A producer and editor for WGN-TV was aggressively detained and driven away by Border Patrol agents on Friday morning during an Immigration and Customs Enforcement action in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood.
Debbie Brockman, who has worked for the local television station since 2011, was violently forced to the ground by two federal agents before having her hands cuffed behind her back. While she was face down on the street with the masked agents placing handcuffs on her, a local resident filming the encounter asked her name.
“Debbie Brockman, I work for WGN. Please let them know,” a frantic Brockman told Josh Thomas, who works at a Chicago law firm and lives near the intersection where the arrest occurred. According to Thomas, another unidentified man had also been detained by the agents.
Brockman was accused of assaulting a federal law enforcement officer, a Homeland Security official told The Independent. But no charges have been filed against her and she was released from Customs and Border Protection custody on Friday afternoon, WGN said in a statement.
With onlookers shouting at the agents and calling them “fascists,” the officers eventually pulled up the cuffed Brockman – whose pants had fallen during the rough encounter – and tossed her into an unmarked silver van with New Jersey plates. As the officers got in the car, according to videos from Thomas and others at the scene, residents shouted “Nazi f*cks” at the agents as the vehicle peeled off and rammed another SUV.
“Get out of our neighborhood. Get out of our city,” one pedestrian is heard yelling at the agents as other bystanders honked their car horns and tossed epithets at the officers.
The TV station addressed the incident in a statement.
“Earlier today, a WGN-TV creative services employee was detained by ICE. She has since been released, and no charges were filed against her,” the station said. “Out of respect for her privacy, we will have no further statements about this incident.”
In a statement to The Independent, Homeland Security assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin said Border Patrol agents were “conducting immigration enforcement operations and when several violent agitators used their vehicles to block in agents in an effort to impede and assault federal officer.”
“In fear of public safety and of law enforcement, officers used their service vehicle to strike a suspect’s vehicle and create an opening,” she said. “As agents were driving, Deborah Brockman, a U.S. citizen, threw objects at Border Patrol’s car and she was placed under arrest for assault on a federal law enforcement officer.”
McLaughlin added: “This incident is not isolated and reflects a growing and dangerous trend of illegal aliens violently resisting arrest and agitators and criminals ramming cars into our law enforcement officers. These attacks highlight the dangers our law enforcement officers face daily—all while receiving no pay thanks to the Democrats’ government shutdown.”
As of publication, Brockman’s name had yet to show up on a federal criminal arrest docket in Chicago.
Speaking to the Chicago Tribune, Thomas said that by the time he came out of his apartment, the agents already had an unidentified Latino male in the vehicle and had Brockman face down in the middle of the road.
“I walk out the front door of the condo, she’s laying on the ground in the street and they’re wrestling with her, trying to get her hands behind her back,” he said. “They said they were detaining her for obstruction. She said, ‘I didn’t obstruct.’”
The Trump administration has surged federal officers into Chicago and other Democratic-led cities to support the president’s mass deportation agenda, which has been met with growing protests outside ICE facilities. Trump has federalized hundreds of National Guard troops, including troops from Texas, to support federal officers in Chicago and elsewhere, but a federal judge on Thursday temporarily blocked the administration from sending the military to America’s largest city.
A lawsuit from Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker’s administration and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson accuses the president of seeking to escalate tensions by sending troops into the state in an attempt to justify a wider presence of military forces on American soil.
Protesters, members of the press, and local faith leaders have also sued the administration over what they have called a “pattern of extreme brutality” from federal agents, decked out in combat gear and armed with so-called less-lethal crowd control weapons that have seriously injured civilians, according to the lawsuit. Another federal judge ordered federal officers to stand down from using those weapons without warning, among other constraints.
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