Federal gun charges have been unsealed against a man who allegedly aimed a gun at a woman in a Little Village restaurant parking lot the same day federal immigration agents said that someone shot at them as they ran enforcement raids near the restaurant and surrounding neighborhood.
Hector Gómez, 45, was charged in a criminal complaint made public Thursday with possession of a weapon by a person in the country illegally. He is scheduled to be taken from Cook County Jail for an initial appearance at the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse on Dec. 10, records show.
The Tribune first reported earlier this month that Gómez had been arrested by Chicago police with a gun in a black Jeep Wrangler near the intersection of West 26th Street and South Kedzie Avenue.
A few hours before Gómez’s arrest, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents had called 911 to report that someone in a black Jeep had fired at them one block to the north.
Law enforcement sources said the 9mm pistol Gómez had on his lap at the time of his arrest was being analyzed to see if it matched shell casings found on the street near that shooting.
As of Friday, neither the federal complaint nor similar charges lodged in Cook County criminal court on Nov. 8 allege Gómez fired any shots at agents.
His lawyer, Michael Monaco, declined to comment. Gómez’s next court date in his county case is Dec. 2.
Gómez’s initial arrest took place toward the end of a chaotic morning of immigration raids in Little Village in which a Chicago police officer was hit by a car and a baby girl and her family were pepper-sprayed while trying to get groceries. During the Border Patrol raids, incensed residents pursued carloads of federal agents as they wound their way through the neighborhood, arresting people and deploying chemical crowd controls.
At one point, agents called Chicago police to report that someone had fired shots from a black Jeep Wrangler at one of their vehicles near 25th and Kedzie, though no one was hit, according to police.
According to police reports, officers who arrived at that intersection in response to the call didn’t get to question the Border Patrol agents further “due to a large hostile crowd that was beginning to escalate and throw bricks.”
The Ogden (10th) district commander personally located two 9 mm shell casings on the 2500 block of South Kedzie Avenue, the reports stated.
Around 2:15 p.m. that day, police arrived at Aguascalientes for a 911 call of a person with a gun. People in the restaurant’s parking lot, on the 3100 block of West 26th Street, pointed them toward a black 2018 Jeep Wrangler. A man was sitting in the car with a gun in his lap, authorities said.
The man, later identified as Gómez, had allegedly approached a woman with the gun in his hand, laughing and pointing it at her, authorities said. The arrest report states that the Jeep matched the description federal agents had given a few hours earlier but doesn’t draw any other connection between Gómez and agents’ report of shots fired.
At Gómez’s first court appearance Nov. 9, Cook County Judge Deidre Dyer ordered him held pending trial, noting that he had a prior felony conviction for aggravated unlawful use of a weapon and that he’d “brandished the gun at civil public protesters” on the public way in the middle of the day.
The federal complaint, meanwhile, alleged that Gómez is an illegal immigrant from Mexico with a criminal history that includes two weapons convictions, most recently earlier this year.
Gómez first entered the U.S. in 2008 using a fake name and has since been removed from the country several times, according to the federal charges.
In an interview with law enforcement after his Nov. 8 arrest, Gómez said he “has crossed the border illegally approximately 30 times since he was 17 years old,” the complaint stated.
jmeisner@chicagotribune.com
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/11/21/federal-gun-charges-unsealed-little-village/
