As the crowd grew more hostile, agents ramped up their uses of force. Michael Brosilow—a photographer, Irving Park resident, and decorated long-distance runner—pulled into his neighborhood after returning from a training session. Rico and Chavez confronted the 68-year-old man, who yelled, “Fuck you!” as he stepped out of his silver Toyota. Rico then tackled Brosilow, planted his knee in his back, and handcuffed him. “This is my block!” Brosilow screamed. Six of Brosilow’s ribs were broken in the encounter, and he suffered internal bleeding.
Chavez pulled the pin on a can of tear gas and tossed it into the street as bystanders screamed. Puerte, meanwhile, spotted 25-year-old ICE watcher Maria Bryan allegedly hit Rico in the head and slammed her and her bicycle to the ground, fracturing seven of her ribs.
The agents eventually loaded into the vehicle, drove off, and radioed in that they had arrested two US citizens for “impeding” and “assault.” (Neither Brosilow nor Bryan were charged.)
As the agents moved out of Irving Park, the horns of trailing cars and whistles from ICE watchers were clearly audible. When the SUV stopped at a red light, two men on the sidewalk stepped up to remonstrate with the feds.
Puente photographed one with his iPhone, then rolled down his window and pointed his grenade launcher at a second man.
“Get the fuck out of the way!” he yelled, aiming his muzzle at the civilian as the vehicle pulled away. “Fuck you!”
Created in 1984 to deal with riots in immigration detention camps, BORTAC has been sent to South America for narcotics interdiction missions alongside the Drug Enforcement Administration; conducted missions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Jordan; and, in the recent past, raided desert aid stations. While BORTAC is designed for close combat, BORSTAR, which was created in 1998 in response to a rise in migrant deaths on the southern border, specializes in open-country operations. Members of both teams undergo Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape training, are taught complex military surveillance and countersurveillance tactics, and tend to be recruited from specialized military units like the Army Rangers.
“They go in real hot—in my opinion, too hot and too unruly,” says a former Special Forces member, speaking on condition of anonymity. This veteran says that in his experience, BORTAC members tend to be “ego-driven hotheads” who are highly trained but have little or no operational war-fighting experience. “Even then, they’re definitely not the people I’d want in any sort of civilian law enforcement context.”
Beginning in February 2020, the first Trump administration sent BORTAC into Democrat-run “sanctuary cities” for civil immigration enforcement, a surge that was short-circuited by the Covid-19 pandemic. Later that summer, BORTAC agents were documented snatching protesters off the streets of Portland, Oregon, during the George Floyd protests.
Since the start of the second Trump administration, BORTAC and BORSTAR agents have participated in immigration blitzes in California, North Carolina, Minnesota, and Vermont. Since October, the Border Patrol’s paramilitary units, led by Timothy P. Sullivan, the head of the Fort Bliss–based Border Patrol’s Special Operations Group, have also commanded the federal presence at an ICE facility in Portland, Oregon, that has been a constant target of protests, often resulting in violent clashes. More recently, in mid-March, agents from one of the Border Patrol’s local Special Operations detachments used crowd control munitions on protesters in South Burlington, Vermont, during a chaotic immigration arrest.
