Dan Jones was jolted awake around 1 a.m. Tuesday to the sound of federal agents trying to break through his apartment door. They couldn’t get past his double lock, so he went back to bed.
But when he woke up hours later for work, he walked out and found broken doors littering the hallway — and his neighbors missing.
Jones, 27, is among the residents left at 7500 S. South Shore Drive who are trying to piece together what remains after an early morning, high-powered federal immigration raid led to the arrests of dozens of their neighbors at their South Shore apartment building.
Armed federal agents in military fatigues busted down their doors overnight, pulling men, women and children from their apartments, some of them naked, residents and witnesses said. Agents approached or entered nearly every apartment in the five-story building, and U.S. citizens were among those detained for hours.
When he got home from work, Jones said he entered his unit to find all of his electronics and furniture missing, and all of his clothes and shoes thrown on the floor. Jones said he had no idea who took his belongings and hadn’t received answers from Chicago police.
“I’m pissed off,” Jones said. “I feel defeated because the authorities aren’t doing anything.”
On Wednesday, toys, shoes and food were still in piles in the building’s hallways. Property managers were seen throwing mattresses and broken doors into dumpsters.
The Department of Homeland Security said federal agents with Border Patrol, the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives arrested 37 people in the raid. DHS said some of those arrested “are believed to be involved in drug trafficking and distribution, weapons crimes and immigration violators.”
The feds also claimed the South Shore neighborhood was “a location known to be frequented by Tren de Aragua members and their associates,” but DHS gave no evidence to support the assertion, and authorities did not confirm that any of the people arrested were members of the Venezuelan gang.
Alleged Tren de Aragua members have been charged and detained in the city as recently as August. But the Chicago Sun-Times has found little evidence tying them to violence in Chicago.
Rodrick Johnson, 67, is one of many residents who were detained by federal agents during the South Shore raid. A U.S. citizen, he said agents broke through his door and dragged him out in zip ties.
Johnson said he was left tied up outside the building for nearly three hours before agents finally let him go.
“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,” Jones said. “I asked if they had a warrant, and I asked for a lawyer. They never brought one.”
Video taken near 75th Street and South Shore Drive showed federal agents in large vehicles gathered on the street near the building. Some wore U.S. Border Patrol uniforms. Others had FBI logos.
A spokesperson for Chicago’s FBI field office confirmed the bureau was present to support a “targeted immigration enforcement operation” carried out by Border Patrol.
The raid is one of the largest operations executed since President Donald Trump’s administration announced the launch of “Operation Midway Blitz” on Sept. 8, bringing a flood of federal immigration officers to the Chicago area to conduct raids and arrests.
A similar raid was carried out in suburban Elgin, when agents led by U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem rode in a military vehicle and blew down the front door of a home where they detained six people, including two U.S. citizens.
In the South Shore raid, neighbors said federal agents used flashbang grenades to burst through the building and several drones and helicopters were deployed.
Ebony Sweets Watson, who lives across the street, said it “looked like hundreds” of agents were outside her front door.
Watson said she saw agents dragging residents, including kids, out of the building without any clothes on and into U-Haul vans. Kids were separated from their mothers, she said.
“It was heartbreaking to watch,” said Watson. “Even if you’re not a mother, seeing kids coming out buck naked and taken from their mothers, it was horrible.”
Watson said she went into the building to help one of the residents and was shocked by what she saw.
“Stuff was everywhere,” said Watson. “You could see people’s birth certificates, and papers thrown all over. Water was leaking into the hallway. It was wicked crazy.”
Jones, who lives on the fourth floor, said most of his neighbors were Venezuelan and often took turns cleaning the hallway because the property owners did little to maintain it.
“They were cool people,” Jones said as he looked into his next door neighbor’s unit. “They didn’t speak a lick of English, but we used translator apps to talk to each other.”
Jones wondered what would happen to his neighbor’s young children.
Jones and Johnson said they believed the landlord would kick out the remaining residents from the building, which public records show had previously received code violations. Owners of the property could not be reached for comment.
Brandon Lee, a spokesman for the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, said the group was working to identify those taken in the raid.
“It was a violent show of force in the middle of the night,” Lee said. “Taking families out of an apartment building in a residential neighborhood like that is harmful, is traumatic, and that is not something that people can easily recover from, whether they themselves were taken or whether they witnessed it.”