It was the quiet that most troubled Mara Lynne. Her street usually bustles and thrums, but when armed, masked agents grabbed a passing man and stuffed him into the back of an S.U.V., she was the lone witness.
“There was nobody around, just me,” she said. “It was silent. That’s the part that freaks me out the most.”
Witnessing what she called an “abduction” unnerved Ms. Lynne. It’s one thing to know that such things are happening; it’s another to see it unfold before your eyes, right outside your house. Quietly.
The arrest was part of Operation Midway Blitz, the huge federal immigration surge that swept through Chicago this past fall. It was a season of madness. Helicopters chewed the skies. Federal agents sped through the streets and launched tear gas, pepper balls and rubber bullets. At least two people were shot by immigration agents; one of them was killed. Thousands of people were rounded up, even when officials had no warrants, leading to a tangle of court cases. U.S. citizens, legal residents and even City Council staff members were detained. The Trump administration claims to target violent criminals, but as of December, only 3 percent of Chicago’s detainees had wound up having convictions for violent crimes.
These past months have seen Mr. Trump’s grandiose plans for mass deportation bogging down in litigation and scandal. The masking of agents, their propensity to prey on people at courthouses, the targeting of student protesters, the use of identifying information plundered from government databases — none of that has sat well with the public or the courts.
The intense, often physical animosity between immigration agents and ordinary people in Minneapolis last winter, with agents fatally shooting two American citizens whom officials quickly smeared as domestic terrorists, helped lead to the dismissal of the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, and a freeze in funding for the department.
But before Minneapolis, there was Chicago. It was here, in a city that has long thrived on immigration, that a federal agent first shot a U.S. citizen who was protesting, with the Department of Homeland Security calling her a “domestic terrorist” and officials later dropping charges against her. It was here that Immigration and Customs Enforcement unveiled some of the harsh, militarized tactics they later transferred to Minneapolis. I visited Chicago to find out what kind of mark ICE had left on Ms. Lynne’s community, Rogers Park.
The reactions I heard were unambiguous: Residents recoiled at federal agents swarming their neighborhood and hauling people off the street. If agents had been running down hardened criminals, that might have been different. But landscapers, cooks, churchgoers, kids, people washing their clothes at the laundromat? People couldn’t accept that.
The raids felt more like military occupation than law enforcement, and they triggered the same, distinctly American revulsion against overwhelming federal power and militarized abuse that threads through the Constitution. Many people here told me that the agents supposedly sent to vanquish criminal usurpers were themselves the criminal usurpers.
Ms. Lynne was one of the residents whose political ideas sharpened as she watched the mayhem. A former model and an impassioned advocate for disability rights, she hadn’t given immigration much attention, she told me, before Mr. Trump announced his mass deportation. “Never,” she said. “I had no clue. I knew nothing.” But the arrival of the agents, menacing and masked, brought Mr. Trump’s crackdowns crashing into daily life, making residents witnesses to a national project that seemed designed to prey on vulnerable people.
“I think it just opened people’s eyes to what’s been happening,” she said. “We just never saw it in real life. Then we had to learn. It’s in your face.”
Ms. Lynne attended training sessions where leaders of a local community watch organization taught people how to legally respond to immigration agents. She started carrying a whistle. She knew what to do.
And then she spotted the agents through her window. “I was like, ‘Oh,’” she said. “Like I was in a movie. It wasn’t real, but it was real.”
A Latino, perhaps in his early 40s, had come walking down the street, dressed casually in dark jeans and a jacket. He struck Ms. Lynne as wholly unremarkable.
Suddenly two masked men in brown uniforms, bulked up with gear, approached the man. Ms. Lynne picked up her phone and whistle and rushed out.
“Leave him alone!” she shouted at the masked agents. “He lives here!” The agents called her “ma’am” and told her not to worry about it. They pulled the man’s wrists together and cuffed them in the front.
“He was looking at me like he was a 2-year-old,” Ms. Lynne said of the man taken into custody. “It was terrible.”
His name was Emilio Bahena. He is from Mexico. He worked two jobs to support his children, both of whom are U.S. citizens. After his arrest, his daughter started a fund-raising campaign, explaining that the family was struggling to cover housing costs.
