At around 7:30 am on Halloween, Ava and Sam were taking their two kids to school when their upstairs neighbor rushed toward them on the street. “You shouldn’t be out right now,” she told them. ICE vans were just around the corner. Ava felt her body go numb. The day before, her coworker—another undocumented woman she cleaned houses with—told her about how she’d seen an ICE van parked behind her while she was taking her lunch break in her car. All the images Ava and Sam had been watching, the ones that popped up on their TikTok of ICE agents arresting people shopping at Home Depots and Walmarts, all the things they’d been hearing in bits and pieces from her husband’s coworkers, their caseworker, her children’s school teachers about what to do if ICE comes—it was finally here at their doorstep.
They accepted a ride from their neighbor. All day, Ava felt paranoid, like ICE was watching her. Who would take care of her young kids if she or her husband got taken? She told her boss, who ran a housekeeping business, that she felt like it was too risky to be cleaning properties; her boss agreed. At the end of the day, her boss dropped her off at home, taking side streets and alleys. Then Ava’s world grew lonelier than she’d ever known.
The ICE raids in Chicago that have terrorized immigrant neighborhoods like Ava and Sam’s have been both highly performative and extremely random. Six weeks earlier, on September 9, Greg Bovino, the G.I. Joe look-alike who previously served as ICE’s “commander-at-large,” arrived in town with a caravan of unmarked, black-tinted vans to patrol Chicago’s immigrant-heavy neighborhoods. Three days later, ICE agents shot and killed Silverio Villegas González, an undocumented father of two from Mexico who worked as a line cook, and who had no criminal record, after he tried to drive away from them. ICE officers began lurking on sidewalks, downtown, at grocery stores, at the Cook County courthouses, in parking lots, at intersections, in alleys, and in neighborhoods like Ava and Sam’s.
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By the end of September, allegedly following a “tip” about reported gang activity—later found to be a complaint about squatters—ICE agents swarmed a South Side apartment building in the middle of the night, rappelling down from a Black Hawk helicopter and patrolling the sidewalk outside with masks and rifles, arresting 37 people. They kicked down doors, leafed through bookshelves, and upturned mattresses. In November, they violently pulled a Colombian teacher from the day care center where she worked, while school was in session. It began to feel like they could take anyone, at any time. Sam started to catch glimpses of the arrests and deportations from coworkers and Facebook groups. The news trickled in through Ava’s phone, where she watched video after video on TikTok. The more she clicked, the more videos appeared.
Ava, whose name I’ve changed to protect her identity, crossed the border before Donald Trump would be sworn into office for a second time. Her husband, whom I’ll call Sam, had arrived in America in 2022; paying coyotes $12,000 he’d borrowed from family members to make the seven-day journey on foot. “It’s a very heavy, heavy decision to make the choice to abandon your children and your family,” Sam told me. “You don’t know if you’ll see your family again.” After the dangerous journey, he settled in Chicago, where he found a job in construction. He worked grueling nine-hour shifts, six days a week, bringing in roughly $600 a week. He sent as much money home to Ava as he could. When he was off work, exhausted and lonely, he’d call his wife and kids on video chats. Their daughter, a baby at the time, would throw a tantrum every time. He used to put her to bed every night; now, when her mother put her to bed, she’d reach up instinctively searching for her father’s beard. When she realized it wasn’t there, she’d cry. It took a month for her to learn how to sleep again. Their older son struggled more. One day, he came home from school sobbing. Ava asked what was wrong. He had seen his friend’s father pick him up from school on his motorbike, he told her—just like his father used to pick him up. “When will we see him again?” He asked over and over.
The family weighed their options: It was too risky for Ava to cross the border alone with such young kids, and they couldn’t afford to pay another coyote. But staying in Mexico felt equally dangerous. Drug cartels patrolled their town, recruiting kids as young as 13; police offered little protection. One day, Ava got a panicked call from her brother. His two children had been secuestro exprés, “express-kidnapped”—a common occurrence in their area of Mexico where gang members lure young kids with candy or sometimes threats, then hold them hostage until the parents pay for their release. Ava’s brother scrounged together $3,000—selling everything he owned, including his small home, to get his kids back.
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Ava and Sam wanted a better future for their children. They heard from friends that they could apply for Temporary Protected Status, a Department of Homeland Security program that offers emergency asylum to people from countries with ongoing armed conflict, environmental disasters, or extraordinary conditions. For many, it is often the first step to full asylum status. (The Trump administration has moved to revoke the status for 11 countries and does not consider Mexico to be a qualifying country.) Ava applied during the Biden presidency and, after about a year of waiting, was notified that she’d been granted an interview in the United States that would expire in 15 days. Frantically, she packed what she could in a large suitcase, gathered the kids on their first airplane ride, then took a taxi to El Paso, where she found herself, quite suddenly, before a phalanx of US Border Patrol officers.
