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Judge ordered release of 4 Operation Midway Blitz detainees, rejected ICE directive expanding warrantless-arrest discretion

On February 13, 2026, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Cummings ordered the Department of Homeland Security to release four people who had been arrested without warrants during Operation Midway Blitz, and separately rejected a recent ICE directive — a memo from Acting Director Todd Lyons — that sought to give agents more discretion to make warrantless arrests, finding it inconsistent with the 2022 Castañon Nava consent decree. The ruling followed a federal appeals court's earlier rejection of Cummings' original October 2025 order to release hundreds of people arrested without warrants under the same operation.

Part of: Operation Midway Blitz (Chicago Immigration Crackdown)

Jurisdiction
Federal
Location
Chicago, Illinois

Abuses documented

Actors

On February 13, 2026, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Cummings ordered the Department of Homeland Security to release, by the following Monday and without conditions such as bond or parole, four people who had been arrested without warrants amid the "Operation Midway Blitz" immigration enforcement campaign in the Chicago area. Cummings separately rejected a recent ICE directive -- a memo from Acting Director Todd Lyons that sought to give immigration agents more discretion to make arrests without warrants -- ruling it inconsistent with the 2022 Castañon Nava consent decree, which limits agents' authority to make warrantless arrests across six Midwestern states unless they first assess a person's likelihood of fleeing. Cummings ordered the government to recirculate the warrantless-arrest policy nationwide and directed DHS to give attorneys for those still in custody at least 12 hours' notice before release.

The ruling followed a federal appeals court's rejection of Cummings' original October 2025 order to release hundreds of people arrested without warrants under the same operation. Of 615 people originally arrested between June 11 and October 7, 2025, the government reported 173 still in custody as of February 2, 2026; plaintiffs' attorneys said they expect more people were arrested without warrants and proper cause since that list was compiled. "It's been a long road since Operation Midway Blitz, but we are finally, finally at the point where we're starting to see people get released," National Immigrant Justice Center attorney Mark Fleming said after the hearing.

This is a separate, earlier ruling in the same consent-decree litigation from Cummings' later February 27, 2026 finding that 32 warrantless Midway Blitz arrests violated the decree: this ruling turns on the four individually named detainees and the ICE directive's inconsistency with the decree, not the broader 32-arrest violation finding.

Why we recorded this

A consent decree is a binding court order, not a policy suggestion an agency can narrow by internal memo. A federal judge found that a recent ICE directive expanding agents' discretion to make warrantless arrests was inconsistent with the Castañon Nava consent decree governing six Midwestern states, and ordered four people detained without warrants during Operation Midway Blitz released unconditionally. This archive records the ruling because an agency that tries to expand its own arrest authority around a standing court order, rather than through it, is defying that order regardless of whether it labels the workaround a directive rather than a defiance.

Sources

  1. Judge rules four people arrested by ICE without warrants should be released — Associated Press (via Morning Sentinel) primary accessed August 15, 2026
  2. Judge rules four people arrested by ICE without warrants should be released — WIFR (Associated Press) primary accessed August 15, 2026

See also