DePaul Student Charged With Spitting on ICE Agent at O'Hare

Brett Heier, a 20-year-old DePaul University student, faces a felony aggravated battery charge after Chicago police say he spat on an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent at O’Hare Airport Sunday evening. His defense attorney is pushing back hard, arguing the case is being inflated far beyond what the facts support.

According to a Chicago Police Department arrest report, Heier “intentionally and forcefully” spat on the agent while leaving Terminal 2. But attorney Barry Sheppard told reporters his client is accused of nothing more than spitting on the agent’s shoe, and even that may have been accidental. The arrest report itself acknowledges that Heier was taking medication for an abscessed tooth, a detail Sheppard says matters.

“In the past, [ICE] seems to have made smaller incidents larger than life,” Sheppard said, “and I feel this one was also blown out of proportion.”

The ICE agent identified Heier in a photo lineup, corroborated by a second agency official. Chicago police arrested Heier Tuesday as he left his Lincoln Park apartment. At his first court appearance Wednesday, a judge ordered him released from custody.

ICE is not backing down. A spokesperson for the agency cited a broader pattern of violence against its officers, claiming a 1,300 percent increase in assaults, a 3,200 percent increase in vehicle attacks, and an 8,000 percent spike in death threats against agents. The agency framed those numbers against its mission of arresting, in its words, “murderers, rapists, pedophiles, and gang members.”

The incident lands in the middle of one of the more turbulent stretches in the history of federal immigration enforcement at Chicago-area airports. A week before the alleged spitting, President Trump announced he was deploying ICE agents to airports nationwide to assist with security. That move came as part of a broader fight over Department of Homeland Security funding that triggered a partial government shutdown.

The shutdown has hammered TSA workers in particular. Agents went without paychecks from mid-February until Trump signed an executive order granting back pay last week. Long lines and staffing shortages at airports have been the visible result for travelers. ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents, by contrast, have kept drawing paychecks, funded through Trump’s domestic policy bill passed last summer.

The shutdown itself was ignited by Democratic demands for reforms following the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens during an aggressive deportation campaign in Minnesota earlier this year. Those deaths hardened opposition to ICE operations and sharpened an already bitter political divide over immigration enforcement.

That tension is playing out here in Chicago too. Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke has faced growing pressure to investigate and potentially prosecute immigration agents who carried out similar enforcement operations in the Chicago area. Burke has said her hands are tied when it comes to bringing charges against federal agents, even as legal challenges to those operations continue to work through the courts.

For Heier, the immediate question is whether Cook County prosecutors pursue the felony charge aggressively or let it resolve quietly. Aggravated battery to a peace officer is a serious charge in Illinois, one that carries the potential for prison time. Whether a jury would view an allegedly accidental spit on a shoe the same way the arrest report frames it is a different matter entirely.

Sheppard’s strategy seems clear. He will argue the physical act was minor, that the circumstances of his client’s medical condition complicate any claim of intent, and that federal agencies have a track record of turning small confrontations into federal cases to make a point.

What happened Sunday night at Terminal 2 is genuinely disputed. What is not disputed is the climate surrounding it. ICE agents are working an airport that has become a flashpoint, during a shutdown rooted in outrage over immigration enforcement tactics, while the city’s top prosecutor navigates real limits on her authority to respond to federal conduct.

Heier’s case will move through a Cook County courtroom, but the forces that shaped the moment he and that ICE agent crossed paths at O’Hare are considerably bigger than either of them.