Border Patrol agents took Ava’s DNA and biometrics and confiscated her passport. They did a body exam and made the family strip down to their innermost layers. But Ava still felt that the Border Patrol agents treated them warmly. “I didn’t think they were rude or cold or harsh,” she recalled. She’d heard the interview could take all day, but by noon she was free to walk out of the building and into Texas. She called Sam, who booked the family plane tickets to Chicago. He gave her instructions on what to do at the airport, where everything was in English—a language she’d yet to grasp. She navigated it in a maze of confusion, pulling out her boarding pass every so often so someone could point her in the right direction. After the plane dipped to the misty ground at Chicago’s Midway Airport, they cleared customs and found Sam waiting for them.
“I was so happy,” Ava told me. “After you don’t see your family for two years, it was thrilling.” Sam added, “ We hugged each other very, very tightly.”
Chicago was cold, and a little overwhelming. But it was beautiful. They took a drive by the lake. “It’s so big!” their daughter squealed. The kids had lots of questions: What temperature was the lake? Could they swim in it? When? Soon after she arrived, the family splurged on an Uber to Chicago’s sprawling downtown, where they stared at themselves in The Bean, a life-size lima-bean-shaped piece of public art that reflected the city skyline behind them. Their daughter had been diagnosed with a developmental condition, and they’d managed to find a clinic to assist with her special needs. They started taking English classes. Chicago’s harsh winter turned to spring, which yielded a beautiful summer. Every day was memorable. “We still felt comfortable enough to go out, go for walks, go to the store, get groceries,” Ava told me when we met at her place last December. And then, nearly a year into her new life in America, the ICE raids began. “Right now, frankly, we’re just really scared.”
The family lives in one of Chicago’s many Spanish-speaking neighborhoods, which have historically been friendly to immigrants. The neighborhood, once lively, was barren. When I arrived at Ava’s front steps last December, the doorbell went unanswered even though we’d set an appointment. Outside the house, every shade was drawn—as if nobody lived there at all. After confirming through her caseworker that it was safe to let me in, Ava opened the door. She wore a soft pink sweater with a bow in her hair and smiled warmly, offering instant coffee and biscuits as we sat at her dining table. The bedrooms in their apartment were separated by a sheet hanging from the ceiling. It was a week before Christmas, and they’d draped a stream of tinsel over the windows. Sam, who appeared briefly to shake my hand on his way to work, had taken to biking there as fast as he could, even in below-zero temperatures with a freezing windchill, because it minimized the amount of time he would be visible outside. The rest of the time, they hide inside. “I just feel a sense of despair,” Ava told me, fighting back tears. “And stir-crazy.”
It’s easy in today’s world to feel watched. Digital footprints are vast: Every email, text, or social media account can be tracked and monitored by someone. Cameras at intersections record license plates. CCTV footage inside grocery stores and shops catches faces. The digital technology ICE has at its disposal—under the $85 billion budget Trump allocated to the agency with his “One Big Beautiful Bill”—is even more vast. ICE has nearly tripled its spending on digital surveillance technology since 2015. The agency uses license-plate-reader apps that pull up a driver’s entire bio and face-recognition technology that the agency says can identify a person from a few feet away. Last year, a $2 million Department of Homeland Security contract with an Israeli spyware company called Paragon Solutions granted ICE access to Graphite, software that can gain unauthorized access to mobile phones. “ICE is really in this moment where it’s pooling as much data together as it can to create a broad surveillance network,” Will Owen, who works for the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, told me. “And it’s increasing exponentially, because they have the resources to invest in broader surveillance.” Among the most high-profile of these technologies is Palantir’s ELITE system, which creates a visual map of so-called “targets”—suspected undocumented immigrants whose data is mined from places like the Department of Health and Human Services, US Citizenship and Immigration Services, license-plate-reader logs, arrest records, jail bookings, financial records, and even social media.
Yet for all the Orwellian levels of surveillance ICE has at its disposal, the apparent randomness of many immigration raids suggests an agency unready to harness its own godlike technologies. ICE officers have stormed farms, construction sites, apartments, offices, grocery stores, cafés, and intersections, searching for undocumented workers in crude, sweeping dragnets. They have stopped people on the streets—many of whom are American citizens—based on the color of their skin. They have mistaken mothers for gang leaders and a Hmong refugee for a sex offender. They have accidentally detained US citizens at gunpoint. They’ve forced so many families like Sam and Ava to hide. “Now we’re inside all the time,” Sam told me. They were scared to take their trash out. “You don’t know if you’ll see them along the way or encounter them on a walk. You don’t know if you’ll be able to come back.”
Ava hadn’t heard that the government could monitor her phone. She spends most of her day looking at it, inside her small apartment, talking to her mother back home in Mexico and watching videos of more ICE arrests on TikTok while Sam is at work. In the months since Halloween, she’s lost her income, and her freedom. When absolutely necessary, she goes to the grocery store. Sometimes, volunteers drop groceries off for the family—anything that can minimize the risks of being seen outside. “I was just trying to do honest work, and it just feels really scary,” she told me. Living in constant fear had started to take a physical toll. One morning, a few weeks into news about the raids, Ava woke up and found that her right arm was numb. Then she and Sam noticed that when she blinked, only her left eye would move. For weeks, the right side of her body was half-paralyzed. Sam was panicked to see her like this. But on the surface he stayed calm. In life he saw challenges as hidden blessings. “My method is always to try to stay as calm as possible and reassure her, like, you’ll get better,” Sam said. A month and a half later, slowly, Ava regained movement on her right side.