The government never accused Mr. Bahena of any crime except slipping over the border into the United States, where he built a new life. Nevertheless, he was locked up for two months until his family managed to get a lawyer, who in January got him released on bond while his deportation case makes its way through court.
When agents were forcing Mr. Bahena into the back of an S.U.V., Ms. Lynne peered after him and saw other men inside. One, she said, had blood on his face. As the agents prepared to drive off, she asked for a name or a badge number.
“Have a good day,” one of the agents replied in a singsong, she said.
“Like he was getting off on it,” Ms. Lynne told me.
Later that day, Ms. Lynne sat for hours, arms wrapped around her knees, mind racing. “My neighbor just got kidnapped,” she thought. Even like-minded friends, who listened sympathetically, she said, couldn’t grasp the severity of what she’d witnessed. She believes it’s the worst thing she’s ever seen.
I asked her: What was the feeling?
She didn’t hesitate. “I was enraged,” she said.
By the time federal agents surged into Rogers Park, Mr. Trump’s deportation campaign was already hampered by severe public backlash and weakened by the mission’s fundamental incoherence.
The president framed the ICE campaign as, simultaneously, a targeted exercise to track down violent criminals and a “mass deportation” that would empty the country of undocumented immigrants. The pairing of these goals never made sense; there weren’t nearly enough dangerous immigrants to result in anything resembling an en masse purge. On the contrary, immigrants (no matter their legal status) commit violent crimes at a lower rate than native-born U.S. citizens.
Pushed by their bosses to arrest as many people as fast as they could, and emboldened by the courts to use race as a “relevant factor” in arrests, Department of Homeland Security agents ended up sweeping buildings where immigrants were rumored to live, and grabbing random people who happened to cross paths with agents. Immigration experts warned that the rush to meet quotas interfered with the more careful, time-consuming work of nabbing criminals. Undeterred, the department went big and sloppy, snatching up legal residents and U.S. citizens in a deportation frenzy that has, since October, resulted in more than 4,400 judicial rulings against the agency.
At the same time, residents of targeted communities were alienated, enraged and increasingly eager to interfere. The broader public was also disgusted: By March, half the country, according to one poll, wanted to see ICE not just reformed but abolished. Many said the lawlessness and highhanded disregard for human rights ran all the way down to the roots of the agency, which was created in the swirl of nationalistic panic, expanded surveillance and diminished civil liberties that followed the attacks of Sept. 11.
Rogers Park, a dense, eclectic, comfortably scruffy area in the city’s far north, was never likely to embrace Mr. Trump’s anti-immigration push. With its cheerful jumble of mom-and-pop hair braiding salons, panaderias and hole-in-the-wall restaurants, the neighborhood has long been a magnet for migrants and refugees. It has been described as the neighborhood whose racial demographics most closely reflect Chicago overall, although its median annual household income of $63,293 is lower than the city average.
At least 47 people have been detained in the area since Operation Midway Blitz kicked off, according to community volunteers who have tracked and mapped the arrests. They included a school employee, people washing their clothes in a laundromat and parents whose children were left behind.
Kristin Jackson, a pastor who’s lived in Rogers Park for more than three decades, told me the immigration crackdown caused a disillusionment so profound that her understanding of the country had changed.
“I’m just realizing,” she told me, “this is not the Statue of Liberty land of the free that I thought it was.”
Ms. Jackson now feels obliged to venture out into the streets to help protect people from the excesses of the federal government rather than privately teach and pray in her congregation, many of whom were also upset by the raids.
One day, Ms. Jackson joined other local clergy members to pray outside the detention center in Broadview, near Chicago. Denial of spiritual counsel was one of many complaints about conditions inside the facility.
While she and other religious leaders prayed, the Department of Homeland Security sent armored vehicles thundering near the crowd.
“It’s so eroding,” Ms. Jackson said. “People’s lives have been turned upside down by something that just feels lawless.”
