Federal immigration agents blanketed Chicago‘s affluent North and Near West sides Friday, making immigration arrests in neighborhoods that haven‘t been targeted as often as others in the past six weeks of President Donald Trump‘s aggressive deportation campaign.
Feds smashed one man‘s car window outside a family health center where his pregnant partner had an appointment.
Other agents grabbed two construction workers from a house and teargassed neighbors on the residential block.
Agents took two men from outside a comedy club. One group grabbed an Amazon delivery driver.
The scenes marked the third consecutive day federal agents swarmed the city in what seemed like a new level of escalation in their immigration enforcement blitz, even for the standard they had set since early September.
The push caught the attention of U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis, who has shown increasing frustration with the feds’ tactics. On Friday, she ordered top Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino — who threw a tear gas canister into a Little Village crowd a day earlier — to court next week.
Community Facebook groups were full of reported sightings of the feds all morning Friday in West Town, Ukrainian Village and Wicker Park.
“It was terrifying,” said Autumn Brown, 22, whose apartment windows overlook the Erie Family Health Center in West Town, which provides community resources and a daycare.
That‘s where a group of agents in camouflage gear approached a man in his car, broke his window and dragged him out. Bystanders said his partner, who is eight months pregnant, was inside the center. She could be heard yelling that she‘s pregnant on videos posted to social media.
“Especially with a day care, I just keep thinking about the kids and how they had to witness that,” Brown said. “I saw a couple of children at the windows.”
Neighbors and members of a rapid response group were quickly outside blowing whistles to alert the community, trying to stop the agents from taking the man, asking them to produce a warrant and yelling “you can‘t do this,” witnesses said.
Kevin Davis, a spokesman for Erie Family Health Centers, said there was a “violent interaction with ICE agents outside here with a member of our community.” Davis said he couldn‘t confirm any details about a patient receiving care at the center.
“It‘s jarring for members of the community for something like this to happen right here,” Davis said. “We want to make sure, especially as tenants in the community, that the community members feel safe.”
State Rep. Lillian Jimenez said outside the health center the detention of the soon-to-be father was “unacceptable.”
“This is the definition of kidnapping,” Jimenez said.
Around the same time as the health center arrest, agents grabbed a man from another car in the neighborhood. His relative later told the Chicago Sun-Times he was delivering packages for Amazon Flex, which allows people to use their own cars.
The man has a 6-year-old daughter and a pending asylum case, his relative said. The family didn’t hear from him until Friday evening, when he called to say he was being held in the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in suburban Broadview.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which oversee Border Patrol, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Lake View: Construction workers targeted, neighbors teargassed
About four miles north, in the 3300 block of North Lakewood Avenue in Lake View, two vehicles full of federal agents pulled up to a house where four construction workers were sitting on the front porch eating lunch.
The Border Patrol agents went inside the home‘s fence to grab the workers, who tried to flee to safety. Two managed to find refuge inside, but the other two were arrested.
One of the workers, a 37-year-old man who did not share his name out of fear for his safety, told the Chicago Sun-Times his nephew, Eladio Monter de Muñoz, was caught by agents as he tried to hide in the garage but couldn‘t manage to shut the door in time.
The uncle made it inside, but he suffered cuts and puncture wounds on both arms and hands when he jumped over the fence trying to get away from federal officers.
“There isn’t much I can do about what happened,” he said as he tried to control the bleeding on his arm. “I just want to make sure my nephew and my coworker are OK.”
When asked what he would do moving forward, the man responded, “Go back to work. I have no other option. We just have to try and be careful.”
After the raid, their uneaten lunches remained on the porch and sidewalk while the two remaining men went back to work.
Marisa Vivoda, who lives on the first floor, was inside her apartment when federal officers arrived.
Vivoda said federal officers jumped over the fence and went into the front lawn without asking the workers questions or showing a warrant.
“They were all over our yard, all over the front, the back, our balcony,” Vivoda said. “We‘ve been keeping these gates locked because they can‘t come on our property. But they jumped the fences. I yelled at them to get off the property, but they ignored me.
“It’s just horrible because these [workers] are working so hard,“ she said. “They just want to make money for their families to build a life for themselves.”