Ever since ICE first appeared in Chicago last fall, the mood had grown tense and paranoid. But the resistance was strong too. Signs had appeared in windows as if in a political election: HANDS OFF CHICAGO. Restaurants in Hispanic neighborhoods began locking their doors during business hours, and some posted signs banning anyone wearing a balaclava or mask from entering. Chicagoans took to wearing whistles around their necks to be able to alert the public if an ICE officer was seen. Residents honked horns and pulled out their phones if an ICE van was spotted. Protesters appeared all over the city and outside the ICE facility in Broadview, a suburb away. ICE agents responded with a force seen in authoritarian countries: tear gas and body-slamming people to the ground. One woman, a US citizen named Marimar Martinez, was shot five times by a Border Patrol agent for driving “aggressively” while protesting. (“Five shots, seven holes. I take pride in my shooting skills,” the agent allegedly texted his colleagues after news of the shooting broke.) Ava and Sam kept hearing about all of this from their apartment, in trickles, through social media. Sometimes, Ava felt responsible. One day, at the end of January, she woke up to the news on TikTok that agents had shot a man—an American man—in Minneapolis. “I’m seeing they killed another man, and I feel terrible,” she told me.
After Ava stopped working, the family started worrying about money. Sam reduced his lunch hour to 30 minutes, which brought in a little extra cash each week. But their daughter’s special-needs appointments cost money, and so did rent, groceries, and laundry. Ava realized she’d need to try to work again. “I’m afraid,” Ava said. “But we have necessities.” She created handwritten résumés with her name and number and her experience and began dropping them off at Spanish-speaking stores nearby: at the local laundromat, a bakery, a taqueria. She explained on the forms that she didn’t speak English but that she was a fast learner. “I know it’s a risk,” she told me. “I feel unsure if I’m safe, but we have to go out.” The alternative felt riskier.
One day, in January, Sam was at work when a sharp piece of plastic flew from a machine and lodged in his eye. When he came home that night, his eye was swollen, and he had a lump on his eyeball. A white dot obstructed his vision. Ava urged him to go to the hospital, but he refused; he was too scared. What if ICE was lurking at the parking lot or in the lobby? If he got deported, what would the family do? For two days, he didn’t go to work. He lay in bed, hoping it would heal. But the pain in his eye was excruciating and had started to extend deep into his skull. They began to fear he might lose his sight. Finally, he relented and sought medical care while Ava waited nervously at home, next to her phone, anxiously anticipating an update. A few hours later, to her immense relief, Sam returned home with medicine. Their joy was immediately supplanted with a fear over how they would pay the hospital bill, which she’d heard could be wildly expensive, especially without insurance.
By the end of January, the stress of the situation was starting to feel untenable. They talked about returning to Mexico, but that felt more dangerous for their kids. Ava had frequent headaches, and felt nervous and lonely constantly. In Mexico, she was used to living with her mother—this was the first time in her life she’d ever been alone for so long. She and Sam took virtual training courses at a local nonprofit on what to do if one of them was arrested by ICE: Never let anybody in unless they have a warrant signed by a judge. Ask the agents to leave the warrant in the mailbox or put it up against the window. Never open the door. If you are detained in public, remain silent and request an attorney. Together, they came up with a contingency plan. They filled out emergency paperwork with their families’ contact information back home in Mexico.
Since September, when the raids began, they’d stopped doing anything outside as a family. If one of their kids had a performance or presentation at school that was open to parents, one of them always stayed behind. Their daughter was still too young to grasp what was going on, but they saw how the stress was overwhelming their son. He’d grown withdrawn and took, increasingly, to his phone. He struggled to understand the English in his classes. He started having nightmares. One evening, in the middle of the night, they awoke to the sound of their son screaming, as he ran into the kitchen and hid in a corner. “Get down! Get down! They’re gonna see us!” he yelled. Confused, they realized he had been sleep-walking.
As signs of spring began to poke through a brutally cold winter, Ava and Sam watched as the world’s attention turned to other things: the strange kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro, the killing of the Mexican drug lord “El Mencho,” and now, a new war in Iran. ICE, at least ostensibly, had moved onto other cities. But Ava and Sam were cautioned not to become cavalier. ICE was still lurking. So they stayed cautious, and cautiously optimistic. Their kids were starting to adjust better to life in America—bringing homework and artwork from school, talking about their dreams for the future. “When we’re home, honestly, it’s all joy,” Ava told me. “We play with the kids; we spend a lot of time together.”
Every morning, they awake as a family around 7 am. Ava makes the kids toast and Choco Milk, and instant coffee for herself and Sam. She does her daughter’s hair and gets her dressed for the day. Then Sam walks their son to school. When he returns, they have a couple of hours together before he has to leave for work. In those brief hours, everything about their life is normal and calm, mundane even, as if there was no border between the walls of their house and the ever-watchful eye of the world outside.
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