On Monday night, an apartment building in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood became the site of the federal government’s immigration crackdown on the city.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, 37 people were arrested in the late-night apartment raid on 7500 South Shore Street. The agency claimed it was targeting a Venezuelan gang called Tren de Aragua. The FBI confirmed it worked with DHS, and said the raid was a “U.S. Border Patrol targeted immigration enforcement operation.”
The predominantly African American neighborhood has become a home for migrants from Venezuela, who stayed in the shelters and apartments there, but DHS did not provide evidence for its claim that Tren de Aragua members were frequenting the area, and did not share whether members of the group were arrested in the raid.
The residents of the apartment building, including ones who were arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, tell a different story. One where women and children were woken up in the middle of the night, zip-tied, and put into U-Haul and Budget trucks. One where U.S. citizens were detained and threatened to stay in police custody if they had a warrant unrelated to immigration.
A 67-year-old U.S. citizen named Rodrick Johnson was among those arrested. He told the Chicago Sun-Times that ICE broke his door down, dragged him out of his apartment in zip ties, and detained him for three hours.
“I asked [agents] why they were holding me if I was an American citizen, and they said I had to wait until they looked me up,” Johnson said to the outlet. “I asked if they had a warrant, and I asked for a lawyer. They never brought one.”
According to another building resident who was detained, ICE agents told her that they would not release anyone with a warrant, even if it was not immigration related.
“They treated us like we were nothing,” Pertissue Fisher told ABC 7 Chicago. “It was scary because I’ve never had a gun put in my face.” Fisher said she came into the hallway of her building at 10 P.M. that Monday and was put in handcuffs by agents. She said she wasn’t released until 3 A.M. Tuesday.
When some residents returned to their building, what they came back to was a reminder of the events of that night. Photos of the building reported by The Chicago Sun-Times and Block Club Chicago show personal items thrown into the hallway, residents’ household items strewn across the room, mixed with the items of strangers, broken doors and windows. Some residents returned, realizing their neighbors were missing.
Residents said the building was already in bad shape, and had reportedly been abandoned by its owner and building management. But from the children’s toys and clothing left behind to the mattresses being thrown out by building workers, some of the remnants of the raid were obvious.
Neighbors in the community said that they saw children among those zip-tied and detained, and they were also separated from their parents. Some of them, according to witnesses, were not wearing clothes or shoes. Eboni Watson, a neighbor who witnessed the raid, told ABC 7 Chicago that an agent near her laughed and said, “F*ck them kids.”
DHS posted a promotional video of the raid on its account on X, in which the agency said it has made over 900 arrests in Illinois during “Operation Midway Blitz.”
