Juan Muñoz, an Oak Parker who serves as an Oak Park Township Trustee, was detained by ICE Friday as he took part in a protest at the immigration detention center in Broadview.
In an interview Saturday morning with Wednesday Journal, Muñoz and Dr. Monica Maalouf, his wife, described his arrest, conditions inside the detention center and the circumstances of his release late Friday afternoon.
Muñoz said the start of the protest was notably less aggressive than on his previous visit to the facility. “The first time ICE was much more aggressive with chemical weapons, pepper balls, tear gas,” he said. On Oct. 3 protesters had been sequestered onto a grassy area somewhat back from the facility. The street had been lined with state and county officers tasked with keeping it clear for ICE vehicles to enter and exit.
Oak Park Village President Vicki Scaman, who also attended the protest, said protesters were chanting, “the sort of chanting you hear at protests in Scoville Park,” she said.
Both Muñoz and Scaman described a rapid escalation just after 9 a.m. by federal agents in engaging with protesters.
“With no warning,” Muñoz said, “there was chaos created by ICE agents.” He said federal agents began aggressively pushing protesters, came over the guard rail set up to contain protestors, and issuing “very confusing instructions” as to what the agents wanted protesters to do.
Muñoz said he was taking video when he “was pulled to the ground,” by Gregory Bovino, commander-at-large of U.S. Border Patrol. Bovino has been a visible presence in Broadview and downtown Chicago over the past two weeks.
“I was taking video. Bovino knocked my phone to the ground and pulled me to the ground. I told him I was an elected official,” said Muñoz. Scaman who saw Muñoz taken down described it as aggressive and that a federal agent had his knee on Muñoz’s back as plastic handcuffs were put on him.
Muñoz and six other protesters were arrested and moved to the middle of the detention center’s parking lot. They were placed on a guard rail.
Shortly after that, he said an ICE SUV pulled up and Kristi Noem, secretary of homeland security, exited the vehicle and came over to observe the detainees.
“They grabbed us for a photo op. We were on display for her,” said Muñoz.
After an hour in the parking lot, Muñoz said he and the others detained were moved inside the detention facility and into a cell with an open toilet in one corner and overflowing trash cans.
What he described in the hours that followed was a “bureaucratic process with a veneer of a normal bureaucratic process” that was anything but normal. He and the others were fingerprinted and photographed, interrogated (and read their Miranda rights) by FBI agents.
At about 12:30 p.m. he was allowed to call his wife to confirm that he was still in Broadview. By that time Maalouf was at the site conferring with Scaman and representatives of the National Lawyers Guild which had an attorney inside the building. She said the guild had no specific information on Muñoz but shared their previous experience with similar cases.
Scaman credited staff in the offices of Sen. Dick Durbin and Gov. JB Pritzker with working on Muñoz’s behalf.
Muñoz said he saw multiple different federal agencies represented inside the detention center — ICE, Border Patrol, Homeland Security, the FBI.
He described it as chaotic and traumatic with no indication throughout the afternoon as to whether he and his fellow detainees would be charged, released or transported to another detention center. He was the only Latino among those sharing the cell.
Maalouf said she was “concerned and scared and left in an information black hole all day.” She had brought all of Muñoz’s citizenship documents with her to Broadview.
At about 4:30 p.m., Muñoz said, he and the others were told to leave the cell and were escorted outside to an ICE van. He said they did not know where they were going or what they might be facing. ICE then drove the detainees to a gas station about 1.5 miles from the detention center and told them they were being released.
Maalouf and others saw a van exit the detention facility but did not know if her husband was inside or where it might be going.
Muñoz, who is still without his cell phone, borrowed a phone and called his wife.
Looking back 24 hours after he was arrested, Muñoz said it “feels surreal. I think about what might have happened. But my focus is not on me but on what is happening to other families because of their status.” He said the federal government is building a system aimed at the Latino community that is “cruel and chaotic, that is tearing families apart.”
He said he grew up, the son of immigrants, in small towns in Minnesota and Colorado where immigration enforcement was common. His experience was that people stayed silent. In this moment he said, it is important that “people are raising their voices, advocating for others.”
Asked if he will return to Broadview for other protests he was uncertain. “I’ll give that some thought. I’m elected and I feel a responsibility to be present to represent my community.”
Maalouf said, “We struggle with this tension. What yesterday meant for him and our family. But all of this is done with the intention of making him afraid to speak up.”
Asked about his two young children and what they might know about his experience in Broadview, he said, “They won’t know anything for a long while. As parents, part of our role is protecting their innocence.”
Oak Park elected officials across branches of government held a press conference in the parking lot of the township offices at 103 Oak Park Avenue Monday night.
Munoz, Scaman, Township Supervisor Timothy Thomas and several Oak Park village trustees and Oak Park Public Library trustees addressed the gathered reporters and residents to call for an end to ICE’s deportation campaign in Chicagoland and to violent crack downs on protestors.
“I’m here to unequivocally state that ICE is the aggressor,” Scaman said. “There is no emergency here, we do not need ICE or the national guard. What I need from our federal government as a municipal village president is dollars for housing, mental health, physical health, support for transgender individuals, school programs and food.”
Some of the Oak Parkers in the audience had also travelled to downtown Chicago last week to attend the detention hearing of Paul Ivery, a 26-year-old Oak Park man with intellectual disabilities arrested at the facility during a protest Sept. 27 and charged with felony assault of a federal agent.
Each of the elected officials who spoke at the press conference said that they’d seen federal agents treat protestors, press and politicians violently outside the Broadview facility firsthand.
Library Trustee Annie Wilkinson took to the podium holding a rubber bullet she’d been shot with during a protest. She said she had watched an agent shoot a journalist in the head with a rubber bullet a few feet in front of her and that she’d been pushed down herself.
“What shocked me the most was the agents’ sadistic enjoyment in causing chaos,” Wilkinson said.
As Oak Park Trustee Brian Straw spoke, many of his words were drowned out by the sound of a Black Hawk helicopter flying low over Downtown Oak Park.
Munoz told those in attendance that what he had experienced on scene at the protests was not the real tragedy at hand.
“What I went through last Friday pales in comparison to what immigration detainees and their families endure every single day,” he said. “Their voices must be heard.”
Letter to the editor from Juan Muñoz:
