Leo Feler

NION-007 · CBP agents chased construction workers onto his property without a warrant, then tear-gassed the street as they left. · Chicago, IL · 2025-10-24

Case ID: NION-007
Legal status: Unknown
Agency: CBP
Location: Chicago, IL
Incident date: 2025-10-24
Abuse type: Excessive Force; Property Destruction; Unnecessary Arrest
Verification tier: T1 Third-party evidence of the incident, or court order

Summary

CBP and ICE agents scaled the spiked fence around Leo Feler’s Chicago home without a warrant, chased four construction workers across his property and arrested one of them in his garage. As they left, an agent threw two tear gas canisters at neighbors in the street without warning. Feler was travelling and watched it on his own security cameras. No agency has ever accounted for the raid.

What happened

INCIDENT DETAILS

Just before noon on Friday October 24, 2025, unmarked cars carrying Customs and Border Protection officers drove the wrong way down a one-way residential street in Chicago's Lakeview neighborhood and stopped outside Leo Feler's home. Four subcontractors hired to replace the siding and windows on his three-unit building were eating lunch, three on the public sidewalk beyond his gate and one inside the fence on his front stoop.

Masked Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents scaled the five-foot spiked perimeter fence of his private residence, and arrested a man who was eating lunch with the other workers.

Feler was travelling for work. He watched through his own security cameras and used their microphones to tell the agents they were trespassing. His tenant, the only person home, repeatedly demanded to see a warrant.

Agents pursued the workers across the property, damaging the fence as they climbed it and walking over construction equipment staged in the yard. One worker reached the house through a back door and was not followed inside. A second climbed to the second-story balcony on a ladder left against it, and an agent climbed up after him. A third was chased into the detached garage, where security footage recorded him telling the agent he had no authority to be there. He was arrested.

One of the workers was cut badly enough to leave puddles of blood inside the house.

By then neighbors had gathered in the street. Attorneys in a separate federal case filed video of what followed three days later and cited it paragraph by paragraph. The neighbors were walking in pace with the vehicles, filming and blowing whistles. Two SUVs pulled away, one going the right way down the one-way street and one driving backwards down it.

An agent in the vehicle travelling backwards threw a tear gas canister out of the window "directly at a group of people," with no verbal warning. Moments later, what appears to be the same agent threw a second canister at the same group, again without warning. The filing states that "no protester or observer was obstructing the SUV's path, and the DHS agents were not under any threat justifying the use of tear gas." Feler's complaint puts the same point from the other direction: the agents had a clear path out, they used it, and they deployed tear gas anyway.

The wind carried the gas back over the agents. They left their vehicles. The arrested man stayed inside one of them, handcuffed. The gas entered neighbors' homes and drifted over a playground about a block and a half away.

Body camera footage from the raid shows one agent urging another to throw the tear gas "for fun."

Body cameras existed on those agents at all because a federal judge had ordered them eight days earlier.

CHARGES AND LEGAL PROCEEDINGS

Feler was not arrested and has never been charged with anything.

On December 20, 2025 he filed administrative claims under the Federal Tort Claims Act with Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security, because he did not know which agency the officers worked for. Immigration and Customs Enforcement asked him for more documents in January, then wrote on February 2, 2026 to say the claim involved CBP employees and to transfer it. That was the last correspondence any of the three agencies sent him. Six months passed with no response, and the claim was constructively denied.

He had already tried other ways to learn who had come onto his property. He went to a local police station to file a report, and it refused to take one. He went to a second station, and that department told him it would not investigate. He reviewed his own camera footage. He read the filings in the arrested worker's habeas case. His counsel filed a Freedom of Information Act request with Customs and Border Protection on July 16, 2026. None of it produced a name.

On July 28, 2026 he sued in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. The case is Feler v. United States of America, No. 1:26-cv-08915, assigned to Judge Thomas M. Durkin. It brings claims under the Federal Tort Claims Act, a claim directly under the Fourth Amendment, a claim under the Westfall Act, and Illinois tort claims, and demands a jury. The officers are sued as John Does, because he still does not know who they are.

AGENCY STATEMENTS

Requests for comment

No public statement by the Department of Homeland Security or Customs and Border Protection addressing the October 24, 2025 events on North Lakewood Avenue has been located. Neither agency responded to Feler's administrative claim within the statutory six months, and the Freedom of Information Act request seeking the officers' identities has not been answered.

Withdrawals and corrections

None. No agency has retracted or amended any account of this raid, because no agency has given one.

BEST OFFICER JUSTIFICATION

Four men scattered when the vehicles arrived, and officers who believe people are fleeing may follow them. The property was mid-renovation, with a ladder propped against the balcony and materials staged in the yard, and at speed the line between a public sidewalk, an open front stoop and a fenced yard is not obvious. The officers had no way to know that the homeowner was watching from another city or that the woman inside had authority to refuse them entry. The two workers who reached the inside of the house were not pursued further. No one was shot, and no one was struck. Agents operating under a public safety directive in a city-wide operation were doing what that directive told them to do.

THE OUTCOME

Feler says his fences were damaged, that the lock on a front gate was broken, that his air conditioning unit was damaged and that his construction materials were trampled. He cleaned an injured worker's blood off his own floors himself.

He cancelled his Thanksgiving travel because he was too distressed to leave the house unattended. He delayed the renovation for months, because he was afraid that hiring anyone else would bring the agents back, and he says he no longer lets workers onto the property unless he is home. The tenant who was inside during the raid moved back in with her parents and asked to end her lease early.

Feler is an economist and a former professor. He says he left a private-sector job after the raid, because his employer did not want him speaking publicly about what had happened at his house, out of concern that criticism would bring retaliation from clients.

The man arrested in his garage was Eladio Monterde Munoz, a Mexican citizen who had lived in the United States since approximately 2009. A federal judge ordered him released three weeks later, finding that his detention without a bond hearing violated due process.

In the weeks after the raid, federal agents used chemical agents on people in Chicago at least 49 times, including after a judge had ordered them to stop.

No officer who entered Feler's property has been identified. The lawsuit is pending, and as of August 15, 2026 no response from the government has been docketed.