no criminal conviction, or that they would lie about it. A Cato Institute study from June found that 65 percent of ICE detainees since October 2024 had no criminal record, and 95 had no violent criminal convictions. 

DHS’s press release about Villegas-Gonzalez claimed that ICE law enforcement was facing a 1,000 percent increase in assaults against them, up from a nearly 700 percent increase in July. But considering that there were just 10 assaults against ICE agents during the same period last year, that places the total number of purported assaults at roughly 100.

That figure doesn’t seem all that terrifying, especially when considering all of the wildly inconsistent and patently phony allegations of assault that have come to light as the Justice Department consistently struggles to secure indictments against protesters accused of assaulting immigration officials.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement will soon be tracking cell phone data.

The immigration law enforcement agency has bought access to an “all-in-one” surveillance tool that gives it updated location data from hundreds of millions of phones, according to ICE documents obtained by 404 Media. ICE reportedly prefers the service because it also peels information from social media accounts.

Redacted documents make reference to two products, both produced by the contractor Penlink. They are known as Tangles and WebLoc. Both were created by an Israeli company called Cobwebs, which merged into Penlink in 2023. ICE has reportedly spent upwards of $5 million for access to the software, Forbes reported last month.

Previous attempts to monitor consumers’ location data for immigration enforcement were found to be illegal. A sweeping records request by the ACLU in 2022 found that DHS had obtained more than 336,000 location data points across North America by scraping app user data on hundreds of millions of phones during Donald Trump’s first term.  

“Every American should be concerned that Trump’s hand-picked security force is once again buying and using location data without a warrant,” Senator Ron Wyden told 404 Media in a statement.

The decision to invest in Penlink’s products was informed by market research conducted in May and June by ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations, according to the documents.

WebLoc monitors the trends of mobile devices that have location data activated, and “how often they have been” to those locations, according to a government case study. Tangles creates a day-in-the-life profile of individuals based on mined social media data. It combines “posts, contacts, locations, and events they attended, combining it with any information leaked about them online,” Forbes reported, as well as captured images of a subject’s face that can then be searched for in databases by using Tangles’s AI-assisted tools.

ICE has praised Penlink’s products in internal documents, noting the tools forgo issues they’ve had with previous services, which would require analysts to “manually collect and correlate data from fragmented sources.”

“Without an all-in-one tool that provides comprehensive web investigations capabilities and automated analysis of location-based data within specified geographic areas, intelligence teams face significant operational challenges,” according to ICE documents published by 404 Media.

Read the full report at 404 Media.

The president who promised an “end to endless wars” just rekindled one—the war on drugs. 

The New York Times obtained a confidential memo sent to Congress this week that announced President Trump had “determined” that the U.S. is actively at war with drug cartels, which are now officially considered “nonstate armed groups.” The move comes after the Trump administration’s repeated strikes on what it claims were “drug boats” in the Caribbean.

“Based upon the cumulative effects of these hostile acts against the citizens and interests of the United States and friendly foreign nations, the president determined that the United States is in a noninternational armed conflict with these designated terrorist organizations,” read the notice. It contained no further specifics as to what groups will now be designated as terrorists.  

The obvious issue here is that the purposefully vague classification of “nonstate armed group” will allow the Trump administration to continue to administer unilateral, extrajudicial violence against whomever they see fit. The notice also stretches international law, which requires a “nonstate armed group to meet a certain threshold. Many drug cartels are more loosely tied groups of smugglers than they are organized and militant terror groups. But now the Trump administration has the language to justify treating them like it.   

“Not surprised that the administration may have settled on such a theory to legally backfill their operations,” former State Department lawyer and armed conflict law expert Brian Finucane told the Times. “I had speculated they might do so. One major problem, however, is that it is far from clear that whoever they are targeting is an organized armed group such that the U.S. could be in a noninternational armed conflict.” 

He also went on to describe Tren de Aragua, one of Trump’s favorite targets, as a “loosely organized cells of localized individual criminal networks” that was too “decentralized” to be treated as a nonstate armed group. 

This is far from the first time Trump has used wartime language to justify his version of the war on drugs. In March, President Trump used the Alien Enemies Act of 1798—untouched since the War of 1812 and the Japanese internment of the 1940s—to push the deportation of more than 200 Venezuelans, claiming they were Tren de Aragua gang members whom we were “in a time of war” with. 

The first war on drugs was fought domestically against Black and brown citizens, with tactics like broken-windows policing and excessive criminal charges. Trump’s war on drugs will be defined by unilateral attacks on drug boats and violations of Mexican and South American countries’ sovereignty in the name of keeping Americans safe. But given the vague definitions outlined in the memo, this will likely lead to more violence, more surveillance, and more suffering for those Trump thinks we’re at war with.    

Five civil servants working at the Department of Education told NBC News that their out-of-office messages had been altered with political language blaming Democrats for the government shutdown.

