ICE officers in fatal Chicago shooting were not wearing body cameras

Immigration and customs officers who participated in the deadly shooting of Silverio Villegas González in Chicago last week did not bear body cameras at the time, according to a senior in charge of the Ministry of Internal Security.

In the wake of filming, the defenders of immigration, family members and local elected officials had called for ice to release images of body cameras as well as all the photos.

The governor of Illinois, JB Pritzker, a Democrat, called for ice to hand over all the photos or video of the fatal shooting and during a press event reacted on Monday to what he said to be a lack of information on the incident, saying: “This is the most unusual situation that I have seen throughout my life, where we have no transparency and that the federal government is not taking control of it.”

Villegas González, a 38 -year -old undocumented immigrant from Mexico who was described by his family as a “dedicated father, Chéri and Aimneuse friend”, was killed on Friday morning in Franklin Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago.

According to Ice, the police pulled Villegas González, but he resisted the arrest and tried to flee the premises. While his car advanced, an ice officer standing near the passenger side of the Villegas-Gonzalez car was dragged, images of surveillance of a nearby company broadcast by CBS News Shows. Ice says that the officer feared for his life and had released his weapon, killing Villegas González.

Ice said that the officer who had been dragged had been left with serious injuries but was in a stable state on Friday. Ice also said that he had reckless driving history; However, he had no criminal history.

In a press release provided to NBC News, the representative Jesús “Chuy” García, D-ill., Reacted to the lack of sequences of body cameras, saying: “If an officer is authorized to use the force, he should carry and activate the worn cameras of the body. Period.”

The village of Franklin Park said in a statement that the FBI Chicago field office was in charge of the current investigation.

Ice Body Cam Stance

In January 2024, under the Biden administration, Ice deployed a body camera policy which asked that the cameras be carried “in all aspects of the Ice Application Activities”.

An updated copy of policy from February 2025, just after the start of the Trump administration, which was published as part of a law on freedom of information indicates that ice officers are required to carry body cameras and that cameras should be activated “as soon as possible at the start of an application and deactivation when the activity is concluded”. He notes, however, that the body cameras had not yet been distributed throughout the ice, and therefore stipulates that the requirement only applies to the officers in places where the cameras had been distributed.

The senior DHS official said that bodily cameras are not on the agency scale. Ice did not answer a question about the number of his officers currently have body cameras.

DHS assistant secretary, Tricia McLaughlin, told NBC News that the deadly Friday shooting was being examined by the agency.

“Each use of the incident of the force and any discharge of an ice gun must be properly reported and examined by the agency in accordance with the policy, the procedure and the directives of the agency,” wrote McLaughlin in an email. “All shootings are initially examined by the agency for the application of the federal, state, local or tribal law appropriate, mainly accused of first response to the incident. Following an examination of the incident by the appropriate investigation agency, Ice will carry out an independent examination of the critical incident. ”

McLaughlin added that ice officers are formed to use the minimum quantity of force necessary to resolve situations and to defuse meetings.

When the ice deployed its worn camera policy in 2024, the agency wrote that it lacked resources to equip all its workforce with cameras. Since July, ice has become billions of new funds from tax legislation and expenditure known as “Big Beautiful Bill”.

The agency has planned to develop a policy by which images of bodily cameras are examined and published in “critical incidents”, according to Caleb Vitello, which supervised the deployment of the policy of the body camera for ice and was then an acting director of the agency. He now oversees the training of new ice officers and had previously spoken to NBC News in politics in a brief interview in a training center.

Ice rarely releases images of bodily cameras from immigration application operations. One of the only times this year when she published such images was after the arrest of the members of the Congress when they tried to enter and inspect an ice detention center in Newark, New Jersey in May.