The Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project (PAP) is one of the nation’s leading law school civil rights clinics focusing on issues of race and criminal justice. Founded in 2000 by Clinical Professors Craig Futterman and Randolph Stone, it strives to be a grassroots, ground-up, community-based law school clinic. Below are the Clinic's significant accomplishments for 2025-26.

As we began the school year, President Trump declared war on the City of Chicago in a social media post entitled “Chipocalypse now,” depicting images of Chicago’s skyline on fire in the backdrop. Shortly after that, students witnessed entire neighborhoods in Chicago under siege by armed groups of men wearing masks covering their faces carrying military-grade assault rifles as part of what the Department of Homeland Security dubbed, “Operation Midway Blitz.” Masked agents stopped people going to work or church and parents dropping off their children at school. They then held people that they had seized incommunicado in an ICE facility in the Chicago suburbs in crowded conditions unfit for animals—without adequate food, medical care, or sanitation, much less a safe place to sleep. Nearly 4,000 people, almost all of whom Latino, were detained during Midway Blitz.

In addition, Border Patrol and ICE agents targeted people with brutal violence in retaliation for exercising First Amendment rights and rights to religious freedom. They fired munitions and tear gas at ordinary people who had the courage to observe, document, or speak out against local immigration enforcement operations, journalists working reporting on Midway Blitz, and clergy and laypeople engaged in religious expression outside the ICE facility where people were being held in those deplorable conditions. Federal agents threatened senior citizens with loaded rifles and teargassed families with babies outside their homes, children at a Halloween parade, and pregnant women as a routine part of Midway Blitz. Agents shot a father in the neck with rubber bullets when he tried to rescue his four-year-old daughter from their tear gas. They repeatedly shot a priest in his robe as he opened his arms in prayer. An ICE agent shot and killed a man who had just dropped off his two young children at school and a Border Patrol agent repeatedly shot and tried to kill a young Montessori schoolteacher for daring to let her neighbors know that federal agents were present in her community.

Clinic students asked the questions that have consistently guided our work: How could we as a law school civil rights clinic most contribute in this moment? How could we best support the work of people on the ground?

In response to requests for help from community organizations like the Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, we helped to develop material and trainings tailored to the conditions on the ground. Community members who organized rapid response and legal observer teams used our work product to develop protocols to monitor and report on the activities of ICE and Border Patrol in the Chicago area—models that have been emulated in other cities targeted by the President from New Orleans to Minneapolis.

Drawing on our expertise in affirmative civil rights litigation, Clinic students conducted research and developed litigation strategies in coordination with people in Chicago and around the country. The Clinic worked closely with the Illinois Attorney General to defeat President Trump’s efforts to unleash our military against the people of Illinois. The Attorney General relied upon investigative work and sworn declarations secured by Clinic students to obtain an emergency restraining order in federal district court. Clinic students then helped to draft an amicus brief before the United States Supreme Court in Trump v. Illinois, one of the few cases on the emergency docket in which the Supreme Court ruled against the Trump Administration. The impact of the Clinic’s work cannot be overstated. The Court blocked the deployment of the National Guard in Illinois. This ruling stopped similar deployments in other states including California, Oregon, and Minnesota.

The Clinic then worked to mobilize nearly forty lawyers who agreed to represent pro bono press, protesters, and priests alongside the Clinic in Chicago Headline Club v. Noem, a First Amendment and Religious Freedom Restoration Act class action lawsuit that sought an injunction against the Department of Homeland Security to stop federal agents’ civil rights violations during Operation Midway Blitz. Clinic students worked with people on the ground to report constitutional violations in real time, prepare sworn declarations of more than eighty people who suffered violence at the hands of federal agents for exercising their First Amendment rights, produce poignant photographs and video evidence of those violations, and transmit that evidence to the federal district court the same day in ongoing court proceedings. Students participated in taking the depositions and eliciting testimony of supervising federal agents, including Gregory Bovino, the then head of U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. They researched, briefed, and argued the most important constitutional issues of our day.