Similar to the scene outside the health center, a few dozen neighbors quickly gathered and shouted at agents who were arresting the men, demanding a warrant. The agents moved down the street and threw at least two tear gas canisters, scattering the crowd. Witnesses said they didn‘t hear a warning before the gas was deployed, as Judge Ellis is requiring them to issue.
“They‘re not obstructing the vehicles, they‘re not jumping on the cars, nobody has weapons,” Ald. Bennett Lawson (44th) later said at the scene. “They‘re using their First Amendment rights to use their voices, and tear gas was deployed, without warning, in violation of every order that has been issued.”
“All of a sudden, you heard, ‘Pop, pop!‘ And they just threw out some tear gas,“ said Bruce Turner, 64, who had stepped out of his house of 30 years to witness the commotion on his block. “Basically, it just cleared out the entire crowd. I had to leave and run up my stairs just to get out of it.
“Burning in the eyes, burning in the skin,” Turner said of the effects he felt. “Coughing, and I couldn‘t see. I got up there and got water in my face, and that helped a lot.”
As he spoke to a Sun-Times reporter, Turner started choking back tears.
“I was just thinking about this, there‘s some kids that aren‘t going to see their dad today because they‘re f—ing locked up,” he said. “It pisses me off.“
Turner, who‘s white, said he has watched the neighborhood change over the decades and become “pretty affluent“ and heavily white now.
“If there‘s a positive to this, it‘s waking up the people in these places that this is something real,“ he said. “We need to address this as an American problem, not my little street here.“
Vicky Mavreas, who lives down the block from the house where the workers were targeted, said she heard rapid responders‘ familiar whistles and went outside.
“I saw multiple cars surrounding the house,“ Mavreas said. “The ICE agents were behind the fence. I saw one take his elbow and knock the man … that they kidnapped to the ground to detain him.“
The crowd of neighbors followed the agents‘ SUVs as they pulled away with the workers.
“When they threw two tear gasses, there was no violence going on. There was no aggression,“ Mavreas said. “People were asking where their warrants were. People asked for the man‘s name. And this one ICE agent was screaming ‘f— you‘ back at this guy, a civilian that was just fighting for this man to have his rights be upheld.“
Tear gas lingered in the air more than an hour later on the otherwise quiet residential block, and an empty canister was by a curb in the street. About two blocks away on Southport Avenue, people seemed unaware of the federal activity while they dined on restaurant patios.
Lawson said this is the first time his office has received these types of confirmed reports of arrests in his ward.
At the Laugh Factory, a comedy club in Lake View, agents detained one of the club’s managers outside the building at Belmont Avenue and North Broadway.
Video of the encounter posted on the Laugh Factory’s Instagram page shows bystanders attempting to stop agents from putting the man into an SUV. An agent’s helmet is on the ground as he struggles with a woman. Two feds end up on the ground as they try to handcuff the man.
“Let us see your face, you f—— coward!” a woman screams at the masked agents as others demand to know where they’re taking the man. “You know that this is wrong,” she tells them.
Schools on soft lockdown
The stepped-up enforcement in the area disrupted schools across several neighborhoods, as it does each time federal agents have detained, arrested or interacted with protesters since they arrived in force.
Several schools, including Pritzker Elementary School in Wicker Park, Francis W. Parker School in Lincoln Park and LaSalle II Elementary School in West Town, went on soft lockdown — preventing students from leaving campus during the day — or canceled recess.
Lincoln Park High School didn’t allow students to leave for lunch. Other schools, including Lane Tech College Prep in Lake View, allowed students to stay after dismissal to keep safe.
At afternoon dismissal, parents with whistles spread out around Pritzker and nearby Sabin Elementary.
A mother at St. Mary of the Angels Catholic School in Bucktown said she heard people frantically yelling “ICE is here” and blowing whistles when they saw a black SUV near her kindergartner’s school.
“To have a parent tell me, ‘ICE is here,’ as all our children are running around the perimeter of the school,” said Maria Alejandra Ramirez, “was very scary.”
Contributing: Ashlee Rezin, Anthony Vazquez