Chicago Teacher Whose Capture By ICE Agents Sparked Outrage is Released
Viral videos show ICE agents forcibly removing Diana Patricia Santillana Galeano from a daycare and preschool building.
This story has been updated with comments from U.S. Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin.
By Gary Gately
A teacher whose forcible removal from a Chicago daycare center and preschool by ICE agents sparked widespread outrage has been released from federal custody, her attorney confirmed Thursday.
Diana Patricia Santillana Galeano was released from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention in Clay County in west-central Indiana, Wednesday night and had returned to Chicago Thursday, the attorney, Charlie Wysong, said in an email to The Catholic Observer.
The release of Santillana Galeano, a 38-year-old who teaches infants, came a day after U.S. District Court Judge Jeremy C. Daniel ruled in Chicago that her detention without a bond hearing broke the law because it violated her right to due process.
Daniel, nominated to the federal bench by former President Joe Biden, ordered the Trump administration to grant Santillana Galeano a bond hearing by Friday after Wysong argued in a petition filed last Thursday that ICE agents had violated a 2022 consent decree approved by a federal court in Chicago governing warrant-less arrests by ICE agents.
Viral video footage showed two federal agents entering the Rayito de Sol Spanish Immersion Daycare and Preschool on the north side of Chicago just after 7 a.m. on November 5, then dragging Santillana Galeano and slamming her face-first into the outer glass doors as she screamed, “Yo tengo papeles!” (“I have papers!”). The video then shows Santillana Galeano being shoved against a dark gray sedan outside the building by the two agents, one with a mask covering his face.
“I am so grateful to everyone who has advocated on my behalf, and on behalf of the countless others who have experienced similar trauma over recent months in the Chicago area,” Santillana Galeano said in a statement through Wysong. “I love our community and the children I teach, and I can’t wait to see them again.”
Judge Daniel had temporarily barred the Trump administration last week from removing Santillana Galeano from the U.S. and transferring her to any federal jurisdiction outside of Illinois, Indiana or Wisconsin. After being taken into custody, she was initially held at the Broadview ICE processing facility about 12 miles west of Chicago before being transferred more than 200 miles away to the Clay County facility.
U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials said agents pursued Santillana Galeano and took her into custody after she fled into Rayito de Sol following an attempted traffic stop and lied about her identity.
Court filings show Santillana Galeano entered the U.S. from Colombia in March 2023 “due to threats to her safety,” filed for an application for asylum or “withholding of removal” and received a work permit authorizing her to stay in the U.S. through 2029.
But DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin asserted that “work authorization does NOT confer any type of legal status to be in the U.S,” though work permits have long been interpreted to authorize an immigrant to stay in the U.S. legally for a specified period. But, McLaughlin said, “The illegal alien’s work authorization was approved by the Biden administration, which exploited this loophole to help facilitate the invasion of our country.”
In an email to The Catholic Observer Thursday evening, McLaughlin said: “An activist judge ordered Diana Patricia Santillana Galeano, a criminal illegal alien from Colombia, loose on American streets. This decision is absurd.”
McLaughlin also said that last month, Santillana Galeano “reportedly paid for smugglers to illegally” to bring her 16- and 17-year-old children into the U.S. via the southern border, adding that “facilitating human smuggling is a crime.” But McLaughlin did not respond when pressed for details on the allegations or whether Santillana Galeano has been charged with facilitating human smuggling.
“The Trump administration is committed to restoring the rule of law and common sense to our immigration system and will continue to fight for the arrest, detention, and removal of aliens who have no right to be in this country,” McLaughlin said in the email.
Federal immigration raids in Chicago and at the Broadview facility since the Trump administration launched “Operation Midway Blitz” on September 9 have drawn harsh criticism from federal judges, civil rights and immigration activists, human rights organizations, local lawmakers and clergy.
Widely circulated videos have shown federal law enforcement agents deploying tear gas and pepper balls, hurling protesters, many of them nonviolent, to the ground and targeting schools and houses of worship. (President Donald J. Trump rescinded a federal policy in January that had required ICE to refrain from immigration enforcement actions at “sensitive locations” such as schools and places of worship, though the president’s move faces multiple legal challenges.)
