It is well past time for journalists to stop granting any credibility to statements from the Department of Homeland Security.
Time after time, official statements from DHS — including ICE and the Border Patrol — have turned out to be malicious fabrications, often intended to blame the victims for their own brutality.
On Thursday, a federal judge in Chicago did us all an enormous favor by documenting lie upon lie told by DHS agents and officials in her courtroom.
Coming after countless other examples of DHS mendacity — in Washington, D.C., in Los Angeles, in Chicago, and now in Charlotte — Judge Sara L. Ellis’s opinion and order should put to rest, once and for all, the presumption that what these people are saying is accurate enough to report without major caveats about their lack of credibility.
Ellis oversaw a case brought by the journalists, protesters, and members of the clergy against DHS for unjustified brutality and arrests in the Chicago area. Earlier this month, Ellis ruled in their favor, enjoining DHS from using tear gas and other crowd-control weapons except in extreme cases. She said in court that DHS’s “use of force shocks the conscience.”
A federal appeals court panel on Wednesday blocked the injunction from taking effect, describing it as “overbroad” and “too prescriptive” — but not disagreeing with Ellis’s “voluminous and robust factual findings.”
Here are some extensive excerpts from the “credibility” section of Ellis’s 233-page opinion issued on Thursday that I think should be required reading for any journalist who covers DHS. I’ve removed the citations to make it easier to read:
After reviewing all the evidence submitted to the Court and listening to the testimony elicited at the preliminary injunction hearing, during depositions, and in other court proceedings, the Court finds Defendants’ evidence simply not credible. Plaintiffs submitted a mountain of evidence, providing the Court with over eighty declarations, numerous videos and articles, and other evidence. Defendants did not rebut anything that Plaintiffs set forth in their declarations or testimony, even with BWC [body worn camera] footage.
For their part, Defendants submitted use of force and other investigative reports, hours and hours of BWC footage, surveillance footage from the Broadview [ICE] facility, and footage from a helicopter over Little Village. With respect to this footage, Defendants specifically directed the Court to certain videos and timestamps “to aid the Court in its review of those videos.” Presumably, these portions of the videos would be Defendants’ best evidence to demonstrate that agents acted in line with the Constitution, federal laws, and the agencies’ own policies on use of force when engaging with protesters, the press, and religious practitioners. But a review of them shows the opposite—supporting Plaintiffs’ claims and undermining all of Defendants’ claims that their actions toward protesters, the press, and religious practitioners have been, as [Border Patrol chief Gregory] Bovino has stated, “more than exemplary.”
For example, she writes:
Defendants directed the Court to two videos of agents outside the Broadview facility the evening of September 19, 2025. In those videos, agents stand behind a fence preparing to leave the facility’s gates and disperse what Defendants described as an unruly mob. The scene appears quiet as the gate opens, revealing a line of protesters standing in the street holding signs. Almost immediately and without warning, agents lob flashbang grenades, tear gas, and pepper balls at the protesters, stating, “fuck yea!”, as they do so, and the crowd scatters. This video disproves Defendants’ contentions that protesters were the ones shooting off fireworks, refusing orders, and acting violently so as to justify the agents’ use of force.
On September 26, 2025, video from an agent’s BWC shows a line of agents standing at least thirty feet away from protesters outside the Broadview facility on Harvard Street. Despite this distance, the agents start yelling “move back, move back” to the protesters and then shoot pepper balls and tear gas at them without any apparent justification. While the agent wrote in his use of force report that protesters were “becoming increasingly hostile,” the BWC video shows that the protesters were simply standing there when agents first deployed any force.
Defendants also highlighted an October 3, 2025 video, presumably to show that agents driving the streets faced constant danger from cars ramming them on purpose. But instead of leaving this impression, the video, which almost entirely consists of a view of the back seat of the car and some dialogue about how the agent’s “body cam is on” and he is “still recording,” suggests that the agent drove erratically and brake-checked other motorists in an attempt to force accidents that agents could then use as justifications for deploying force. This also calls into question [Supervisory Border Patrol Agent Kristopher] Hewson’s testimony that motorists have rammed into agents every day during the operation.
