A group of 15 Illinois residents filed claims against the Department of Homeland Security over excessive force and civil rights violations they say were perpetrated by federal agents during Operation Midway Blitz.
Antonio Romanucci, one of the lawyers for the claimants, said at a press conference Thursday that federal law enforcement officers “terrorized our citizenry” during the operation, which began in the Chicago area last fall.
Claimants, Romanucci said, “all had their civil rights violated by masked federal agents, and were unlawfully detained” as part of the operation.
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“They were withheld, had their Fourth Amendment rights violated during this Operation Midway Blitz,” he said. “What were they doing at the time? They were exercising what’s known under the Constitution as their rights. Rights are not conditional; they’re not optional. They have a right to exercise their rights, and that’s what they were doing under the First Amendment.”
What are claimants saying?
One claimant, Oak Park Township trustee Juan Muñoz, said at the press conference that he was pulled to the ground by former Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino during a demonstration on Oct. 3 at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Broadview, Illinois.
Muñoz recalled having his “hands restrained behind my back,” and then being “taken inside a federal immigration facility, a place that represents fear and despair for many.”
While inside the facility, Muñoz said, “I witnessed people held in unsanitary, crowded, and inhumane conditions.”
“I saw a young man with a swollen jaw, scrapes along his face and body, and no one received medical attention. I was stripped of my freedom,” he said. “I did not know where I would be taken or when I would see my family again.”
Muñoz was detained for eight hours, then loaded in a black van and dropped off at a gas station.
“There, I was released without [charges], but I did not walk away unchanged. The fear and uncertainty created that day still affect my family and me today. I now carry a copy of my passport. I have experienced sleepless nights,” he said. “My heart races when I think about what happened and how easily they took my freedom. And I understand even more deeply the fear that generations of immigrant families have carried. I’m tired. I’m tired of carrying what happened that day.”
On Sept. 26, Kyle Frankovich said he watched a Border Patrol agent shoot his partner, Leigh Kunkel, a citizen journalist reporting at the Broadview ICE facility, in the back of her head with pepper balls. When she dropped to the ground, “he lowered his aim and deliberately shot her in the face,” Frankovich said.
Between the tear gas sprayed by federal agents and pepper ball rounds, Kunkel was bleeding profusely, Frankovich said. When he went to Broadview a week later, Frankovich said, an agent repeatedly charged at him while he was recording on his phone. Though Frankovich remained upright and kept filming, several more agents, he said, then threw him to the ground, kneeling on him and zip-tying his arms behind his back.
“The assault tore a muscle in my side, chipped several of my teeth, and caused significant and lasting nerve damage to my left arm,” Frankovich said. Content creators who were with the federal agents captured his detainment on camera. Frankovich said those images were later used in official DHS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement recruitment materials.
“They falsely claim that I was a violent activist who assaulted law enforcement officers. I did no such thing, as the government well knows,” he said. “No charges have ever been filed against me; these posts were seen millions of times. Individuals in the comments section were trying to identify me so that they could stop me.”
Frankovich and the other detainees were taken to Broadview, which he called a “filthy, overcrowded, poorly-run hellhole” with “overcrowded cells” that lacked beds, blankets, toiletries, hygiene products or medical attention.
“My fellow protesters and I were denied our constitutional right to legal counsel, despite many explicit requests,” Frankovich said.
Another claimant who spoke at the press conference, Jennifer Moriarty, has previously talked about how a federal immigration agent grabbed her by the neck and threw her on the ground while she was filming a car accident involving agents, where, witnesses said, they “break-checked” another vehicle.
At Thursday’s press conference, Moriarty said the sounds of “honking horns, helicopters, and whistles just trigger emotional reactions” after she was “accosted and attacked” by federal agents in Evanston on Oct. 31, 2025.
“Sleep is a luxury that I can no longer afford,” she said.
The Department of Homeland Security, in a statement to Straight Arrow, said “agitators who obstruct or assault federal law enforcement officers will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.” It added in the statement that Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents will continue to arrest “the worst of the worst.”
However, an analysis by experts and media outlets has shown that a majority of the people detained by federal agents during Operation Midway Blitz did not have prior criminal convictions, something Romanucci noted at the press conference.
“Our clients I consider to be the best of the best,” he said. “In fact, reports indicate that as many as 85% of the people who were detained during Operation Midway Blitz had no criminal convictions on their records at all; in most of those cases, no criminal charges were ever filed, as we’ve seen.”
The 15 residents are filing their claims under the Federal Tort Claims Act, and are being represented by Evergreen Legal Strategies, Romanucci & Blandin, LLC, and Jacobson Lawyers Group.
Romanucci & Blandin also represent some of Renee Good’s family members. Good was fatally shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent during Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis in January. During Midway Blitz in Chicagoland, a man in suburban Franklin Park, Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, was also shot and killed by an ICE agent.
What is the Federal Tort Claims Act?
Under the Federal Tort Claims Act, those who are injured or have their property damaged by “the wrongful or negligent act of a federal employee acting within his or her official duties” can file a claim with the government to be reimbursed.
To do this, claimants have to file a Standard Form-95. The form cannot name the individual involved, only the federal agency. The government has six months investigate and decide how to respond. If they don’t do so in this time period, claimants can file a civil lawsuit.
The American Civil Liberties Union said in July it filed 54 of these claims over allegations of property damage, excessive force and constitutional violations during immigration enforcement operations and National Guard deployments.
“The Federal Tort Claims Act is a vital tool in the fight for accountability,” Karianne Jones, a partner at Evergreen Legal Services, said Thursday. “Through these claims, we are demanding the federal government to pay up, an answer for what it did in Chicago and cities across the country, and we’re also sending a clear message: no one is above the law.”
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