Eighteen people targeted in last fall’s notorious military-style raid on a South Shore apartment complex took a key step Wednesday toward holding the federal government legally accountable for “brutalizing and racially profiling” the building’s residents, attorneys say.
The MacArthur Justice Center and other legal groups announced that they’d submitted administrative complaints against the Department of Homeland Security in pursuit of relief under the Federal Tort Claims Act, which offers a path to suing federal agencies.
“We should not live in a country where the federal government can use violations of the Constitution as propaganda and get away with it,” Jonathan Manes, senior counsel at the MacArthur Justice Center said Wednesday. “This raid was a nightmare turned into reality. It put federal agents’ abuse of power on full display while leaving the Chicago community traumatized. We are proud to fight for our clients and hold those responsible to account.”
The Sept. 30 raid became an early flashpoint of Operation Midway Blitz, the weeks-long deportation campaign that tore through the Chicago area last year.
Agents descended on the 130-unit complex at 7500 S. South Shore Drive from helicopters, used flashbang grenades to burst through doors and pointed guns at residents, according to the new filing. Residents reported seeing men, women and children dragged out of their apartments and zip-tied. Some U.S. citizens also reported being detained for hours.
DHS later released a highly produced, Hollywood-style propaganda video of the raid that didn’t show how residents felt terrorized.
Federal officials initially claimed the area surrounding the building was a hub for Venezuelan gang activity. But arrest reports for two of the 37 people detained that night showed the raid was based on intelligence that “illegal aliens were unlawfully occupying apartments in the building.”
The building’s owner, Trinity Flood, and property manager, Corey Oliver, gave “verbal and written consent” for feds to search the building, according to those reports.
Agents allegedly only checked units “not legally rented or leased at the time,” the reports said.
Tenants have said they experienced squalid conditions in the building for years before the raid. They said the landlord and property management company failed to take care of the property, leading to broken elevators, lack of security and a host of plumbing and pest control issues.
According to housing organizer Jonah Karsh, with the Metropolitan Tenants Organization, the conditions “made it the kind of building that would be more appealing for the federal government to target in the first place.”
He said many tenants who ended up there were low-income Black people and immigrants whose asylum seeker rental assistance had run out.
“A lot of those folks ended up in the building because there were a lot of empty units, in part, because of the disrepair in the building,” Karsh said. “They didn’t have anywhere else to go; they were there because it was a last resort.”
The lack of security at the building also left it open to squatters. Some residents suspected building managers called the feds as a way of clearing the building of tenants without leases.
One resident previously said he saw someone taking pictures of the units “where the Venezuelans lived” before the raid.
WBEZ and Sun-Times reporters also found a crumpled map of the building on a hallway floor days after the raid. The map marked each unit as “vacant,” “tenant” or as having “firearms.” The units marked “vacant” on the map had clearly been raided. Most units marked as “tenant” appeared intact, though not all.
The Illinois Department of Human Rights has since announced it would investigate Flood and Strength In Management about their possible role in the 2025 raid.
In December, the remaining residents moved out of the building after a Cook County judge ordered it vacated, citing dangerous conditions.
Karsh said the tort claim could address the treatment of some tenants impacted by the raid, but there are dozens more who were displaced in the aftermath.
“Everyone who’s been affected by the really awful, unjust activity perpetrated in this building deserves justice,” Karsh said.