WAUKEGAN, Ill. — If you rolled past Bedrosian Park after the final bell rang at Waukegan High School on any given weekday this fall, you were likely to find Diego Rosales and his mop of unruly black hair, basketball in hand, permanently grinning and playing down to the level of local middle-schoolers. Until Oct. 6, when Rosales watched two dark SUVs come to an abrupt stop while he waited for the bus to school.
Rosales brought his eyeglasses to his nose just in time to see three White men in green fatigues, cloth masks and body armor emerging from the vehicles with pistols on their hips. They stared and then rushed toward him.
His first thought was to run home to his mother. She had warned him that even though he was a U.S. citizen, born in this city on the northern outskirts of Chicago 15 years ago, the streets were no longer safe for people who looked like him. Federal agents had arrived in the Chicago area and were arresting people first and asking questions later, she told him.
Surveillance footage from a nearby school captured Rosales in full sprint, curving around a building and through a parking lot, backpack in hand, the agents trailing by a stride. After a three-block race, they tackled the teenager to the pavement and shouted a question:
“Where were you born?”
Rosales didn’t return to Bedrosian Park in October, refusing to leave his home for fear of meeting immigration agents again. The Department of Homeland Security’s Operation Midway Blitz was still in full force. And while Secretary Kristi L. Noem recently said no U.S. citizens were detained in the crackdown, Rosales and numerous other Latinos in the Chicago area say their experiences show that is not true. Some, like Rosales, were stopped for no apparent reason than for officers to question their status in the United States.
How many U.S. citizens were stopped or arrested during Midway Blitz and other recent enforcement operations is not known. DHS did not respond to requests for comment on the incidents described in this story and has not provided any figures. The Washington Post identified several cases of U.S. citizens being targeted by immigration enforcement agents that are documented in video and witness accounts. Lawyers and community leaders said there are many others involving people too frightened to come forward.
Some of those targeted now wonder if there is still a place for them in the U.S.
“I’m disappointed about what America has come down to,” Rosales said. “I thought the president was supposed to protect us, but he only made things worse for Hispanics.”
The Supreme Court recently cleared a path for immigration officers to use skin color as a factor in determining whom to stop and ask about their legal status, stretching DHS powers far beyond that of traditional policing guardrails. Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote that if lawful residents were picked up in raids, their detention would only result in a temporary inconvenience. Officers would see that they were in the country legally and release them.
But in Chicago and elsewhere, Latino U.S. citizens and lawful residents describe being detained for hours, and in some cases, days. Others were not detained, but say they were assaulted because of the color of their skin.
Upon being tackled, Rosales stammered that he was a U.S. citizen, born in Waukegan. And then, just as abruptly as the agents entered his world, he said, they vanished.
A sudden detention
Before the chase, Rosales was skeptical of his mother’s warnings about the masked agents, he said. In school, he’d learned that U.S. democracy was constantly reinventing itself for the better. Then the videos came pouring into his social feeds depicting a Chicago he no longer recognized. The streets of Little Village, the epicenter of the city’s Hispanic cultural scene, a place he’d often visited with his family, were now filled with masked men in armor.
“I raised good kids who’ve never been chased by police,” said his mother, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she came to the U.S. from Mexico illegally as a child. “And my son was chased by police because he has brown skin.”
According to the 2023 American Community Survey, more than 20 percent of Chicago’s roughly 560,000 foreign-born residents are undocumented. DHS officials said Midway Blitz would target the hardened criminals among them — “the worst of the worst” — but available records indicate serious offenders make up a small portion of arrests in Chicago.
Citizens and legal residents soon began describing encounters with immigration officers, too. Brian Orozco, a Chicago civil rights attorney, said he is aware of more than a dozen cases of people detained during the crackdown whose stories have not been made public. Many come from mixed-status families and fear putting an undocumented relative at risk.
“No one is putting it past the federal government to retaliate right now,” Orozco said.
Dayanne Figueroa, who was born and raised in the U.S., had been driving to her job as a paralegal for a marketing company on the morning of Oct. 10 when she heard a chorus of car horns — warnings from locals that immigration agents were nearby. She honked at the vehicle blocking her path. Seeing her lane clear, she said she accelerated forward to steer clear of the action.
Video of the incident shows an unmarked SUV swerve to the right as Figueroa’s vehicle moves forward and then crashes into the driver’s side. A moment later, immigration agents exited the SUV with guns drawn. They pulled Figueroa out of the car by her shoulders and handcuffed her as she thrashed on the pavement.
Figueroa was placed in the third row of a red van between two trembling Hispanic men also in handcuffs. A supervisor, she said, made eye contact with her in the rearview mirror as she begged the masked agents to identify themselves and their agency. She said she told them she was a U.S. citizen.
“No one is going to help you,” she recalls the supervisor saying. “You’re all criminals.”
Then a young, brown-skinned agent behind a cloth mask seated in the second row turned to take photos of the detainees’ faces. He had spoken Spanish to her and the men. His nameplate was obscured, but she could see the last two letters, and deduced he had a Latino surname.
“I told him how big of a disgrace he was,” Figueroa told The Post. “That moment disgusted me on a level I can barely explain. As a Latina, to be kidnapped, threatened and brutalized by someone who shares my language, my skin, my heritage, felt like a betrayal in its purest form.”
A video of the incident went viral. In the aftermath, DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin accused Figueroa of using her vehicle to “block in agents, honking her horn,” and said she “struck an unmarked government vehicle.” She described the 31-year-old Figueroa as an “agitator” “arrested for assault on a federal agent” in comments to the Chicago Tribune.
