James Yanke, an urgent care physician assistant with Northwestern Medicine, went to the Kane County Judicial Center in St. Charles Township Aug. 14 to document Homeland Security Investigations/ICE/ATF arrests of Hispanic people as they came out of the courthouse.

He ended up getting arrested himself.

Yanke, 57, of Carol Stream, said he belongs to Casa DuPage Rapid Response and Elgin Area Rapid Response, groups that assist families impacted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests, and he wanted to document what was happening.

“It’s a large group of like-minded people,” Yanke said. “I went there to see if I could help in any way. My goal was to – at least – document what I saw.”

Kane County Sheriff Ron Hain said ICE agents have been arresting people released from jail in the public area of the lobby outside his office. Because it’s a public area, there’s nothing his office can do about it, he said.

Immigration-related arrests by federal agents have ramped up at the direction of President Donald Trump, who campaigned heavily on immigration enforcement.

Chief Judge Robert Villa, speaking at the Aug. 14 Judicial and Public Safety Committee meeting, spoke about federal law enforcement at the courthouses.

“ICE, in particular, has been operating in our courthouses for 20-some years,” Villa said. “There’s nothing new about federal law enforcement coming to our buildings to arrest people who have federal warrants. It’s just the way it’s conducted now is different.”

Before the Trust Act in 2021, law enforcement would come when a person was in custody. Or if somebody showed up for court, “they (ICE) would calmly and quietly identify themselves to the sheriff’s office,” Villa said.

The Trust Act generally prohibits local law enforcement in Illinois from participating in immigration enforcement.

The sheriff’s office would let the judges know that there’s an ICE or FBI agent or some other warrant for someone, Villa said.

“That person would be taken out through our jail system out back to the van and transported,” Villa said. “So those agents who are performing the duty that they have been doing for the last 20 years, now come to our public spaces to find these individuals.”

No warrant presented

The first Hispanic man Yanke said he saw arrested was wearing a Michael Kors T-shirt. He had just exited court when men with ATF and Police on their vests grabbed him.

Federal agents have previously been at the Judicial Center to make arrests when people leave court - for hearings, as witnesses, defendants and victims – and in the lobby of the Sheriff’s Office when they are released from jail, officials said.

Yanke said he believes the arrest he saw was “basically kidnapping.”

“To me, they are breaking the law. They are taking these people without following the normal procedures of law enforcement officials,” Yanke said. “These people were being targeted not as criminals, but as non-white people.”

The men who arrested the man in the Michael Kors shirt came in a pickup truck with private Indiana plates. The man was taken to another part of the parking lot and transferred to another truck, Yanke said.

Then Yanke said he decided to go up to the entrance of the Judicial Center and warn people that ICE was there.

‘I was freaked out’

“I think that probably as I was walking in the door, a woman had walked out and I didn’t notice her,” Yanke said.

She was also Hispanic and the next to be arrested as she reached the bottom of the steps, he said.

“I saw these same people ... came back and grabbed this woman ... she was crying and screaming,” Yanke said. “She looked terrified. ... They were very rough with her.”

Yanke took video of her arrest.

Two men had ATF on their vests, while two others were masked and wore nothing to identify them as law enforcement, Yanke said.

One man wore a balaclava and a black, white and gray striped Puma shirt. The other man wore a mask covering his face below his eyes, an unbuttoned short-sleeved tan shirt over a blue T-shirt, according to still shots from videos he took and provided to Shaw Local News Network.

They did not show the woman a warrant, he said.

“They did not have any paperwork, they just grabbed her,” Yanke said. “I know that’s not right, that’s illegal.”

Yanke said he was moved by her distress and reached out to grab her arm and pull her away from them.

The federal agents told him to step back – and he did – and then he was under arrest.

‘He speaks English’

Yanke said one man placed him face down on the grass to handcuff him while the other held a taser to his side. They kept telling him to stop resisting, even though Yanke said he did not move or resist.

When they sat him in the back seat of a pickup truck, the agents asked him his name, whether he was born in the U.S. and if he spoke English.

“They had my wallet,” Yanke said. “The driver said, ‘He speaks English.’ I said I wanted a lawyer and he (the other guy) slammed the door.”

Yanke was taken to the St. Charles Police Department and brought in through the back door to be in their lockup.

“I was freaked out,” Yanke said. “I’ve never been in jail.”

The agents took a photo of his face with a cellphone to prove they didn’t beat him up, he said.

“I was thinking, ‘No you didn’t beat my face up, but you had a taser ready to go on my left side thoracic area.’”

Yanke sat in the cell less than an hour before being released.

One of the agents told him he was not being charged.

But the agent also told Yanke the U.S. Attorney General’s Office might decide to issue an arrest warrant, which would come to him in the mail.

The agent told him if he gets a warrant and doesn’t come to court, they will come and arrest him.

Yanke said he took an Uber back to his car.

But his thoughts were still on the woman.

“I don’t know her name or what happened to her. I don’t know if her family knows what happened to her. It was one of the most horrible things I ever saw,” Yanke said. “In my mind, I thought they were terrorizing her.”

Yanke said he had no regrets about what he did to interfere with the woman’s arrest.

“My hope for going forward is that I just want this to stop. I want these unlawful abductions to stop,” Yanke said. “Just follow the law and stop racial profiling – and go after criminals, not innocent people.”

Yanke said he had not received any warrant as of the time of his interview with Shaw Local.

According to a news release from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in the first 100 days of President Trump’s second term, ICE “arrested 66,463 illegal aliens and removed 65,682 aliens, including criminals who threaten public safety and national security. Three in four arrests were criminal illegal aliens, putting the worst first.”

“This agency has set the bar on arrests and removals while upholding its national security mission,” ICE Deputy Director Madison Sheahan said in the release.

The federal agency did not respond to questions from Shaw Local about the identity of the two people Yanke saw arrested that day, or why the arrests were made.