On October 4, 2025, in Brighton Park, Defendants directed the Court to BWC footage of an agent pushing a protester to the ground, with tear gas and pepper balls released thereafter. The footage shows the agents allowing the protester they had tackled to the ground to stand up and then tackling him again, kneeling on his head or neck. Only after agents threw tear gas and pepper balls and pushed the protester to the ground did other protesters throw some bottles of water at the agents, which cannot support the agents’ use of force.
But wait, there’s more! Ellis writes:
These are not the only inconsistencies and incredible representations in the record. While Defendants may argue that the Court identifies only minor inconsistencies, every minor inconsistency adds up, and at some point, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to believe almost anything that Defendants represent.
For example, Hewson testified that people held shields with nails in them, but video demonstrates that at least some of these shields were merely pieces of cardboard, none of the shields had nails in them, and nothing warranted the aggression that the agents showed toward the protesters holding these shields.
In Albany Park, agents wrote in their reports and DHS publicized that a bicyclist threw a bike at agents, but video from that event makes clear that agents actually took a protester’s bike and threw it to the side after they had deployed tear gas.
[Russell] Hott, who served as the Field Office Director for the ICE ERO Chicago Field Office from August 2025 to October 17, 2025, and currently serves as the Field Office Director of the ERO Washington Field Office, represented in his declarations that someone ripped a beard off an agent’s face and that protesters broke a downspout at the ICE Broadview facility. But when questioned about these instances in his deposition, Hott acknowledged that he did not even know if it was a person that caused the damage to the downspout, much less a protester, and that he did not have proof that the agent’s beard was actually ripped off his face.
And the biggest liar of them all turns out to be Greg Bovino, the Border Patrol official who has been leading the sieges of blue cities including Los Angeles, Chicago, and now Charlotte. Ellis writes:
Turning to Bovino, the Court specifically finds his testimony not credible. Bovino appeared evasive over the three days of his deposition, either providing “cute” responses to Plaintiffs’ counsel’s questions or outright lying. When shown a video of agents hitting Rev. Black with pepper balls, Bovino denied seeing a projectile hit Rev. Black in the head. In another video shown to Bovino, he obviously tackles Scott Blackburn, one of Plaintiffs’ declarants. But instead of admitting to using force against Blackburn, Bovino denied it and instead stated that force was used against him….
Bovino and DHS have represented that a rock hit Bovino in the helmet before he threw tear gas.
Bovino was asked about this during his deposition, which took place over three days. On the first day, Bovino admitted that he was not hit with a rock until after he had deployed tear gas. Bovino then offered a new justification for his use of chemical munitions, testifying that he only threw tear gas after he “had received a projectile, a rock,” which “almost hit” him. Despite being presented with video evidence that did not show a rock thrown at him before he launched the first tear gas canister, Bovino nonetheless maintained his testimony throughout the first and second days of his deposition. But on November 4, 2025, the final session of his deposition, Bovino admitted that he was again “mistaken” and that no rock was thrown at him before he deployed the first tear gas canister. (“That white rock was . . . thrown at me, but that was after . . . I deployed less lethal means in chemical munitions.”) (Q. [Y]ou deployed the canisters, plural, before that black rock came along and you say hit you in the head, correct? A. Yes. Before the rock hit me in the head, yes.”).
Moreover, videos of what happened in Little Village taken from agents’ BWCs and helicopters do not match up with agents’ descriptions of the alleged chaos they encountered. DHS tried to claim protesters threw fireworks at agents, when the helicopter and BWC footage indicates that those explosions were instead agents’ flashbang grenades. Moreover, aerial footage from CBP’s helicopter shows an agent throwing some type of smoke or gas device on a patch of grass off to the side of 27th Street, which further suggests that CBP, and not protesters, were the ones throwing things that CBP and DHS then used as justification to claim that protesters posed a danger to them.
