It’s been months since President Donald Trump’s “Operation Midway Blitz” winded down in Chicago. But the wounds left behind remain fresh for the people who bore witness to the aggressive immigration campaign.
That pain was on display Monday during hours of emotional testimony recounting several violent interactions involving masked federal agents confronting and arresting residents, and deploying tear gas on neighborhood streets.
The mother of Katie Abraham was among the people who spoke Monday as a part of a two-day hearing held by the Illinois Accountability Commission. The state commission was created to investigate the actions of federal agents in Chicago last fall.
Abraham, a 20-year-old college student, was killed in Urbana following a hit-and-run drunk driving incident by an immigrant without legal status in January 2025. The Trump administration said Operation Midway Blitz was named in her honor.
But Abraham would have “wanted nothing to do with it,” said her mom, Denise Lorence.
The Trump administration “used my daughter Katie’s name in an attempt to give them cover for their disturbing tactics,” Lorence said. “Having my daughter’s name used this way added a level of despair I didn’t even know could exist.”
The Illinois Accountability Commission was formed by Gov. JB Pritzker in October to hold federal immigration agents accountable for the aggressive tactics used during the deportation campaign and to collect and preserve evidence.
The commission — which doesn’t have subpoena or prosecutorial power — has spent months gathering testimony and reviewing body camera footage, bystander videos, law enforcement records, news reports and court filings, said the commission’s vice chair, Patricia Brown Holmes.
“We built a record of evidence that you, the public, can now judge for yourselves,” said Holmes, who called the commission’s work a “reckoning.”
“This is a durable record,” she added, “and it exists because of the people of Illinois. People who grabbed their whistles and raised their cell phones, who brought lawsuits, produced investigative journalism and posted what they saw to their social media, who bore witness even when they didn’t feel safe.”
The two-day hearings are unveiling that accounting. A second public hearing is scheduled for Tuesday at noon in the Michael A. Bilandic Building. The commission’s final report must be delivered to Pritzker by Thursday.
During Monday’s hearing, the commission played several videos from some of the major incidents that happened last fall and were widely reported on. That includes the raid of a South Shore apartment building and confrontations between residents and federal agents in Little Village, Lake View, Old Irving Park and Evanston.
Among the people who testified was Evanston resident Jennifer Moriarty.
She was walking to get her dry cleaning on Oct. 31 when federal agents “brake checked” a car, leading to a confrontation with the agents, the driver and residents on a busy Evanston street.
When Moriarty tried to film the aftermath of the crash, an agent grabbed her by the neck, threw her to the ground and cuffed her.
“I was so angry, I wasn’t afraid because I didn’t do anything wrong,” Moriarty said. “I was angry that they were doing this in my community.”
Agents also wrestled and pinned a young man to the ground, video from the scene showed. An agent kneed the man’s back and shoved his face into the pavement before putting him into the same car Moriarty had been detained in.
Moriarty, the young man and the driver involved in the crash were later taken to the FBI field office in Chicago. They were never charged and no one ever said why they were detained, Moriarty said.
“It’s my obligation to do whatever I can to save our democracy and to preserve something for the future, for my child and everybody else’s child,” Moriarity said when she was asked why she testified. “This is not the world we’re supposed to be giving them.”