In short, Clinic students and lawyers rose to the moment to protect the rule of law. Our work brought an end to Midway Blitz and the massive civil rights violations throughout the Northern District of Illinois. We won an injunction supported by a 233-page opinion by District Court Judge Sara Ellis, the definitive historical record of all that transpired during Midway Blitz. Notably, we also won a court order that required the Department of Homeland Security to produce video evidence and reports about every instance that agents used force or other violence during Midway Blitz. The Illinois State Accountability Commission, chaired by former chief federal Judge Ruben Castillo, held public hearings based on the record we created, issued a public report documenting the civil rights violations and lies by high-ranking officials in the federal government, and made recommendations with the goal of preventing this human rights atrocity from happening again.

Clinic students then called upon the public record that we created to draft a petition to seek the appointment of a special prosecutor in Cook County to investigate and prosecute federal agents for the crimes that they committed against the people of Illinois. While our petition was denied without prejudice, students continue to work with crime victims to ensure that federal agents are held accountable for their crimes and the harm they inflicted.

Simultaneously, Clinic students worked with the City of Evanston to draft and implement a policy for the Evanston Police Department to protect residents from further civil rights abuses by federal agents there.

Demonstrating their superhuman capacity, Clinic students won other significant victories and performed other outstanding work beyond Operation Midway Blitz in pursuit of police accountability and transparency in Chicago this year.

The Killing of Officer Krystal Rivera

Dena Kaperas (’27) and Ethan Wellerstein (’27) won a victory in the Illinois Appellate Court overturning a trial court’s gag order that had prevented the public release of video of the shooting and killing of Chicago police officer Krystal Rivera by her partner Carlos Baker. Our clients along with Officer Rivera’s family called for transparency in this high profile case in which serious questions had been raised about whether Baker, who was alleged to have had a previous failed romantic relationship with Officer Rivera and was subject to serious complaints of misconduct, should have even been working as a police officer with Officer Rivera on that tragic day. Rivera’s family members had also alleged that Baker failed to aid Officer Rivera after he had shot her. Based on Dena’s and Ethan’s powerful advocacy, the Illinois Appellate Court vacated the trial court’s secrecy order. As a result, the City of Chicago publicly released video that provided an objective account of the shooting, including Baker’s delay in rendering aid to Rivera.

Fighting Efforts to Drive Cases of Serious Chicago Police Misconduct into Secrecy

Another team of students led by graduate Benjamin Postone (’24) secured another victory in the Illinois Appellate Court for transparency. Relying upon the Clinic’s brief filed at the end of last year, the Court rejected efforts of the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) to push cases in which Chicago police officers had been found to have committed the most severe forms of misconduct behind closed doors. The FOP had persuaded an arbitrator to allow police officers to have their misconduct cases heard in private, shielded from public scrutiny, before FOP-approved arbitrators who have a long record of protecting Chicago police from accountability. The Court of Appeals ruled that the arbitrator’s award to the FOP violated dominant Illinois public policy in favor of police transparency and accountability and ordered that cases involving serious police misconduct must be open to the public.

The FOP then appealed to the Illinois Supreme Court. After the Court agreed to hear the case, a second team of Clinic students of Dena Kasperas (’27), Olivia Kramer (’27), Cameron McCulloch (’27), Olivia Robbins (’27), and Ethan Wellerstein (’27) authored a fantastic amicus brief on behalf of a coalition of victims and survivors of Chicago police misconduct, good government groups, and non-profit journalists. The brief called upon more than 25 years of the Clinic’s work in the community demonstrating the link between the lack of police accountability and transparency to patterns of civil rights violations in Chicago. We expect the case to be argued before the Supreme Court this fall.

Christopher Ellis

Together with the Exoneration Project, Clinic students brought an end to the 11-year-long persecution of Christopher Ellis. Mr. Ellis was wrongly convicted based on the false testimony of two Chicago police officers who had targeted him for false arrest and brutality as a part of their practice of targeting Black people with similar abuse. When Mr. Ellis attempted to assert his rights, the two officers yanked him out of his car, threw him face down to the street, beat and stomped him, fired 50,000 volts of electricity into his back, and then falsely accused Mr. Ellis of aggravated battery against the police officers to cover up their abuse. After winning a nearly year-long Stage 3 post-conviction trial that vacated Mr. Ellis’ conviction, a Clinic team led by Sabrina Huang (’26) won the dismissal of all criminal charges against Mr. Ellis in the fall.

