Politics
Former Mayor Lori Lightfoot on ICE Accountability Project, Documenting Alleged Misconduct
A new project is underway with the goal of holding accountable federal immigration agents accused of misconduct.
Former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot is behind the initiative called the ICE Accountability Project, which allows community members to submit their own documentation of incidents.
It comes in the wake of last week’s fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis.
Lightfoot joined “Chicago Tonight” to talk about the new project and its goals.
On how this project is different from the Illinois Accountability Commission, which will hold hearings and similarly create a public record of what residents are experiencing during ‘Operation Midway Blitz’:
“(This project) will really be working in harmony with the state. As I understand it, the state’s project will primarily focus on really assessing the harm to individuals and families and community, which is obviously a very important thing. We are creating a centralized repository for people who have collected video, audio and all other information about what ICE has done in Chicago. Hopefully local law enforcement will look at this information and not have to search across various social media platforms.”
On how Lightfoot and her team are confirming the veracity of the videos:
“We are working on an AI tool ourselves to be able to detect whether or not the information, particularly video information, has not been altered in some way. There’s multiple levels of review: There’s a frontline level of review that looks at the information to confirm date, time, location. Then there’s a second line of review that’s going to include myself, other lawyers, former federal agents, to make sure, frankly, we’re not getting duped into posting something that never actually happened.”
On who is working with Lightfoot on this — and who’s funding it:
“For obvious reasons we’re keeping the identities of folks that are involved confidential, but they are people that I’ve known and have worked with for a number of different years. We’re keeping the donors’ identities confidential.”
On what she envisions coming of the project:
“I hope that it adds to a level of transparency about what’s been happening. It’s pretty eye-opening and alarming to see the number of incidents aggregated together in one spot. Another aspect of the project is so-called unmasking the agents. We’re not talking about doxing federal agents. But there are agents that you have seen on videotape that look like they’ve committed crimes.”
In 2021, a probe by the Chicago Office of Inspector General found the city and the Chicago Police Department botched the response to the protests and unrest triggered by the police murder of George Floyd in May 2020.
On whether Lightfoot sees a difference between the conduct of Chicago police officers at the time and federal immigration agents now:
“At the time, and still, I fundamentally disagree with that assessment by the Inspector General’s Office. We were facing very unprecedented times, we were facing not just peaceful protests, but people who came for a fight and people who wanted to provoke actions on the part of Chicago police officers. If you look at my contemporaneous statements, you look at the statements of former Supt. David Brown, we never apologized or tried to do anything other than hold officers accountable. When things happened and went wrong in Chicago, we held officers accountable. We had a number of oversight mechanisms. You’re not seeing that at the federal level, and that’s the problem.”
