Nearly a decade after joining the FBI, former NFL player Charles Tillman resigned last year due to the Trump administration’s immigration operation in the city where he became a Chicago Bears legend.
Tillman was informed in Jan. 2025 that ICE would soon be deployed to Chicago, and they expected the assistance of the FBI, DEA, ATF, Border Patrol, and U.S. Marshals for targeted arrests, according to a piece written by The Athletic senior writer Dan Pompei. While Tillman has long believed that there is an immigration problem in the United States, something about this operation seemed wrong.
“It was, ‘We need everybody outside, and we want everyone standing guard,’” he said. “And they wanted us to make arrests. It wasn’t just about going after the violent individuals. It was, ‘There’s some guys working on a house outside. Let’s go swap them up, and it will count for the quota system.’ To me, it felt political.”
Politico reported in Aug. 2025 that the Justice Department attempted to walk back a claim from White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller that the Trump administration aimed to arrest 3,000 people every day. Whether or not that alleged goal is true, what cannot be denied is the alarming number of individuals who never should have been arrested in the first place.
A Jan. 2026 report from the Deportation Data Project found a sevenfold increase in arrests of people without criminal convictions in the first nine months of the Trump administration.
As the arrests piled up, it became clear that ICE were targeting a specific group of people, which is a reality that Tillman knew all too well.
Tillman was in sixth grade when he and his friends, who were Black, were forced to kneel down and put their hands behind their heads for nearly 30 minutes after officers were called over a “mild argument” with a group of white kids. In another incident five years later, Tillman and his friends were instructed by a plainclothes officer to “line up plantation style” after failing to have identification while playing basketball.
Despite his experiences as a youth, Tillman was called to follow in the footsteps of his father Donald Tillman II, who served in the Army for 20 years. When he retired from the NFL at the age of 36, Tillman could not apply for the Army, so he signed up for the FBI, one year before the age cutoff point.
Tillman worked on the safe streets task force before spending his final year as a firearms and tactical instructor. “I thought the NFL was the greatest job ever,” he said. “What’s the second-greatest job ever? The FBI. Their motto means something — Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity.”
Considering what being an FBI agent meant to Tillman, one can assume just how difficult it was for him to quit. However, unlike his peers, the former NFL player’s financial freedom helped make that decision a little easier.
“There are a lot of people in the FBI that aren’t happy with how the organization is being run by (FBI Director) Kash Patel, but they can’t quit like I did,” he said.