The judge who once challenged Border Patrol Cmdr. Gregory Bovino and tried to limit the feds’ use of force during Operation Midway Blitz is now expected to decide in mid-November whether she’ll allow Illinois and Chicago’s lawsuit over the deportation campaign to move forward.U.S. District Jud ge Sara Ellis said she will rule Nov. 17 on Homeland Security’s bid to have the lawsuit tossed out. She set the ruling date after listening to 3½ hours of arguments Wednesday in the same courtroom where she once ordered Bovino to appear. The arguments came with Chicago on the cusp of marking the one-year anniversary of Midway Blitz. It began Sept. 8, 2025, and led to eight weeks of chaos, tear gas and fear. The feds say the campaign ended late in 2025, but Illinois’ lawyers clearly aren’t convinced that it's over. Related Trump administration hit with federal lawsuit over ‘occupation of Illinois and Chicago’ In fact, attorneys recently accused the feds of resuming their use of chemical munitions, warrantless arrests and enforcement activity near sensitive locations like courthouses. Chicago’s immigration court led the country in hearings in June.“Things are no longer quiet,” Illinois attorney Vikas Didwania told Ellis in a court filing last week.The lawsuit alleges the Trump administration “unleashed an organized bombardment on the State of Illinois and the City of Chicago” designed to “coerce” them into abandoning sanctuary policies, which mean local authorities won’t help track down immigrants without legal status.Among other things, it asks Ellis to block similar future attempts at immigration enforcement by Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Related Judge blasts Trump’s Chicago border ‘Blitz,’ extends curbs on use of force that ‘shocks the conscience’ Ellis, appointed to the bench by President Barack Obama in 2013, took over the case after handling similar litigation last fall. She’d entered a preliminary injunction Nov. 6 that limited the feds’ use of force during the campaign, reading Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago” poem as she ruled.The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals blocked and later vacated her order.Wednesday’s hearing in the new case largely turned on technical legal arguments, including whether Illinois and Chicago have the right to sue. But Ellis and the lawyers explored the differences between the 2025 campaign and the aggressive, albeit quieter, immigration enforcement now.The judge also reflected on an effort to enforce one of her orders last fall.Ellis brought it up while asking the lawyers to identify the line between legitimate immigration enforcement and the kind of coercion alleged by Illinois and Chicago. She wanted to know, “At what point do I … step out of my lane?” U.S. Border Patrol Cmdr. Gregory Bovino leaves the Dirksen Federal Courthouse last October after testifying during a hearing about immigration enforcement in Chicago.Ashlee Rezin/Sun-Times Before she handed down her injunction last fall, Ellis had entered a similar temporary restraining order. Then, in late October, she ordered Bovino to appear in her courtroom to discuss whether that order was being followed. The former Border Patrol official had become the public face of Midway Blitz, and he's since retired.“I had issued a valid order saying, ‘this is what can be used, this is the amount of force that is appropriate in this particular setting,’” Ellis said Wednesday, “and it was certainly my impression that that order was not being followed, right?”The judge then tried to force Bovino to return to her courtroom regularly, over the course of a week. She explained Wednesday that she’d wanted to “look backwards” with him on events that had already transpired. Had she asked him to tell her what he was doing the next day, she said, that would have amounted to her improperly “managing” the executive branch.But there wound up being “a difference of opinion on whether that violated the separation of powers” between the courts and the executive branch, she said.The federal appeals court ruled that it did.“I think that it is very illustrative of how tricky that can be,” Ellis told the lawyers Wednesday.Justice Department attorney Brantley Mayers argued that Illinois and Chicago want to have it both ways: They don’t want to support the federal government’s immigration effort, and they don’t want the feds to deploy more resources to do it on its own.But Ellis told him, “I don’t think that’s what they’re arguing, at all.” Related ‘It’s a disgrace': Chicagoans describe jarring encounters with feds as judge prepares to rule on ‘blitz’ “What they are complaining about, at this point, is that there were a number of warrantless arrests,” Ellis said. “That people were being stopped on the street. That people were being stopped dropping off their kids to school. That people were being stopped going to church. Going to the grocery store. That people living in an apartment complex had agents in the middle of the night rappelling down the side of their building and coming in.“That that sort of behavior, combined with the treatment of people who were protesting the increased enforcement … that that crossed the line from enforcement to coercion.”Lee Reeves, Mayers’ co-counsel, told the judge the lawsuit was brought by the wrong claimants making the wrong claims. He said individuals who believe they were harmed during the campaign should be pursuing lawsuits or criminal charges, instead.Several individuals have done exactly that. And many have called for federal agents to face criminal charges for alleged wrongdoing during Midway Blitz.Meanwhile, Illinois attorney Paul Berks invited the feds to make another claim: That the lawsuit is “moot.” In other words, there’s no reason to worry about Midway Blitz happening again.Reeves and Mayers did not take him up on the offer.“We would love to see the evidence that it’s not going to happen again,” Berks said. ...read more read less