So pretty much everything they said was a lie.
Ellis concludes:
Defendants, however, cannot simply create their own narrative of what happened, misrepresenting the evidence to justify their actions. Overall, after reviewing all the evidence, the Court finds that Defendants’ widespread misrepresentations call into question everything that Defendants say they are doing in their characterization of what is happening at the Broadview facility or out in the streets of the Chicagoland area during law enforcement activities.
That last paragraph ought to be turned into boilerplate for every time DHS officials are quoted saying anything: “Widespread misrepresentations by Department of Homeland Security agents call into question everything they say about their activities.”
More Dismissals and Acquittals
Ellis is hardly alone when it comes to calling out the lies.
There are many examples in which either credulous or malicious prosecutors have dismissed cases — or lost them — because it turned out federal agents simply made stuff up.
For instance, a September 27 protest outside the ICE facility in Broadview, Ill., resulted in federal arrests and charges against five people. All five cases have now been dismissed by prosecutors.
The latest dismissal came on Thursday, when charges were dropped against Dana Briggs, a 70-year-old Air Force veteran. Prosecutors had initially charged him with felony assault for allegedly swinging his right arm against a Border Patrol agent. Video from a journalist showed Briggs being brutally shoved to the ground, and body-cam footage unearthed by the judge apparently didn’t support the charge.
In an unusual move, Magistrate Judge Gabriel Fuentes, who heard all five cases, scolded prosecutors in a blistering opinion.
Dismissing appears to be the responsible thing for the government to have done, in light of the government’s judgment and discretion. But the Court cannot help but note just how unusual and possibly unprecedented it is for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in this district to charge so hastily that it either could not obtain the indictment in the grand jury or was forced to dismiss upon a conclusion that the case is not provable, in repeated cases of a similar nature. Federal arrest brings federal detention, even for a short time. It brings the need to obtain counsel, to appear at court hearings, to answer the charges (as Briggs did in this case, pleading not guilty), and to prepare for trial (as Briggs also has had to do in this case). Being charged with a federal felony, even if it is later reduced to a misdemeanor, is no walk in the park. And any responsible federal prosecutor knows this. Any responsible federal prosecutor knows that federal charges, or any actions by the United States Attorney directed at the citizenry, must be undertaken with the utmost care.
Some more examples:
- Also on Thursday, federal prosecutors in Chicago moved to dismiss charges against Marimar Martinez, who was shot five times by a Border Patrol agent after allegedly ramming the agent’s SUV. But witnesses said it was the Border Patrol that caused the accident. The agent bragged to his colleagues about what a good shot he was.
- In a trial last month in Washington, D.C., Sidney Lori Reid was found not guilty of assaulting an FBI agent during an ICE protest outside D.C. Jail. Video showed that two different assault accusations made against her were false. Before the trial, three grand juries had refused to charge Reid with a felony, so she was charged with a misdemeanor.
- Brayan Ramos-Brito, a Los Angeles protester charged with assaulting a Border Patrol agent, was acquitted in September after video showed him being shoved by the agent, not the other way around. One of the prosecution’s witnesses was none other than Greg Bovino. The jury didn’t believe him.
- In a story that is just now unfolding, Heather Morrow of Charlotte, who was charged last week with felony assault of an ICE officer for allegedly “attempting to jump on the officer’s back,” released video footage that showed no such thing.
- And in what could be the next test case, the Charlotte Observer reports that federal agents saw a man taking photos of them, rammed his van, then broke his window and charged him with felony assault.
The conclusion that journalists should reach is obvious: the brutality with which federal agents have abducted immigrants off the streets and assaulted protesters seems to be emboldening them to lie about how they are the real victims. They are not credible.
Also see: “All police lie,” May 26, 2022