CHICAGO — Juan Manuel Armenta was at a bus stop en route to pick up his paycheck when he was approached by several armed men. The Department of Homeland Security had just started “Operation Midway Blitz” and was surging immigration officers into the city. On that September afternoon, Armenta became one of their first arrests.
Three days later, DHS included Armenta’s mug shot in a press release titled “Pedophiles, Abusers, Rapists, and Other Violent Thugs Arrested.” It described Armenta, who concedes he crossed the border illegally more than three decades ago, as a “criminal illegal alien” with arrests for armed robbery and drunken driving. The release did not mention that the 2013 DUI allegation had been reduced to reckless driving and that police had declined to charge him in the 2006 armed robbery.
“I’ve never touched a gun in my life,” Armenta said in a telephone interview from Mexico, where he was quickly deported.
Two months ago, DHS sent immigration officers to Chicago to detain and deport “violent offenders” that the agency said were released from state and local jails because of “sanctuary” policies. So far, the agency says it has arrested more than 4,000 people. Officials have publicly identified only about 120 of those as having a criminal arrest or conviction, some for major crimes such as murder, and others for nonviolent offenses such as illegally crossing the border.
When the operation began, the agency highlighted 11 serious criminals it said had been released and remained at large. DHS did not answer questions from The Washington Post about whether it had found them. One of the men on the list, Pedro Colmenares Gonzalez, a suspected Tren de Aragua gang member, had been arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in March. DHS did not respond to questions about why he was on the list if the agency previously detained him.
Another man, Hector Gomez, had been released by state authorities despite ICE’s attempts to detain him for immigration violations. Gomez, whose record includes a conviction for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, was arrested by Chicago police, not DHS, during Operation Midway Blitz. He was accused of pointing a gun at a woman in a predominantly Latino neighborhood.
Of more than 600 people arrested in the Chicago area in recent months, and whose detentions were examined in a court case, ICE identified fewer than 70 as posing a “high public safety risk,” according to a federal judge.
Though ICE framed its operation as focusing on criminal threats, its agents have drawn attention for bringing an aggressive approach to detaining people with no criminal record or relatively minor charges. In one incident, an undocumented immigrant who had just dropped off his two young sons at school was pulled over, shot and killed. DHS said he had tried to flee and hit an officer. His criminal history consisted of traffic violations.
Another undocumented immigrant was detained outside a Home Depot where he had been picking up supplies for a job to help pay for his daughter’s cancer treatment. He had no criminal record. And agents recently chased a teacher into a preschool where she was working legally; she also had no criminal history, according to a court filing.
Tensions are flaring within DHS as the Trump administration’s deportation campaign shifts immigration officers from targeting serious criminals to sweeping up anyone without a legal status in the country. ICE is the top agency on interior enforcement, but the Border Patrol is increasingly taking the lead in urban operations such as Midway Blitz. The difference is key: Border agents are trained to make large numbers of arrests outdoors along the nation’s borders, while ICE has historically arrested people primarily inside prisons and jails, after they have been detained by local police on suspicion of a crime or completed their sentences.
In Chicago, senior Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino has commanded much of Operation Midway Blitz, becoming the face of the Trump administration’s crackdown. Under his leadership, agents have rappelled from helicopters onto the roof of an apartment building and tear-gassed bystanders and protesters upset over migrant arrests. A federal judge said the heavy-handed approach “shocks the conscience.”
For this report, The Post interviewed dozens of current and former agency officials, Chicago residents, activists and lawyers involved in legal challenges against the administration. Many said the operation is a bellwether for the approach DHS will take in other cities and that, as President Donald Trump promised on the campaign trail, anyone without a legal status will be a target. The undocumented population includes people who crossed the border illegally — which is a crime, though historically most are not charged — as well as people who entered on a legal temporary status that has since expired.
“What we’re seeing now is new, at least in my experience,” said Doris Meissner, the top U.S. immigration official during the Clinton administration. “The kinds of operations that have traditionally been done by ICE and by interior enforcement and under interior enforcement guidelines is different work than what the Border Patrol is trained for or has typically done.”
