CHICAGO — After Border Patrol Cmdr. Gregory Bovino and scores of his federal agents left Chicago last month, and immigration enforcement wound down, Matt DeMateo said daily life slowly but surely returned to normal.

Congregants started to fill church pews again on the Southwest Side and kids returned to school, said the CEO of the nonprofit New Life Centers of Chicagoland. But in the back of his mind, he waited and wondered if they would return.

Those fears were realized this week, DeMateo said. He and his team were in the middle of a food giveaway when community group messages activated with reports that Bovino was back. On Wednesday, DeMateo said, he was driving down 26th Street when federal agents sprayed pepper bullets at a nearby car.

“I was about 20 feet behind the agent with my windows down listening and some of that chemical pepper spray went into the van,” he said, adding that he started coughing and couldn’t breathe well for a couple of minutes.

DeMateo testified Thursday morning at the first public meeting of the Illinois Accountability Commission, which Gov. JB Pritzker launched in October to track and scrutinize federal immigration agents’ actions in Chicago. About 100 residents and community leaders gathered at the Arturo Velasquez Institute in the Lower West Side neighborhood primarily to discuss agents’ use of chemical crowd-control weapons.

The commission, headed by former federal Judge Rubén Castillo, was launched via executive order after weeks of alleged misconduct during President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, called Operation Midway Blitz. Pritzker said it would collect evidence and recommend steps to hold the federal government accountable, with a status report outlining the findings expected in January.

Castillo said Thursday that “nothing is off of the table” as far as recommendations the commission can make to the state, including legislation. Many of the federal agents’ actions “dishonors” true members of law enforcement, he added.

However, the eight-member commission is restricted by the state’s limited authority. It has no subpoena power and no direct law enforcement authority. There also was no apparent way for members of the public who experienced or witnessed excessive force to directly report allegations, the Tribune reported a month ago, although the commission said Thursday that it would open an online portal next month.

This week, Bovino and at least 100 Border Patrol agents, according to sources, returned to Chicago for a show of force after many had left for operations in other states. They made several arrests, but spent much of their time goading angry residents and protesters who confronted them in streets and in car caravans.

DeMateo said the exposure to pepper spray this week reactivated a lot of memories from another confrontation last month in Little Village. On Nov. 8, he was eating breakfast at Nuevo Leon Restaurant when he got text messages about federal immigration activity.

There was a series of chaotic confrontations that day between agents and angry residents who blew whistles. Police responded to calls of shots fired at agents. Bovino also circled the neighborhood and deployed chemical crowd controls in several locations.

DeMateo watched agents speed erratically throughout the community, he testified. He said he also saw them throw “jarring and loud” flash-bang grenades.

A Berwyn couple recounted a masked agent pointing a pepper spray gun out the window during the chaos and firing into their car, hitting them and their baby girl. The couple were headed to Sam’s Club and pulled into a parking lot when they saw the convoy of agents approaching them.

“My first thought was my daughter,” Rafael Veraza, the father, told the Tribune at the time. “I didn’t even care if it got to me.”

DeMateo found the family “in distress” and “frantically rubbing their eyes” in the parking lot. The baby was crying. He drove Veraza to medical treatment, a ride he captured on video and played at the meeting. Veraza appeared visibly distressed.

“They had done nothing wrong,” he said. “They were not protesting, they were not chasing ICE vehicles. They were simply shopping.”

DHS said in a statement that “ICE does not pepper spray children,” which DeMateo called a “blatant lie.”

“There’s literally video evidence of them spraying a child,” he said.

Dr. Rohini Haar, an emergency medicine physician with expertise in health and human rights, testified that chemical crowd-control weapons, such as tear gas and pepper spray, cause “pain and harm to force people to comply.” Side effects range from involuntary spasms of the eyelid to coughing.

They’re also inherently indiscriminate in that once they’re fired there’s “no saying where the wind blows or who it targets,” she said.

Haar reviewed a number of incidents where federal agents used tear gas in Chicago, and said it was “by and large unjustified.” When it was used, agents didn’t follow protocols that would limit injuries and protect health, she said.

One example was Bovino lobbing a tear gas canister on Oct. 23 while standing in a parking lot in the Little Village neighborhood.

“When the leadership of an organization is doing this, it provides cover for everyone under him,” she said. “This is obviously a really top-down problem.”

Some residents said they would like the commission to look into local police allegedly helping federal agents. Kathy Herwig, 54, of Edgewater, for example, said she was “shocked to see” Chicago police assist them Wednesday in navigating the streets.

Chicago police officers stopped a man Wednesday in the North Side neighborhood who was trailing Bovino and a convoy of agents and livestreaming on social media. Police said they were responding to a 911 call from an agent who said another vehicle was “attempting to ram them,” and denied helping federal authorities with immigration enforcement.

Also on Thursday, both of Illinois’ U.S. senators wrote a letter to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, urging her office to investigate federal immigration enforcement agents who the senators allege have broken the law during Operation Midway Blitz.

The Democratic senators, Tammy Duckworth of Hoffman Estates and Dick Durbin of Springfield, cited numerous news articles from various media outlets, including the Chicago Tribune, to make the case that the agents have used questionable tactics on people they’ve encountered while carrying out their mass deportation efforts.

The letter, however, is likely to fall on deaf ears. Bondi and the rest of the Trump administration have been all in on flooding major U.S. cities like Chicago with federal agents to turn up the heat with immigration enforcement.

But in a news release accompanying the letter, the senators said that if the Republican Trump administration fails to pursue charges, “the statute of limitations will permit the next Administration to prosecute officials who acted unlawfully.”

“They have shoved Chicagoans, including U.S. citizens, into unmarked vehicles, tased them, punched them, launched pepper balls at them, and tear gassed and shot them,” the letter stated.

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(Chicago Tribune’s Jeremy Gorner contributed.)

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