CHICAGO, Oct 4 (Reuters) - U.S. Border Patrol personnel shot an armed woman in Chicago on Saturday, the Department of Homeland Security said, as scores of protesters faced off against federal immigration agents on the city’s southwest side.
No law enforcement officers were seriously injured in the incident in which a group that included the woman rammed cars into vehicles used by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a DHS spokesperson said in a statement. The woman, a U.S. citizen who was not identified, drove herself to the hospital, according to the statement.
No additional information was immediately available about the woman’s condition. ICE agents fired pepper spray and loaded rubber bullets as part of heated exchanges with protesters on Saturday.
U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said in a post on X that she was sending additional “special operations” to control the scene in Chicago’s Brighton Park neighborhood. The woman was armed with a semi-automatic gun, assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement.
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, a Democrat, said on Saturday that he was given an ultimatum by Republican President Donald Trump to deploy the state’s National Guard.
“It is absolutely outrageous and unAmerican to demand a Governor send military troops within our own borders and against our will,” Pritzker said in a statement.
Trump authorized 300 National Guard troops to protect federal officers and assets, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told Reuters in a statement.
People in the Chicago area have staged repeated protests condemning the stepped-up federal presence. On Friday, police scuffled with hundreds of protesters outside an ICE facility in the Chicago suburb of Broadview.
On multiple occasions, demonstrators sitting on the ground attempting to block ICE vehicles from carrying detainees into the facility have been repelled by heavily armed ICE agents using physical force, chemical munitions, and rubber bullets, evoking combat scenes.
Protesters have decried what they call similar heavy-handed policing in other Democratic-run cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Portland, Oregon. A federal judge on Saturday temporarily blocked Trump from deploying 200 Oregon National Guard troops to Portland.
(Reporting by Jim Vondruska in Chicago, Rich McKay in Atlanta and Mike Stone in Washington; Editing by Caitlin Webber, Matthew Lewis, Rod Nickel)