While the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said it has made hundreds of arrests in Illinois, immigration advocates in Chicago announced their own database to track immigration arrests and deportations.
The agency touted 900 arrests in a social media post accompanied by a one-minute video showing federal agents conducting a nighttime raid on a South Shore residential building this week that resulted in 37 arrests of people who are accused of being “involved in drug trafficking and distribution, weapons crimes and immigration violators,” according to DHS.
But DHS and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have shared few details on the arrests, making it difficult to independently verify some of the alleged crimes. The limited information has spurred immigrant rights activists to create their own public dashboard showing who is being detained by federal authorities.
Since Sept. 8, the federal government rolled out an aggressive deportation campaign called “Operation Midway Blitz” in Chicago and the surrounding suburbs. The National Immigrant Justice Center and the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois are challenging the arrests in federal court, arguing that at least 27 of the arrests were done so without warrants or probable cause and in violation of an existing consent decree. At least three U.S. citizens were among those arrested in recent weeks, according to the civil rights groups.
A top U.S. Border Patrol official who has been leading the arrests told WBEZ the agents were arresting people based on “how they look.”
In South Shore this week, federal agents approached or entered nearly every apartment in a five-story building that was raided, and U.S. citizens were among those detained for hours, residents and witnesses told the Sun-Times.
So far, federal officials have named about 50 people arrested in recent weeks, typically through social media posts and press releases highlighting their criminal backgrounds. The list includes a man convicted of murder and a least three others convicted of sexual assault or domestic battery charges.
But several others arrested have only been accused of entering the country illegally.
About half of the names and alleged charges released by DHS couldn’t be definitively matched to court records.
At least two of the men, and apparently a third, were detained outside of Illinois.
In response to requests for comment and a more detailed breakdown of the arrests showing how many were targeted and how many have criminal records, a DHS spokesperson provided only the news release from Wednesday announcing the more than 800 arrests.
Immigration arrests dashboard unveiled Thursday
The public dashboard of immigration arrests, announced Thursday by The Resurrection Project, will be updated weekly on the organization’s website. It aims to catalog immigrant arrests and deportations that the federal government is no longer sharing.
The dashboard shows that calls to immigrant legal assistance hotlines more than doubled in September, when DHS increased immigrant enforcement in the Chicago area.
The federal government used to share data about who was arrested by ICE, says Eréndira Rendón, vice president of immigrant justice for The Resurrection Project. But those public dashboards were scrubbed from the internet when President Donald Trump took office this year, Rendón said.
“We’re trying to keep record of what’s happening in our communities,” Rendon told reporters Thursday. “These dashboards make it clear: Immigrants, particularly Latinos, are under attack.”
Of the 121 hotline calls taken in the last week of September, the vast majority of calls were for families from Mexico, followed by those from Venezuela. Most referrals came from people living in Chicago, with others coming from Cicero, Aurora, Calumet City and Elgin. The data also shows that immigration officials are arresting more people who have been in the U.S. for 2 to 5 years.
Contributing: Sophie Sherry