Chicago, Illinois

Reverend David Black has been pastor of The First Presbyterian Church on the South Side of Chicago since 2020. In August, neighbors invited him to join a peaceful protest outside the Broadview Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility. They were counting on a minister’s presence to help keep them safe. Instead, as Black recounted his experience to Josina Guess at Sojourners magazine, he found himself being dragged across concrete by ICE officers while in the act of praying for them.

He returned a week later with 50 clergy and 100 protesters, and yet again on September 19^th. This time, ICE officers had been firing tear gas and pepper balls from the roof of the facility, and Black was “moved in that moment,” he told Sojourners, to remind them of “the spiritual consequences of their actions.” If they persisted, he warned (according to an Instagram post he composed later), their grandchildren would be ashamed of them and their names would live in infamy. There was still time for them to repent, Black added; they could “turn from their wicked ways.”

This message did not go over well. As he continued to address the ICE agents in this fashion, Black was struck by a volley of pepper balls. He heard agents laughing as they fired, Black said in an interview with CNN. He wound up being shot in the head, in the face, and multiple times on his body.

Protesters scrambled to shield him, absorbing some of the shots headed his way. Moments later, though, ICE agents on the street violently shoved him and sprayed “chemical weapons” in his face; their assault was “indiscriminate” and “vicious,” he said. At one point, after being drenched in the dispersant “from the crown of my head to the socks in my shoes,” Black said he feared for his life.

Video taken by a local schoolteacher, Amanda Tovar, seemed to square with Black’s account. But a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson, Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin, claimed that the video had been edited: “What this clipped video doesn’t show is that these agitators were blocking an ICE vehicle from leaving the federal facility — impeding operations,” McLaughlin said.” Black called her claim “categorically false.” According to McLaughlin, protesters had also been “throwing rocks, bottles and launching fireworks at the law enforcement officers on the roof.” DHS provided no evidence for this, though, and Tovar, the amateur videographer, told CNN’s Erin Burnett that she had been at the scene for half an hour prior to the assault on Black and “nothing like that” had happened.

On October 6, Rev. Black joined a lawsuit asserting that ““no compelling governmental interest [could] justify Defendants’ use of force against clergy peacefully praying in public spaces.” Three days later, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order that barred the use of “riot control weapons” against “the press, protesters, or religious practitioners” who don’t pose a threat to law enforcement officials.

“If they are doing this to pastors who are praying and protesters who are singing songs and holding hands and chanting… it makes me shudder to imagine,” Black told Sojourners, “what they might be doing to our neighbors behind closed doors and in these outsourced internment camps, in [places like] El Salvador.”

Posted on November 2, 2025