On a humid September night in Chicago, Cameo Polk was asleep in his fifth-floor apartment when he heard the thump thump thump of a helicopter overhead.
Outside, hundreds of men with masks and rifles were scurrying around the building. He briefly wondered if an invasion was underway.
But they were U.S. law enforcement agents, rappelling from a Black Hawk helicopter and swarming the 130-unit building he lives in. Once inside, they kicked down doors, emptied bookshelves and overturned mattresses.
By dawn, at least 37 of Mr. Polk’s neighbors, nearly all Venezuelan nationals, would be in the custody of the U.S. government, part of President Trump’s plan to crack down on illegal immigration.
Trailed by drones and a camera crew, federal agents with their guns drawn carried out one of the most aggressive immigration operations in recent memory. The raid has become a defining image of the Trump administration’s surge of federal agents into Chicago, where masked immigration officers for weeks have been chasing down people suspected of being in the country illegally.
And while those arrests have drawn fierce protests, the apartment building raid, which took place on Sept. 30, raised even more concerns. In their effort to capture Venezuelans, agents led by the U.S. Border Patrol pulled dozens of American citizens from their apartments in the middle of the night, pointing their guns at sleepy men and women before zip-tying them and taking them outside.
The operation also highlighted the extent to which immigration enforcement and crime-fighting have become intertwined as bevies of officers from various federal agencies have been sent into American cities. The building, targeted by Border Patrol because undocumented immigrants lived there, has long been a hotbed of drug use and violence, residents said.
The raid focused on a mud-colored brick building that rises five stories tall and sits across from an elementary school in the predominantly Black neighborhood of South Shore along Lake Michigan. Residents said the living conditions had been poor for some time, and had worsened in the last year, as more people squatted in empty apartments and the management company, the landlord and the city government remained unresponsive to their pleas to fix the place up.
There have been nearly 500 calls to emergency services regarding the building so far this year, records show, and the city and a bank had been pressuring the landlord to make improvements. Some residents said after the raid that they hoped it might give the building a new start.
But what unfolded that night was an ordeal spanning several hours that left residents, Venezuelans and Americans alike, terror-stricken and humiliated. They bolted out of their beds at the sound of heavy footsteps in the darkened hallways, splintering doors, flash-bang grenades and barked commands. Restrained at the wrists, interrogated and separated by race and ethnicity, residents were forced onto buses while armed federal agents checked their names and records, determining whether they were living in the country legally or not.
Mr. Polk and his brother, Nate Howard, were not immigrants. But they were forced from their apartment anyway, and his brother was arrested after a federal agent found that he had missed a court date related to a years-old drug charge.
“I don’t understand how they decided who they can do that to,” Mr. Polk said. “They didn’t treat people like they were American.”
The Building
On this, the residents of 7500 S. South Shore Drive could agree: The building was full of danger.
The conditions inside were squalid, with mold, broken pipes and the persistent reek of urine in the darkened stairwells.
“Drugs, gangs, prostitution,” said Twana Pickens, 44, who had lived in the building for three years until she moved out this summer. “Anything illegal? Name it. It happened there. It’s just a very unsafe environment for people who just want to come home, go to work and try to raise their families there.”
Former residents said elevators were routinely broken, the mail was not delivered and trash was regularly left in the hallways. One person said she was once followed by a man with his penis in his hand, asking for sex.
Steven Jordan, 34, said he had long lived within a few blocks of the apartment building, and knew it as a place where people bought drugs and went to get warm in the winter.
“A lot of people go up in there because there are empty apartments and no locks on a lot of the doors,” he said.
Residents said that the Americans and the Venezuelans in the building generally left each other alone, but that the immigrants sometimes had conflicts among themselves and upset other tenants.
“Some of them were bad boys, I must say,” said Eleanor McMullen, 64, who lives on the third floor. “Sometimes they would break doors and bust the lights out. Foolish stuff, cause they were young.”
But she was friends with some of the immigrants, who greeted her when they passed in the hallway. She gave a tricycle that belonged to one of her grandchildren to one man’s little girl.
“We talked every day,” she said. “He would knock on my door and be like, ‘Oh, I’m home.’”
In recent months, the violence in the building escalated. A Venezuelan man, Gregori Arias, 31, was fatally shot in an apartment in the building in June in what federal officials described as a “brutal, execution-style murder.”
On Sept. 8, officers with the Chicago Police Department arrested another Venezuelan, Jose Coronado-Meza, 25, in connection to the murder.
