In an escalating feud between Kristi Noem‘s federal agents and local officers, sometime in early October, police in Broadview (suburban village in Chicago’s metropolitan area) Illinois responded to a 911 call from an ICE agent that was later determined to be fake. As Dave Savini and Samah Assad reported for CBS News, the bogus call was one in a series of other questionable distress calls.
Broadview village officials sent a strong message to the feds this week. They do not want U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operating its detention center in their town. On Thursday, Broadview Police Chief Thomas Mills said ICE agents are draining the resources of his department and the community by making false 911 calls. Body camera video footage obtained by the CBS News Chicago Investigators shows several Broadview officers responding to a 911 call claiming someone was tampering with a gate at the ICE detention facility.
The caller to 911 falsely asserted someone was “tampering” with the gate outside the Broadview “detention center,” which has been the scene of multiple reports of violence. Not by immigrants, of course, but at the hand of Noem’s agents.
The same detention center has become the site of at least three other incidents involving federal agents, who are accused of hitting people with cars, shooting projectiles, and using chemical agents on journalists, including firing a pepper ball at CBS News Chicago reporter Asal Rezaei’s vehicle on Sunday.
Broadview police chief Mills told CBS that DHS is “cooperating” with their investigation but did not indicate the extent of that cooperation.
If fake 911 calls are straining police departments—as has been reported—then so, too, is a recent demand by Trump associates to treat skateboarding and livestreaming police as crimes (those activities are legal). Noem regularly complains, without evidence, that DHS agents have been subjected to attacks from the public, but—as our TrumpFile founder wrote in March—ICE’s own record of committing violence and other atrocities is very clear.
AUTHOR FOOTNOTE
Hard to tell which action is designed to distract from the other, but this series of fake-911 calls belies the inherent chaos and violence already documented by authentic calls to 911—as documented by Wired. Sure, the fake calls in Broadview could be just opportunistic and one-off, but I suspect it must be happening in other cities and towns where Donald’s concentration camps are located. I’ll continue following this story.