The raids started in Chicago on a Saturday in September, Torrence Gardner recalled, and “that’s the first time I would’ve said it felt like living in a military zone.” Helicopters hovered overhead during breakfast, he said, and by the time he headed out to go to the gym, he felt the area was being overrun.
“Helicopters, cars, chaos,” he recalled. “I just remember the helicopter sounds. The whole day changed on a dime.”
Mr. Gardner is one of the founding members of Protect Rogers Park, a volunteer group created during the first Trump administration in response to its prohibiting people from some Muslim countries from entering the United States. As ICE and the Border Patrol poured into the city last fall, the organization’s volunteer base swelled into the hundreds, attracting people who’d never been particularly political but felt compelled to help. School and bike patrols monitored the movements of federal agents. Community care teams tried to keep an eye out for immigrants who might need help during what felt like a lockdown.
The group has also been working to place markers on sites where people were taken into custody. The idea was partly inspired by Amsterdam’s Stolpersteine, small brass plates embedded in the sidewalks to mark the last known residences of people exterminated by the Nazis. The Chicago markers are flimsier and more ephemeral — bright ropes braided from scrap fabric and laminated orange construction paper printed with butterflies and a message in English and Spanish: “A neighbor was taken from this spot on ____.”
It’s a kind of groundswell from residents reluctant to let the streets swallow these events into obscurity. They wish to record that their neighbors have been disappeared. It’s a term I associate with other places — the Dirty War in Argentina, the civil war in Sri Lanka, the Assad regime in Syria, places where human beings vanished into the maw of a state — and never wished to apply to my own country. And yet it’s true: People are disappearing.
Their cars are found abandoned, they suddenly don’t show up at work, and nobody knows where they are at first and sometimes for a long time afterward. These people are not being executed, but they disappear, and many of them will never be back in their communities again.
Ki Lee knew the Hispanic whom immigration agents dragged from her car just outside his laundromat. A regular customer, she’d been waiting for her clothes and had stepped outside for a bite to eat. Mr. Lee watched helplessly while three men he calls “soldiers” jumped from an S.U.V. and surrounded her car, pulling his customer out and shoving her into their vehicle.
The agents returned an hour later, just as another customer, a Latino, was carrying his dried clothes out to his car. The man dashed back into the store. But the “soldiers,” Mr. Lee said, chased the man inside, handcuffed him and took him away.
“I was very shocked,” Mr. Lee told me soberly. “I couldn’t sleep for several days. They were regular customers. They were very good people.”
After that, he said, the laundry grew eerily quiet. The day I dropped in, he and a few family members were sipping tea and trading gossip. Many of the laundromat’s longtime customers had gone to ground. One day a customer panicked and became too frightened to walk home on the streets. Mr. Lee felt sorry for her. He drove her home in his car.
I heard more stories of damaged business and lingering anxiety when I dropped into a town hall with Mike Simmons, the state senator for Rogers Park and the surrounding area.
The son of an immigrant who escaped Ethiopia’s Red Terror by crossing several African countries on foot, Mr. Simmons talked briefly about SNAP benefits and Medicaid before turning to what he called “the elephant in the room”: ICE. He was optimistic about new state laws he’d helped pass in the last session, allowing Illinois residents to sue immigration agents for violating their constitutional rights and barring federal agents from arresting people within 1,000 feet of a courthouse.
Next Mr. Simmons said he’d push for a $50 million relief package to shore up local businesses hurt by decimated foot traffic and frightened workers ghosting their shifts. He also wants to incorporate community watch organizations like Protect Rogers Park into the government.
A resident with a dirty-blond bob asked him whether lawmakers in Springfield could create a fund for families whose breadwinners had been detained or people who couldn’t get to work. Mr. Simmons agreed: It was a good idea.
Then a middle-aged man with a crew cut stood up. He wore glasses, a fading polo shirt and thick, sensible shoes. Would he be the meeting’s contrarian, berating Mr. Simmons and extolling the virtues of immigration enforcement? But then the man said aloud the names of the people shot by immigration officers in Chicago — Silverio Villegas Gonzáles and Marimar Martinez.
“Obviously, there hasn’t been any accountability for those shootings,” he said coldly. Mr. Simmons, he continued, should join in efforts to push the state’s attorney to prosecute the agents who opened fire.