Consent Decree to End Incommunicado Detention

Clinic students have also been engaged in proceedings to enforce a consent decree designed to end the decades-long practice of incommunicado detention in CPD stations that has facilitated torture, coerced confessions, and wrongful convictions. Students are actively engaged in proceedings in which we seek to require police to offer everyone in custody a phone and the Public Defender’s free 24-hour hotline number before officers may engage in any interrogation and to document those offers on video. Student advocacy holds the promise of making Miranda real in Chicago.

The Federal Civil Rights Consent Decree Governing the Chicago Police Department

At the same time, Clinic students have engaged in proceedings to enforce the federal civil rights consent decree to remedy the Chicago Police Department’s (CPD’s) pattern and practice of excessive and discriminatory violence targeted disproportionately against Black people. Notwithstanding the Decree, reported violence by Chicago police has recently increased by as much as 75% and Black people have been subject to CPD violence at twelve times the rate of White people. The Clinic endeavors to establish numerical benchmarks to which the Department can be held to account that reduce the number and severity of instances of CPD violence and the racial disparities in the victims of such violence. Parsa Aghel (’26) delivered a compelling oral argument in federal court in support of our clients’ efforts.

As instances of needless gun pointing by police similarly increased, Parsa also testified in a public hearing before the Illinois General Assembly in support of state legislation drafted by the Clinic that would prohibit police from pointing guns at people unless they pose an immediate threat of death or serious bodily injury to another person. The proposed law would also prohibit no-knock home raids in Illinois.

Addressing Racial Profiling

Harmela Anteneh (’26) gave an outstanding presentation before the Illinois Racial Profiling and Data Oversight Board to improve data collection procedures by law enforcement agencies in Illinois when police engage in traffic and pedestrian stops.

Illinois Torture and Inquiry Relief Commission

After leading a more than year-long investigation, Erika Doane (’26) persuaded the Illinois Torture Commission to grant a full evidentiary hearing in court on claims of Chicago police torture. Erika uncovered credible evidence that a teenage boy who had been convicted of participating in the murder of a Chicago police officer was tortured into giving the incriminating statement that resulted in his conviction. At least ten other individuals questioned in the same investigation gave similar accounts of abuse and the interrogating detectives have since become infamous for their pattern and practice of coercing young people to confess to crimes that they had not committed. She presented this evidence in a public hearing in which she was peppered with questions by the eight Commissioners. Erika’s phenomenal work moved the Commission to adopt verbatim her draft opinion.

Charlynn Teter (’27) and Julianna Bass (’27) have also done superb work initiating investigations into police torture in two other cases that will be presented before the Commission in the coming year.

Public Defense/Access to Counsel

The Clinic’s advocacy with community-based clients and Public Defender Offices led to the passage of the FAIR Act in Illinois, a law that established a statewide public defender office to address long-standing disparities in access to quality legal representation by indigent persons accused of crimes in the state. The Chief Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court appointed the Clinic to the Court’s Data Advisory Committee to assist with the implementation of the law.

In addition, building upon the Clinic’s work with the Cook County Public Defender and Zealous, a national non-profit dedicated to supporting public defender offices, to open a first-of-its-kind community based law office within the Public Defender’s Office dedicated to providing holistic legal defense and wraparound services to residents on the South Side of Chicago, Clinic students supported the Public Defender in creating a second such office on the West Side of Chicago, the Freedom Defense Center of Austin. As a part of that partnership, Gloria Bueno (’26), Sanye Sichinga (’26), and Kassidy Mahoney (’26) designed and delivered an outstanding presentation at the Center’s first “community day” about what neighborhood residents can do if they experience or witness police misconduct.