The new message read: “Thank you for contacting me. On September 10, 2025, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 5371, a clean continuing resolution. Unfortunately, Democrat Senators are blocking passage of H.R. 5371 in the Senate which has led to a lapse in appropriations. Due to the lapse of appropriations, I am currently in furlough status. I will respond to emails once government functions resume,” NBC reported Thursday.

It may sound old-fashioned, but typically, civil servants don’t make political comments like that—at least ones who follow the Hatch Act, which forbids federal employees from engaging in certain political activities in their official capacities.

One Department of Education employee, speaking anonymously, said that they restored their out-of-office message to the original neutral version, only to have the partisan language added back. 

“None of us consented to this. And it’s written in the first-person, as if I’m the one conveying this message, and I’m not,” the person told NBC News. “I don’t agree with it. I don’t think it’s ethical or legal. I think it violates the Hatch Act.”

Another employee anonymously told NBC News that they’d used the standard out-of-office message that the agency had disseminated to them earlier this week. Even that was changed. “They went in and manipulated my out-of-office reply. I guess they’re now making us all guilty of violating the Hatch Act,” the person said. 

A third employee told NBC News that they weren’t surprised by the apparent violation of the Hatch Act, or concerned that they might face repercussions for political speech they hadn’t actually made. “Nobody follows the law anymore, so why does it matter? It seems like laws are dotted lines now, not solid lines. It seems there’s no one to hold this administration accountable to laws,” they said. 

“Clearly, this wasn’t done by me, it was done while I was in a furlough status, I think I’d be able to argue that point,” the employee added. 

The Trump administration issued multiple rounds of emails via executive agency heads this week containing ideological messaging to thousands of federal employees, in potential violation of the Hatch Act and the Standards of Ethical Conduct for Employees of the Executive Branch. Workers at the Treasury Department, Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Social Security Administration received near-identical notes claiming that the Democrats had thwarted the Republicans’ continuing resolution due to “unrelated policy concerns.” In reality, Democrats had  been fighting to ensure health care subsidies. 

As desperate as Donald Trump has been to blame Democrats for the shutdown, it doesn’t seem that Americans are buying it. A recent poll found that roughly 47 percent of respondents blamed Republicans, while 30 percent said that Democrats were primarily responsible. Twenty-three percent of those surveyed said they were not sure who was primarily responsible for the shutdown.

A massive immigration raid at an apartment in the South Shore neighborhood of Chicago tormented residents in the early hours of Tuesday morning.

Some 300 federal agents, per NewsNation, raided the building, arresting 37 people, with the Department of Homeland Security alleging that “some of the targeted subjects are believed to be involved in drug trafficking and distribution, weapons crimes, and immigration violators.”

Agents rappelled in from helicopters, broke down doors, used flash bangs, tore tenants from their units, and detained several people—including numerous U.S. citizens—for hours before leaving the building ravaged, according to multiple reports.

Pertissue Fisher, who lives in the building, told ABC7 Chicago that ICE agents forced everyone out and only asked questions later. Fisher said she was handcuffed and questioned before being released at around 3 a.m. The officers, she noted, “just treated us like we were nothing,” and, “It was scary, because I had never had a gun in my face.”

Another ABC7 interviewee ducked upon hearing flash bangs detonate, and was then distressed by the sight of children detained. “They was bringing the kids down too, had them zip-tied to each other,” she said. “That’s all I kept asking. What is the morality? Where’s the human? One of them literally laughed. He was standing right here. He said, ‘f*** them kids.’”

A witness of the same name told the Chicago Sun-Times it was “heartbreaking” to see “kids coming out buck naked and taken from their mothers.”

Witness Darrell Ballard recalled seeing the agents use a “big, 15-inch chain saw” to cut down a fence. “We’re under siege,” he said. “We’re being invaded by our own military.”

Resident Rodrick Johnson told Block Club Chicago that he heard “people dropping on the roof” before his door was kicked in by agents and he was packed into a van for what seemed like hours, without being told why he was detained.

“I asked [agents] why they were holding me if I was an American citizen, and they said I had to wait until they looked me up,” Johnson told the Sun-Times. “I asked if they had a warrant, and I asked for a lawyer. They never brought one.”

Agents also reportedly left tenants’ doors flung open. Resident Dan Jones, the Sun-Times reports, returned to his apartment “to find all of his electronics and furniture missing, and all of his clothes and shoes thrown on the floor.”

The following day, reports described the building’s hallways as strewn with “toys, shoes and food,” with doors “blown off their hinges” and “holes left in walls.” In one room, per Block Club Chicago, zip ties sat on the floor beside blood stains and baby shoes.

Gregory Bovino, a Border Patrol commander-at-large, told NewsNation, which embedded with the federal agents for the operation, that it went “very smoothly.”