The man was a lawyer named Ben Meyer. Despite the complications of the Constitution’s supremacy clause, which sets federal law above state law and has hamstrung local officials in trying to curb ICE abuses, he told me, he believed there were mechanisms for the state to prosecute federal agents.
“It should not be the case,” he said plainly, “that we have immigration officers running around killing people.”
People in Rogers Park are still trying to make sense of their experience under Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown — and wondering whether another surge will come.
After immigration agents fatally shot the two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis, condemnation exploded across the country. Suddenly the Trump administration seemed eager to distance itself from the whole mess. Officials stopped emphasizing “mass deportations.” Even some of the politicians who had ardently favored deportation began complaining that the administration had lost public support because of poor strategy. Mr. Trump — ever poll-conscious, briefly auditioned a jarringly gentler tone toward immigrants in late January.
“We have a lot of heart for people,” he said. “They came in illegally, but they’re good people, and they’re working now on farms, and they’re working in luncheonettes and hotels and all. And we’re not looking at — we’re looking to get the criminals out right now.”
With the Iran war bedeviling Washington and midterm elections drawing ever closer, a scandal-ridden ICE seemed to retreat into the background. But will the agency stay there? Money alone suggests not. ICE (created in 2003 with a relatively modest budget of about $3.3 billion) received an extra $75 billion from Congress last year, part of Mr. Trump’s $190 billion allocation for the Department of Homeland Security. If U.S. immigration enforcement were an army, it would be the world’s third richest, outspent only by the militaries of the United States and China.
With all those contradictory signals swirling, residents of Rogers Park didn’t know what to expect. And then, right in their neighborhood, a terrible thing happened.
Sheridan Gorman, a freshman at Loyola University Chicago, was shot dead in Rogers Park. She’d been strolling along a lakeside pier with friends when a man who had been lurking nearby shot her in the back.
Police soon arrested a suspect: José Medina, a 25-year-old immigrant from Venezuela. Mr. Medina, who lived in Rogers Park, seems very much like the dangerous immigrants Mr. Trump is forever invoking. Mr. Medina has been charged with first-degree murder and illegally carrying a gun. He had highly contagious tuberculosis. He crossed the border into Texas in 2023 — during the Biden administration — and turned himself in to Department of Homeland Security agents, who detained him briefly and then released him. He then boarded a bus headed to Chicago, where he was soon arrested, accused of shoplifting from Macy’s. When he didn’t turn up for court, a judicial warrant was issued for his arrest.
Ms. Gorman’s tragic death was immediately sucked into the vortex of political debate. A few members of a pro-Trump group called Chicago Flips Red, which voiced support for ICE and denounced local officials for spending too much money on immigrants, trekked to Rogers Park to protest. A handful of local residents turned out in counterprotest, and the two groups shouted back and forth.
Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois, meanwhile, told reporters that her death illustrated “national failures.”
“Failure to have comprehensive immigration reform,” Mr. Pritzker said. “Failure of the president to follow his own edict to go after the worst of the worst.”
The eagerness with which people seized on a slain young woman to score points felt a little bit cheap.
And there is this point. Somehow, despite Mr. Medina’s shoplifting charge and judicial warrant, immigration agents upended life in Rogers Park, separated families and retreated, leaving untouched a man who, if the charges against him stand up in court, was among “the worst of the worst.”
After reading about Ms. Gorman’s death, I spoke with Ms. Jackson, the pastor. She sounded, most of all, exhausted.
“It’s heartbreaking that this shocking act of violence would happen in our neighborhood,” she said simply. “It’s a tragedy.”
But she was worried, too, about how Ms. Gorman’s killing would work its way into local politics. Like most people I met in Rogers Park, Ms. Jackson is worried that the federal agents will return.
“I feel just sick about it,” she said. “We know what the narrative is going to be. And it’s the wrong narrative.”
But there is no correct narrative to be spun from all of this. Ms. Gorman’s death, a terrible coda to the turmoil and heartbreak in Rogers Park, left a community counting the costs of whatever it was the federal government tried to do here.
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