On Wednesday, U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey I. Cummings, a Biden federal court nominee, said he would order the release of hundreds of immigrants arrested during the Operation Midway Blitz after attorneys representing some of them argued that immigration agents had arrested them without warrants and in violation of the 2022 consent decree.
“We are grateful that Judge Cummings sees the urgency of this moment and has ordered the Trump administration to allow hundreds to leave the inhumane detention centers where they are being unlawfully held and to have a chance at the due process our laws require,” Mark Fleming, associate director of litigation at the National Immigrant Justice Center, which represents plaintiffs in the case, said in a statement.
“Communities throughout the Chicago area have been traumatized by ICE and other federal agents’ chaotic and violent actions in our neighborhoods in recent months, and potentially hundreds of families already have been permanently separated as a result of unlawful arrests and rapid deportations without due process,” Fleming added.
ICE has also been roundly criticized by Pope Leo XIV, U.S. bishops, lay Catholics and civil rights and immigration advocacy groups for refusing to allow Catholic leaders to enter Broadview to provide Holy Communion and other pastoral care to detainees.
McLaughlin told The Catholic Observer in an email that the ICE facility is a “field office,” not a detention center, and that “illegal aliens are only briefly held there for processing before being transferred to a detention facility.” McLaughlin, a Catholic, said DHS does not permit religious services in field offices.
But for a decade, Sister JoAnn Persch had provided Communion and other pastoral care to Broadview detainees, before federal immigration officials denied Catholic leaders’ requests to do so on October 11 and again on November 1.
“Religious organizations are more than welcome to provide services to detainees in ICE detention facilities,” McLaughlin said. “ICE staff has repeatedly informed religious organizations that, due to Broadview’s status as a field office and the ongoing threat to civilians, detainees, and officers, they are not able to accommodate these requests at this time.”
McLaughlin added that for more than a month, “rioters have attacked the Broadview field office and Illinois streets” and “created serious public safety and officer safety threats: assaulting law enforcement, attacking law enforcement with vehicles, throwing tear gas cans, slashing tires, been arrested with firearms in their possession, blocking the entrance of the building, and trespassing on private property.”
She did not respond to follow-up questions about specific attacks on the facility and surrounding areas by “rioters” or requests for statistics about assaults on law enforcement, attacks on their vehicles and other acts of vandalism and violence.
During demonstrations outside Broadview from mid-September through October 23, Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported, federal law enforcement officials routinely used excessive force against peaceful protesters, legal observers, volunteer street medics and journalists. Federal agents used tear gas and fired projectiles directly into groups of protesters, often from the facility’s roof and without warning, when protesters posed no risk to agents, according to numerous witnesses’s accounts and video footage HRW analyzed.
“This is not crowd control, but a campaign of intimidation,” said Belkis Wille, HRW’s associate crisis and conflict director. “Federal agents are using chemical irritants and firing projectiles at peaceful protesters, volunteer street medics and journalists in broad daylight. The message is clear that dissent will be punished.”
Last Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge Sara L. Ellis, nominated for her judgeship by former President Barack Obama, extended a temporary restriction that she issued last month, when she ordered federal agents to wear body cameras and avoid use of “riot-control weapons” on peaceful protesters or journalists without issuing two warnings — and then use them only to “preserve life or prevent catastrophic outcomes.”
At a hearing in Chicago, Ellis said: “The use of force shocks the conscience,” dismissing federal government evidence as “simply not credible” and saying government officials had provided false testimony about their tactics and protesters’ actions. Ellis said agents showed “no signs of stopping” targeting citizens “indiscriminately” with tear gas and pepper-spray balls and tackling them in the streets.
U.S. bishops on Wednesday condemned the Trump administration’s aggressive crackdown on undocumented immigrants as an affront to “God-given human dignity” in the bishops’ strongest criticism yet of the administration’s hard-line immigration policies.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Special Pastoral Message On Immigration, passed by a nearly unanimous vote at the USCCB’s annual plenary session in Baltimore, did not mention Trump by name. But the bishops harshly criticized federal law enforcement’s aggressive tactics in one of the largest militarized mass deportation campaigns in American history.