A handful of people accused of using vehicles to closely follow or block agents been charged under a federal law that prohibits interfering or resisting officers going about their officials duties. But Figueroa said she was not following agents — she was headed to her day job as a paralegal.
Figueroa was held for four hours and released without charges. She had recently undergone kidney surgery, and said she was hospitalized after her detention. She sustained bruising and a urinary tract infection she believes was brought on by the conditions in which she was held.
She said that was just the beginning of her odyssey. DHS’s remarks, she said, sparked a wave of online misinformation and backlash. She does not believe she would have been written off as a violent agitator if she were a White woman, and she has wrestled with that.
“I love my country very much,” Figueroa said. “And I also love my roots and my culture and my community. And I have to protect both.”
“We can’t just sweep this under the rug like it never happened, like it doesn’t matter. Then it didn’t happen.”
‘A violation of trust’
Other citizens caught up in enforcement operations said they feel the same sense of alarm and betrayal, followed by profound anger.
Rafael Veraza, 25, said he pulled into Sam’s Club with his wife and baby on a weekend grocery run on Nov. 8 when he saw a commotion surrounding what looked to be unmarked vehicles full of immigration officers in Cicero, west of Chicago.
The family decided to leave the area without shopping, he said. On his way out, he believes a passing agent mistook him for one of the protesters who have followed immigration officials throughout Chicagoland in an effort to warn residents and document their operations.
Veraza’s wife happened to be filming the parking lot scene on her smartphone because they wanted to one day show their 1-year-old the turbulent times she was born in. She aimed her camera at a passing SUV and captured the moment when an officer filled the family’s vehicle with a mist of pepper spray.
Veraza and his wife poured water on their crying baby’s face and rushed to the hospital. A doctor called in a poison control specialist for an expert opinion because they’d never seen such a young person pepper sprayed, Veraza said. They advised bringing the child to a specialist for follow-up visits to gauge potential long term damage to the child’s lungs and eyes.
McLaughlin denied that federal agents pepper-sprayed anyone outside of Sam’s Club in a statement issued after the incident to the news media. She did not offer an explanation for what is shown in the video.
Veraza said the existence of the video has encouraged him to speak out. He is considering filing a lawsuit.
“I have a hate toward the government now,” said Veraza, a sales representative for a local clothing store who was born in the U.S. “I don’t know how I’m going to explain it to my daughter one day — that she got pepper-sprayed on our way to buy Pampers and milk.”
Local Latino leaders like Oak Park, Illinois, trustee Juan Muñoz say some U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents have shared private accounts of being detained or otherwise harmed by ICE.
Muñoz himself was outside the ICE facility in nearby Broadview, Illinois, on Oct. 3 when immigration agents stormed an area where protesters had been allowed to congregate. Video shows Border Patrol Commander-at-Large Gregory Bovino grabbing Muñoz by the shoulders and slinging him to the ground. Muñoz, born in the U.S., was detained and not charged, but the experience left a mark.
Inside the ICE facility, Muñoz said he met a man in his early 20s who said he was a U.S. citizen. The man had been seeking work among day laborers congregating outside a Home Depot when agents arrived and arrested him along with his undocumented father and several other men, Muñoz said. The man had a reddened, swollen jaw and lacerations on his face, neck, legs and arms from being thrown to the ground by agents.
In the weeks since, Muñoz said others have come forward to share their experiences. One woman, a 63-year-old Latina social worker born in the U.S., said she was arrested by immigration agents in October on her way home from work and held for 24 hours.
The woman did not want to file a lawsuit or talk to reporters. Telling Muñoz her story, he said, seemed to give her a measure of catharsis. Her most urgent question: Why did this happen to me?
“She kept coming back to this feeling that she’d always been a good community member,” Muñoz said, “and now to be treated this way felt like such a violation of that trust she had in the community.”
Muñoz and several others detained outside Broadview plan to take civil action alleging their rights were violated. Their lawyer, Antonio Romanucci, said he represents more than 10 citizens arrested by immigration officials during Operation Midway Blitz, including some who he believes were racially profiled.
DHS did not respond to a request for comment.
“By definition, when you’re allowed to racially profile, it will be abused,” said Romanucci, who represented the family of George Floyd in its suit against Minneapolis. “And now it’s going to be up to further court interpretation as to how far that abuse can go before it’s deemed unconstitutional.”
‘No place here for me’
The videos of protesters being violently arrested, Veraza’s family being pepper sprayed and Figueroa being torn from her car have served as nightmare fuel for Rosales. The boy whose older sister named him after Dora the Explorer’s cartoon companion said he’s been jolted awake in the early morning, breathing heavily, palms sweating.
He doesn’t dream of being chased by agents. He dreams of his undocumented mother being pulled out of her car at gunpoint.
More than eight weeks after his encounter with masked agents, he still avoids taking the bus to school, instead arranging rides with his girlfriend. His mother planned for him to see a therapist, but Rosales saw online that immigration agents were active in downtown Waukegan the day of the appointment and called it off.
Rosales once envisioned working in construction or home remodeling after high school, eventually making enough money to help his mother retire. Then the masked men gave chase, and he limped home, terrified for what might happen if his mom had been in their crosshairs instead of him.
Rosales’ mother hadn’t wanted to leave Mexico at 6 years old, but her own mother insisted on chasing the opportunities the U.S. provided. Now, Rosales’ mother doesn’t want to fight what happened to him in the courts or the press. She wants out.
“There’s no life here anymore,” she said.
Her U.S.-born son agreed: “I feel like there’s no place here for me either.”
The post The U.S. citizens getting caught in Trump’s immigration crackdown appeared first on Washington Post.