Officials in Illinois have resisted such an approach. In 2017, the state’s then-Republican governor signed a law limiting cooperation with ICE, contending officers should focus on violent crime and not civil immigration violations. Gov. JB Pritzker (D) expanded those protections in 2021 and hailed Illinois as “the most welcoming state in the nation” for immigrants and refugees.
ICE has countered that officers should be granted access to local and state jails to ensure violent undocumented offenders are deported and not released. Without cooperation from local authorities, ICE argues, immigration officers must search for fugitives in communities where they will also encounter ordinary undocumented immigrants whom sanctuary policies sought to protect.
At least one local official in Chicago, Alderman Raymond Lopez (D), has argued in favor of allowing police to work with federal officers to detain undocumented immigrants with violent records. He said he watched “with heartache” as federal agents swarmed some Chicago neighborhoods searching for criminals and arrested “unsuspecting” immigrants not on their lists.
“What pains me the most is that this did not have to happen,” Lopez, who favors granting legal status to undocumented immigrants, wrote last month on X.
Noem has praised the operation for making Americans safe by netting “criminal aliens.” DHS has shared information on detainees who have committed crimes ranging from forgery to sexual assault, armed robbery and murder. The agency says violent crime has dropped in Chicago during Operation Midway Blitz, though crime in the city was already declining.
“Nearly every day DHS is arresting pedophiles, known or suspected terrorists, kidnappers, child smugglers and sex traffickers, including those who entered our country illegally,” DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said. “The Washington Post would know this if you bothered to cover our worst of the worst arrests that DHS puts out every single day.”
Community leaders and activists say the operation has, for many, shattered a sense of safety in the metropolitan area of about 10 million people, home to one of the largest immigrant populations in the United States. Some children of immigrants are afraid to go to school. Street vendors have disappeared from some neighborhoods, and playgrounds are quieter.
“They are hunting us,” said Vicky, an undocumented Chicago mother who, like others in this report, spoke on the condition that The Post identify her by only her first name because she fears being targeted. “They are treating us like animals.”
Shock tactics
DHS started Operation Midway Blitz on Sept. 8 “in honor” of Katie Abraham, 20, who authorities say was killed when an undocumented immigrant crashed into her vehicle in Urbana, Illinois, in January while driving drunk. (Abraham’s mother has since said her daughter would not have supported the operation; her father is standing by it.)
Illinois law largely prohibits state and local police from assisting civil immigration arrests. Deportations had risen to record highs under President Barack Obama (D), a former U.S. senator from Illinois, and supporters said the law was needed to protect families from being separated. Trump and his top aides have long railed against such laws — branding them “sanctuary city” policies that protect immigrants who have committed crimes but not Americans.
“For years, Governor Pritzker and his fellow sanctuary politicians released Tren de Aragua gang members, rapists, kidnappers, and drug traffickers on Chicago’s streets — putting American lives at risk and making Chicago a magnet for criminals,” McLaughlin said in announcing the operation. “President Trump and Secretary Noem have a clear message: no city is a safe haven for criminal illegal aliens.”
Two days later, the agency put out a release announcing the arrest of Armenta and nine others. Armenta’s partner, Yolanda, and their teenage son, Gabriel, could not find out where he was.
Then came a phone call.
“Well, I’m here,” Armenta told Yolanda. She told him to use his keys to open the front door, thinking “here” meant their Chicago home.
“No, you don’t understand,” he said. “I’m here in Mexico.”
Armenta said immigration officers admitted to confusing him with another Juan Armenta, who has a lengthy rap sheet. He assumed that meant he would be released. Instead, Armenta said they told him to sign some papers in English, which he doesn’t read well. He thought they were release documents. In fact, they were voluntary deportation forms.
“I didn’t know what I was signing,” he said. “They asked nothing. Explained nothing.”
The speed of his removal came as a shock to his family. “Where was his due process?” said Yolanda, who spoke on the condition that she be identified by only her first name because she is also in the country illegally. Lawyers said the case fits a pattern that has emerged in Chicago and elsewhere: DHS announces that an arrestee has a criminal record and lists the charges. But the public announcement leaves out that the charges had been reduced or dropped.
