Congress faces new calls to change the law to bar illegal immigrants from carrying guns while serving as police officers after ICE last week announced it had arrested a migrant cop who had been working for a department in the suburbs of Chicago.
The Hanover Park Police Department said it hired a Montenegrin citizen, Radule Bojovic, in January. It concluded that he could carry a gun while on duty under a special exemption in federal law.
Those without full lawful status are generally prohibited from possessing a gun under U.S. law. In a bizarre exception, however, they are allowed to have a weapon given by a government agency, including a police or sheriff’s department.
“Outrageously, there is nothing unlawful about an illegal possessing firearms in the course of working as a police officer in terms of federal gun law,” said Aidan Johnston, director of federal affairs at Gun Owners of America.
The arrest raised all manner of questions about illegal immigrants’ rights.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said Mr. Bojovic came to the U.S. on a temporary visa and was supposed to leave in 2015. A decade later, he was still in the U.S., making him a deportable migrant.
He was picked up Wednesday as part of ICE’s enforcement surge in the Chicago area. The agency said local jurisdictions have a troubling trend of wrongly accommodating illegal immigrants.
“It is alarming how local jurisdictions continue to disregard federal law to the detriment of their communities,” said Sam Olson, head of ICE’s deportation office in Chicago.
ICE said Mr. Bojovic was in the country illegally, which made him eligible to be picked up in a deportation arrest. He was being held in ICE custody at the Clay County Justice Center in Indiana.
The agency indicated that Mr. Bojovic had been in the country without permission for more than a decade, since his temporary visitor’s visa expired on March 31, 2015.
Mr. Olson said that made him ineligible to have a gun.
“Illegal aliens are prohibited from owning or possessing firearms — full stop,” Mr. Olson said.
The police department challenged much of ICE’s story.
It said Mr. Bojovic had legal authorization to work in the U.S. and that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, a sister agency to ICE within the Homeland Security Department, granted the permission.
The department said it determined that Mr. Bojovic was allowed to carry a gun “while on duty.”
It cited a 2024 policy issued by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that said illegal immigrants are exempt from the usual ban on gun possession if the weapons are issued as “part of their official law enforcement officer duties.”
That policy was issued in response to questions about illegal immigrants in the U.S. under DACA, the deportation amnesty President Obama created for “Dreamers.” ATF said that if the agency in question had a requirement that officers carry their weapons at all times, even off-duty, then illegal immigrant officers could carry them all the time. Those who work for agencies without that mandate can possess them only while on duty and must turn them in at the end of their shift.
Andrew “Art” Arthur, a former immigration judge and now a legal fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, said the law agrees with that reading, though he doubted Congress intended for what has happened.
“Under the law, it’s not illegal, but that’s a different thing than saying it’s legal,” he said. “When this law was written, Congress never anticipated a scenario under which an illegal alien would be a cop.”
He said Congress should rewrite the law to make clear that only citizens or legal permanent residents, so-called green card holders, have the right to possess a gun in the U.S.
Mr. Johnston at Gun Owners of America said that sort of legislation would force Democrats to square support for illegal immigrants’ rights with a general bent toward gun control.
“That would be a tough vote for the Democrats to take, and probably a good vote for Speaker [Mike] Johnson to put on the floor if it was specifically to ban illegals from working as police officers and possessing firearms,” he said.
The Washington Times sought clarification from ICE for this report on its legal reasoning, but no answer was provided by the time of publication.
The Times also sought comment from several prominent gun control groups, but none responded.
Mr. Bojovic is the latest person ICE said it caught operating as an illegal immigrant police officer.
In July, the agency reported the arrest of Jon Luke Evans, who had been serving as an officer with the Old Orchard Beach Police Department in Maine.
Mr. Evans, like Mr. Bojovic, entered the U.S. on a legal visa but failed to leave, making him an illegal immigrant, ICE said.
In April, ICE officers arrested Gratien Milandou Wamba, a citizen of Congo, as an illegal immigrant. He had been working as a corrections officer in Maine.
Mr. Evans and Mr. Wamba were flagged when they tried to buy guns on their own, triggering alerts in the background check system.
The Supreme Court has never definitively ruled on who is covered by the Second Amendment’s guarantee of gun rights to “the people.”
A federal judge in Illinois last year issued a ruling in favor of an illegal immigrant charged with gun possession in 2020. The judge said the ban was unconstitutional in that case, citing the Supreme Court’s broader decision in the Bruen case, which said only firearms regulations countenanced by the country’s founders pass constitutional muster.
Other federal courts have upheld the ban on gun possession by illegal immigrants. A three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last year that illegal immigrants fell outside “the people” mentioned in the Second Amendment.
