CHICAGO — Former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has launched an “ICE Accountability Project,” an independent initiative she said would collect and document federal immigration agents’ alleged criminal or abusive conduct during Operation Midway Blitz.

“A mask cannot shield agents from accountability, and there simply must be accountability for those individuals if we are a democracy,” she said at a downtown news conference Thursday.

Lightfoot said residents could send videos, audio, photos or other information to reporticenow.com. The accounts will be published on the website and serve as a “centralized, permanent archive” that law enforcement, elected officials, journalists and others can refer to, she said.

The initiative from Lightfoot follows months of President Donald Trump’s tense and heavy-handed immigration crackdown across Chicagoland as well as an agent killing a woman in Minneapolis Wednesday. Agents arrested thousands of immigrants, most of whom didn’t have a criminal record, during the Chicago operation. It also prompted numerous protests where agents repeatedly deployed tear gas and pepper spray.

Some of the most high-profile confrontations are already documented on the Report ICE website, including the federal raid on an apartment building in South Shore and the nonfatal shooting of Marimar Martinez in Brighton Park.

Officials with the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Lightfoot’s project follows on the heels of Gov. JB Pritzker launching the Illinois Accountability Commission in October to scrutinize agents’ actions in Chicago. The details may be used to hold the federal government accountable if Democrats regain control of Congress in this year’s midterm election or the White House in 2028, he has said.

Pritzker’s commission, led by former federal Judge Rubén Castillo, held its first public hearing last month to primarily discuss agents’ use of chemical crowd control weapons. The commission is scheduled to release an initial report on its findings and recommendations by the end of the month. As of Thursday morning, no additional hearings had been scheduled.

While Lightfoot said the primary goal of the state commission is thinking of policies or solutions to address the needs of residents, her project would focus on collecting information, though it was unclear exactly what it would be used for in the future.

Lightfoot said Thursday that she’s known Castillo for a long time and believes the two initiatives will work “in harmony with each other.”

“I am confident, both because of our personal relationships with people on the commission and as I said, I have a great deal of respect and admiration for Judge Castillo,” she said. “Also our missions are different, but they can coexist and I think work in harmony together.”

The project has no law enforcement authority and won’t conduct criminal investigations, although Lightfoot said she hopes local jurisdictions consider doing so when agents cross the line. She also said they won’t publish home addresses or “personal identifying information” of federal agents, but will list details like their clothing or vehicles they drive.

“(There’s) phone videos, other information that’s been collected by people that are out in these neighborhoods and on the front line, but it’s dispersed amongst literally hundreds of different people … It could disappear just like that,” Lightfoot said. “What we want to do is gather that information in a centralized location, so that people who are inclined to do something, people who are in authority, have the ability to do that.”

When an incident is submitted, there will be two levels of review, Lightfoot said. In the first review, volunteers will confirm the basic factors of a submission, such as date, time or location. In the second review, she said a team of “experienced investigators” like lawyers or former federal agents will examine it.

She said “under no circumstances” absent a court order signed by a judge would they divulge the identities of people who submit information to the project. She said they also hosted the website on a non-U.S.-based platform because “we are painfully aware of how certain U.S. companies have acquiesced to the unlawful demand of this federal administration and censored content.”

The former mayor, who previously served in police oversight roles for the city, first previewed the concept for the accountability project in an interview with Fox 32 Chicago in October.

Almost immediately, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said on a Fox News show that Lightfoot would “get a letter from us tomorrow” and said that it appears she’s “violating the law” by attempting to disclose the identities of federal agents.

“I have every reason to believe that they will not be silent in case of this initiative,” Lightfoot said Thursday. “But what I also know is everything that we’re doing completely is consistent with our rights, my rights as a private citizen to exercise my personal rights to speak.”

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(Chicago Tribune’s Dan Petrella contributed reporting.)

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