Trump’s ‘Blitz’ on Chicago targeting the ‘worst of the worst’ only detained 5 murderers in 68 days

The immigration agents’ mission was absolutely clear: Ferret out the “worst of the worst” criminals living in the United States without legal status.

This was the mantra federal officials repeated throughout the 68 most intense days of “Operation Midway Blitz,” which began nearly one year ago on Sept. 8. Hundreds of armed, masked agents from all over the country hit the streets in and around Chicago, detaining thousands as cameras rolled.

Yet, an analysis of data from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement shows that the surge of ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers to seize and detain thousands of people they called “criminal illegal aliens” proved less effective in Chicago than the quieter efforts they had taken earlier in the second Trump administration — and since then.

Nearly month for month, a Chicago Sun-Times/WBEZ analysis of detainee data shows, last fall’s campaign to remove the “worst of the worst” was more hype than reality.

Federal officers had greater success detaining convicted murderers, rapists, other sex offenders and people convicted of serious assault in many months before and after the height of the “blitz” than during it, the analysis shows. And just 15% of the immigrants detained in the Chicago area during the fall campaign had a prior criminal conviction, a steady decline from a high of 50% right after President Donald Trump’s inauguration.

The high-profile efforts proved particularly effective in at least one area: When a detainee had a prior conviction for a “traffic offense.”

Federal officers also achieved great success in detaining immigrants with a prior DUI conviction, a crime prioritized by flamboyant Border Patrol Cmdr. Greg Bovino, who was 12 when his own father served time for drunkenly crashing his car, killing a 26-year-old woman. The Chicago detainee data didn’t specify if anyone died or got hurt in each DUI.

‘It does not make sense’

When Trump retook the White House in January 2025, vowing to deport millions of immigrants via aggressive enforcement, he rolled out his campaign mainly in Democratic cities that didn’t vote for him, including Chicago.

By Sept. 8, and the start of Midway Blitz, his Department of Homeland Security dedicated its surge to a victim of a fatal DUI crash downstate caused by an undocumented Guatemalan man. He fled the crash on Jan 19, 2025, that killed Katie Abraham, 20, of Glenview, and Chloe Polzin, 21, of Deerfield, and is currently serving a 30-year prison sentence.

“This operation will target the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens in Chicago,” DHS announced in its news release. “If you come to our country illegally and break our laws, we will hunt you down, arrest you, deport you, and you will never return.”

But as detentions around Chicago skyrocketed, topping 3,800 over the 68 fall days, roughly 8 of every 10 people held at the ICE processing facility in suburban Broadview or in other Chicago locations had no criminal conviction. Six of the ten had civil immigration violations — like overstaying a visa; the rest have an unspecified criminal charge pending.

A DHS spokesperson responded to an interview request with a prepared statement that didn’t address the specific findings and attacked the raw ICE data collected by the nonprofit Deportation Data Project that was the basis for the analysis as “cherry picked.” The statement also says those stats count crimes just in the U.S. and don’t account for those in other countries.

“Since Day One, DHS law enforcement has been delivering on President Trump’s promise to the American people to arrest and deport criminal illegal aliens including murderers, rapists, pedophiles, gang members, and terrorists,” it read. “What makes someone a target for immigration enforcement is whether or not they are illegally in the U.S.— full stop.”

This apparent lack of targeting meshes with what the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights’ top lawyer witnessed on the front lines of arrests and legal defense around Chicago.

Instead of knocking on specific doors, immigration officers were flooding places where immigrants were known to live or gather, Fred Tsao says.

“We saw people getting grabbed off the streets, people who were working on yards, or driving Ubers, selling tamales on the street corner or selling flowers,” says Tsao. “They’re getting tackled, they’re getting grabbed, thrown to the ground and beaten … And quite a number of those folks chose not to contest their deportation cases, which means they are separated from their families.”

Regarding DUI convictions, Tsao says, “I don’t want to minimize how serious these offenses are.” But he asks, “Is an arrest and detention and deportation proportionate to the seriousness of the offense?”