DHS said Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, the undocumented immigrant who was fatally shot in September, had a “history of reckless driving.” Cook County court records show Villegas-Gonzalez had received citations 11 times for traffic violations between 2010 and 2019; about half were dropped. Most were civil infractions such as driving an uninsured vehicle and driving with an expired license. The most serious offense was speeding in 2013, a misdemeanor.
“I would like them to take real gang members and violent criminals off our streets — like, I would love it,” Pritzker said in an interview with The Post. “Let’s get drugs and guns and gangs off the streets. But that’s not what they’re doing.”
Protesters soon started following ICE and Border Patrol agents. In suburban Broadview, demonstrators began clashing every week with officers outside an ICE holding facility. Video shows federal agents aggressively pushing demonstrators to the ground and firing pepper balls directly at them — in one case striking a pastor dressed in black clerical garb in the head.
At around 1 a.m. Sept. 30, residents in the South Shore neighborhood were awakened by explosions. Looking out her window, resident Eboni Watson said she saw three helicopters, drones, several armored vehicles and hundreds of agents. She said she also saw unclothed women and children who had been surprised by the raid taken into custody.
Resident Isaiah Johnson, a U.S. citizen, said he was told to get on the ground. “I guess they thought I was one of them. I was telling them I’m from the U.S. … They asked me questions like, ‘What’s my name? What’s my age? Where was I born?’” He was questioned and released.
DHS described the operation as a mission to capture Venezuelan gang members. But in a post on X, the agency said it had arrested only two confirmed members of Tren de Aragua. Thirty-five others were arrested for civil immigration violations.
Leading the raid from a parking lot nearby: Bovino.
‘The good guy gang’
Bovino kept his hand on the butt of his rifle as he directed the raid and told a NewsNation reporter embedded with his team that there was a “different gang in town.”
“It’s called the good guy gang,” Bovino said. “We’re the good guys.”
Bovino has frequently appeared on the front lines of Operation Midway Blitz. In late September, he stood at the helm of a fleet of Border Patrol boats making their way down the Chicago River, posing for photos in front of the Trump International Hotel.
In a phone interview with The Post in October, Bovino said the goal of the Chicago mission was to “uphold federal law,” promote “community safety and national security,” and encourage people to self-deport.
“We are catching terrorists,” he said. “Honest to goodness, bona fide terrorists.”
Before coming to Chicago, Bovino was in charge of Border Patrol’s El Centro sector, a relatively quiet 70-mile stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border in California. Days before the start of the second Trump administration, he led an operation in California’s Kern County known as “Operation Return to Sender.” Border Patrol agents picked up farmworkers driving to the fields and at a convenience store. Though the agency described it as a targeted operation, CalMatters, a nonprofit news organization, later reported that Border Patrol had no knowledge of criminal or immigration history for 77 of the 78 people arrested.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit alleging agents “indiscriminately” arrested non-White people regardless of their immigration status. A federal judge later issued a preliminary injunction barring Border Patrol agents from stopping people in California’s Eastern District unless they had “reasonable suspicion” that the individual was in the country illegally.
Bovino has compared immigration officers to crime-fighting “superheroes” like the Lone Ranger, Spider-Man and Batman — and frequently takes to social media to defend them. When one X user commented on Bovino’s likely violation of a court order forbidding aggressive use of force against demonstrators in Chicago, he responded with emojis of American flags, arm flexes and a cowboy hat. When another X user blasted a federal judge demanding information about the operation — “EFF them all, we ALL stand with you” — Bovino responded: “Thank you!!! Following!”
With illegal border crossings low, Noem has deployed thousands of U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents into cities such as Chicago. Former DHS officials say border agents are often unfamiliar with local laws and court rulings governing arrests and lack the training to differentiate between green-card holders, citizens and undocumented immigrants. The result in Chicago, they said, has been indiscriminate arrests that expose the administration to lawsuits and ridicule.
“CBP thinks it’s the sixth branch of the military,” said Scott Shuchart, a former ICE assistant director. “ICE thinks that it’s an elite federal police force. They’re just totally different mindsets.”
Bovino himself was recorded in late October throwing a tear-gas canister toward a crowd. DHS and Bovino initially said someone had thrown a rock at his head. But when questioned in court, U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis said Bovino “admitted that he lied.”
