Daniel Greer is having trouble sleeping right now.
The 49-year-old Berwyn resident continues to dream of federal immigration officers showing up where he works, Concordia Cemetery in western suburban Forest Park. Again.
Last week, Greer was one of four U.S. cemetery workers arrested during a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation that entered a private Christian cemetery. They were eventually released without charges, but that was after agents hit them with pepper balls and pepper spray and then detained them for several hours, Greer recalled.
Greer, along with two of the three other detained workers and Forest Park Mayor Rory Hoskins, stood together Monday evening in Constitution Court, a public square in the center of the village, about three-quarters of a mile west of the cemetery. Hoskins called on the federal government to uphold the Constitution and demanded an end to the ongoing immigration crackdown that permeates the Chicago area.
“We respect federal authority, but what we see here is an abuse,” Hoskins told the media. “We therefore ask that Operation Midway Blitz cease immediately. This initiative has caused irreparable harm to our communities.”
As the Chicago area has passed more than a month since President Donald Trump's local mass deportation mission began, federal immigration enforcement efforts have intruded. schools, hospitals, enterprises And busy city streets.
“It's bigger than Forest Park,” Hoskins said. I'm running for the Democratic nomination in Illinois' 7th Congressional District.
Broadview's ICE storage facility, where they were weeks of protestsis located just over 3 miles southwest of Forest Park.
In response to questions about the detention of the cemetery workers, Assistant Secretary of the Interior Trisha McLaughlin said in a written statement that they were arrested during an active ICE pursuit.
“On October 7, ICE encountered two illegal aliens who were attempting to evade arrest by crossing the Des Plaines River,” McLaughlin said. “The river was flowing fast, and the illegal immigrants were up to their necks in water and risked drowning.”
McLaughlin accused “four U.S. citizens” of attempting to “interfere with officers' efforts to rescue illegal aliens by blocking their access to the waterfront.” Officers eventually pulled the people in the river to shore and arrested them, McLaughlin said.
“Despite the unrest and lack of assistance from local authorities, ICE successfully arrested both illegal aliens, including Martin Martinez Guereca, a Mexican illegal alien previously convicted of assault in 2004, and Jaime Arturo Martinez Rojas, a Mexican illegal alien previously arrested for drug possession and drunk driving. form,” McLaughlin said in a statement.
Court records show that a man named Martin Gierecka was convicted of assault in Cook County in 2004 and sentenced to three years in the Illinois Department of Corrections.
Cemetery workers were arrested for interfering with law enforcement's rescue efforts, McLaughlin said.
The report detailed by Hoskins, Greer and his fellow workers Monday night paints a different picture.
Greer, speaking to the Tribune after the news conference, said he and other workers were doing maintenance work on the cemetery's pumping station, which pumps water through the cemetery, when they noticed someone was in the Des Plaines River. They approached to see if the man needed help, but then heard voices telling them to leave the man alone, Greer recalled. The workers left, but a few minutes later saw ICE agents approach them and ask them to go into the cemetery grounds, Greer said.
Video of the meeting was purchased and published by WGN-TV. Last week, agents were briefly shown approaching the cemetery gates, requesting access, and then using what appeared to be wire cutters to force their way inside. The video then shows agents releasing what appear to be pepper balls and asking cemetery workers to “get down on the ground.”
Greer said that after agents walked through the gate, he was knocked to the ground and pepper-sprayed.
“My face felt like someone had poured lighter fluid into it and set me on fire,” he said.
After that, according to Greer, the agents tied his hands behind his back and sat him against the wall of the pumping station. After about an hour and a half of waiting, Greer and two other detained cemetery workers were taken to the local Homeland Security Investigations office in Lombardy. The fourth worker arrested was taken to Rush Oak Park Hospital for treatment, Hoskins said.
In a statement to the Tribune last week, a Rush spokesman confirmed that ICE agents were on the Oak Park campus with a detainee who required medical attention.
Greer said he and two other workers taken to Lombard waited another two hours in private cells before being released without charges.
“I asked them repeatedly what I was accused of and they said they needed to talk to their boss,” Greer said.
Since then, he sleeps on average three to four hours a day.
“If this happens to me, a US citizen, what do they do to other people?” – he said.
Hoskins said Forest Park will provide awareness-of-rights training to the broader community following last week's incident.
Darren Eichler, one of the other cemetery workers present Monday, declined further comment after the news conference. But in a text message to the Tribune, Eichler described the encounter in a poem.
“In the midst of a trembling change of power, when my hands could not rise in defense, and the law, in theory, should have stood up for me, a scorching rain began to fall,” he wrote. “Born from oil, it stuck to my skin, slippery and stinging, plunging me into disbelief.
“Then there was a chorus of sharp fire, every shot felt pain, every breath tasted vinegar and fear.”
The Tribune's Jason Meisner and Caroline Kubzanski contributed reporting.
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