The findings are based on analysis of ICE data collected under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the Deportation Data Project, a collective dedicated to transparency in immigration enforcement. The Sun-Times and WBEZ looked at initial detentions logged in the Chicago area and at arrests made in the six-county Chicago metro region between Jan. 20, 2025 and Aug. 5, 2026.

ICE’s nameless data lists the most serious charge for each immigrant convicted of a crime, but provides no details on charges pending when detained.

Highlights:

• The data shows that 11 people with sex assault convictions were detained in October, during the height of the fall 2025 deportation campaign. But federal agents detained 18 immigrants with sexual assault convictions in less time, during the last 11 days of January following Trump’s inauguration. They captured 12 more in March.

• During the nine weeks of last fall’s deportation campaign, federal officers booked five convicted murderers. Yet they had detained the same number just before in August 2025, and an additional six that May. 

• They also detained five convicted sex offenders during those fall weeks — but seven in February 2025, six in July and five in May 2026.

The situation baffles Esteban Salazar. The suburban building engineer has been victimized by an undocumented immigrant who was charged with pointing a gun at him. Simultaneously, he’s horrified that his innocent Mexican-born relatives were grabbed off area streets last fall, detained and then deported.

Carlos Mavarez Viloria, a Venezuelan migrant, had been arrested several times for theft and possessing crack cocaine before February 2024 when he pulled what Salazar described as a polished black Beretta inside a 7-Eleven Downtown.

The weapon turned out to be a copycat lighter. But Salazar, a married father of two, braced himself for the real thing. As Mavarez reached into his own pants and headed toward Salazar at the back of the store, threatening to shoot him, Salazar grasped his own licensed handgun.

“So when he pulled a firearm on me, I was already at the back of the store. He was waving it at me. I don’t know if he got a glimpse of my firearm, but he ran out,” Salazar says.

Cook County court records show other charges against Mavarez through May 2026, with mixed outcomes.

“Why the ‘F’ was he not on the first plane or bus back? My wife’s uncle who was here for 20 years. He was held, it’s ridiculous,” Salazar says.

“It’s tough. As a Mexican, as a Latino, I try to understand what our government’s doing but it does not make sense.”

Strategy changes that could explain arrest and detention trends last fall

Amid the officers sent to the Chicago area last fall, most from Border Patrol and ICE assignments in a dozen other states, the Trump administration unleashed a bevy of social media posts, extolling arrests of the “worst of the worst.”

“Operation Midway Blitz is making Illinois SAFE again. DHS law enforcement has made over 1,500 arrests across Illinois including of pedophiles, vicious gang members, and armed robbers,” Homeland Security posted on X in mid-October.

Weeks later, from Border Patrol’s X account: “Another bad guy busted! In Chicago, CBP apprehended this Bulgarian illegal alien with a rap sheet including: domestic battery, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, rape, failure to register as a sex offender. Happy to have him off the streets!”

A change in arrest methods in Illinois may help explain the actual low rates of detaining immigrants with serious criminal records.

Federal officers began 2025 pursuing arrests of undocumented immigrants through 15 government enforcement methods. But between September and November 2025, they logged only four methods. During those months, they reported no arrests under the Criminal Alien Program that tracks when incarcerated immigrants finish their criminal sentences. CAP arrests had accounted for about 10% of arrests between January and September before the Blitz began.

Then, from Sept. 8 through Nov. 14, the percentage of arrests defined as “collateral” outpaced “targeted” ones — 53% versus 46%. So more people were getting picked up randomly than on purpose. But from Nov. 15 through March 2026, long after the bulk of extra federal officers had left Chicago, targeted arrests eclipsed collateral ones, 72% to 13% (no arrest method was specified for the rest).

Months before Operation Midway Blitz stormed Chicago, Trump’s new “Border Czar” Tom Homan stood in Portage Park in December 2024, vowing to make Chicago ground zero for deportations. A month later, Dr. Phil would ride along with ICE agents in Chicago, questioning detainees on camera.

January 2025 was a high for detaining immigrants previously convicted of sexual assault especially, and for murder.

“That was right after the inauguration, continuing into the first couple of weeks in February and then tailing off,” ICIRR’s Tsao says.

“If there are any arguments for ICE targeting the so-called ‘worst of the worst,’ it would have been in January.”