The Chicago-area blitz has already spawned a flurry of lawsuits, including one that led Ellis to order Bovino to wear a body camera and report to her at 6 p.m. daily — an embarrassing check on a veteran agent that was later overturned.
Bovino testified in court that his agency’s use of force in Chicago has been “exemplary.” Immigration officers are going after “bad people and bad things, and we’re going to arrest as many as we possibly can,” he told The Post. But another part of the mission, he said, is to send undocumented immigrants a message.
“Use the CBP home app, do it the right way and we can all get along,” he said, referring to Homeland Security’s initiative to encourage people to self-deport. “You know, in a giant happy family, hold hands, hug, kiss, all that good stuff.”
Shut-in lives
Every day, Vicky wakes up to chimes from her phone reporting the latest ICE or Border Patrol sightings. Sometimes, they are messages from panicked friends. Each one makes her shiver. Chest pains have landed her in the hospital twice.
“We feel like we are prisoners in our homes,” said Vicky, who used to spend weekends taking her mother around town. Now she only leaves home for work.
The rate of 911 calls made in Chicago has dropped significantly since the operation began, the Chicago Tribune recently reported, especially in Little Village, which is home to Chicago’s largest Mexican American community. Local leaders said some people are now too afraid to call for help.
“I don’t know how to say it in English, but in Spanish it’s ‘impotencia,’” said Ere Rendón, of the Resurrection Project, a pro-immigrant community group. “They are crushing an entire people’s ability to see a future for themselves or their families.”
Ruben Torres Maldonado was picking up materials for a renovation project in mid-October when officers surrounded him. His 16-year-old daughter is fighting a rare and life-threatening cancer that requires intensive chemotherapy and radiation therapy to help shrink the tumors in her abdomen. She’d just been released from a long hospital stay when her father was detained.
His attorney, Kalman Resnick, said he does not know why the 40-year-old father was arrested. He said Torres Maldonado’s only run-ins with the law were for traffic violations such as driving without a license. DHS alleged Torres Maldonado tried to flee; his attorneys said an unmarked vehicle blocked him as he was backing out of a parking spot and that he inadvertently lifted his foot off the brake but did not hit anyone.
In 2003, Torres Maldonado entered the country illegally as an 18-year-old from Mexico. Earlier this year, ICE declared that immigrants who arrived in the U.S. illegally were no longer eligible for a bond hearing. Torres Maldonado filed a civil lawsuit, and a judge ruled his due process rights had been violated. By then, his story had been broadcast on local television and drawn outrage across the city.
“There are hundreds if not thousands of Rubens being detained in Chicago,” Resnick said. “My phone doesn’t stop ringing. … The community is being decimated by family members being dragged off by ICE.”
Many parents are struggling to explain the sharp policy shift in Chicago, a city that until now had welcomed them. Ale, who helps lead a small support network of parents who participate in public school events, said her three children grow anxious every time they hear helicopter rotors. Ale — who spoke on the condition that she be identified by a nickname because she is in the country illegally — said she recently was asked to console an eighth-grade girl who has had trouble concentrating in class since her father was detained.
“How do you tell a child that everything is going to be okay?” she said.
Immigrant families and grassroots organizations have bonded together to help find detained relatives, buy groceries and organize escorts for children whose parents can’t risk picking them up after school. Richy, an undocumented woman who staffs a hotline for immigrants in need, said fear has brought people together: “Despite everything, we are still working, we are still surviving.”
Still, the ripple effects are many. After Armenta was deported, Yolanda lost her job at a restaurant with a largely Latino clientele. Business had cratered as people grew afraid to leave their homes, she said. Now she is facing eviction. She said she does not have enough money to even go to the laundromat. She washes Gabriel’s clothes in the kitchen sink.
Gabriel, a U.S. citizen the couple adopted as an infant, has withdrawn and was refusing to go to school. Yolanda eventually threatened to pack up and take him to Mexico. He returned to class that day.
Yolanda’s plan had always been to return to Mexico, where she has built a house with wages earned over 30 years in Illinois. Part of her wonders whether she should heed Homeland Security’s call to “self-deport.” But her son’s life is in Chicago.
And, at least for now, she said, that means she doesn’t intend to leave.
Karen Tumulty, Kim Bellware and Mark Berman contributed to this report.
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