At the time of the raid, the owner, Trinity Flood, a Wisconsin woman who purchased the apartment building in 2020 for $11.3 million, had been under legal pressure to improve conditions.
Ms. Flood did not return calls and emails seeking comment. Corey Oliver, the owner of Strength in Management, the property management company that handled the property, also did not return requests for comment.
Wells Fargo had sued Ms. Flood in April, seeking to foreclose on three Chicago apartment buildings that she had purchased in 2020 for about $18 million, including the one on South Shore Drive.
Chicago officials met with property managers in June and instructed them to install burglar bars on vacant units and to work with police to remove squatters. A lawyer for the city wrote in August of flooding in the laundry room, urine in the stairwell and “armed occupants,” with criminal activity and shootings taking place.
Ms. Flood’s lawyers told the court on Sept. 26 that the owner had spent $2 million on repairs, maintenance, security and evictions since 2020. They said that managers had “invested hundreds of hours working with law enforcement” to stop squatters and criminals from entering the building.
In response to the continuing complaints, the judge set a hearing on an emergency motion for the appointment of a receiver, giving the parties a court date of Oct. 1.
About 24 hours before the hearing, federal agents raided the building.
The Raid
The operation began with a confidential tip, officials said.
Officials have not said who tipped them off, but records show that agents carried out the raid with the consent of the owner, and that they targeted apartments that they were told were not currently being rented and were presumably occupied by squatters.
Several residents said that agents had left some apartments alone while bursting into others. Miyah Hill, 22, said some residents who peeked into the hallway during the raid were ordered to go back inside. One man who asked not to be identified because he was still living in the building, said he had found a floor plan of the building in the aftermath of the raid with some apartments shaded in green, others in white and some in red.
Brian McGraw, 64, who lives on the first floor and was not targeted by the agents, said that he later found orange tape on his door with the words “NO GO” written on it; two other doors on the first floor had similar tape, he said.
“They must have had some advance intelligence or information, where somehow they knew I wasn’t one of the ones they were looking for,” he said.
Border Patrol officials, who were accompanied on the raid by officers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and other agencies, said that among those arrested were people they believed to be members of the Venezuelan criminal gang Tren de Aragua.
“The intelligence was showing that they would move about inside the apartment complex freely and known to carry weapons inside the apartment complex,” David Kim, an assistant chief patrol agent at Border Patrol, said in an interview.
Another Border Patrol official, who did not agree to be named because he works undercover, said that gang members were squatting in units and extorting people in the complex, and that the building owner had not been able to get them out.
Just after 1 a.m. on the night of the raid, Mr. McGraw, the first-floor resident, peered out of his apartment’s first-floor windows and saw federal officers approach and cut through the back door with a power saw.
As the federal agents roamed through the hallway, Mr. McGraw heard one of them say, “There’s a whole village on the second floor.”
On the fifth floor, Keisha Clark’s apartment door came crashing down as federal agents battered their way in and then tossed in a flash-bang grenade.
Ms. Clark, a 43-year-old American, said that federal agents had grabbed her, scratching her left arm, put her wrists in restraints and took her out of her apartment.
“Clearly you can see that we’re American,” she said, recalling her fury at her treatment. “Why are we in handcuffs?”
Brian Boyd, 56, a tenant and lifelong Chicagoan, woke up in a state of shock when he saw what felt like an army of agents swarming the building.
“They were just on straight-up chaos,” he said.
The agents forced everyone to line up. Keep your focus ahead, they told residents, as they marched them downstairs and outside into the night. They brought them through a fence into a school parking lot where dozens of people were collected, including Venezuelan children and their mothers, some of them only partly clothed because they had been pulled out of bed, witnesses said.
Eboni Watson, who lives next to the building, said she had seen a federal agent with a group of Venezuelans forcibly remove a baby from its mother’s arms.
Venezuelans were separated from Americans, and some residents were placed on buses for at least an hour, they said. Officers checked people’s names to see if they had any open warrants before letting them go.
Ms. McMullen, on the third floor, was briefly detained with several Venezuelans who she said had been squatting in the building.
After being questioned and remaining on a bus for hours, she was allowed to go back to her apartment.
“My bed was turned upside down,” she said. “My mattress and stuff flipped over. My paperwork and stuff just thrown out.
Mr. Kim, of the Border Patrol, said agents arrested anyone who was not legally in the country, whether or not the person was an original target of the raid.
“Well, guess what?” he said. “You’re coming with us.”
Aid groups, lawyers and journalists have all had difficulty identifying and locating many of the Venezuelans who were taken by immigration agents. Federal officials have not publicly identified most of them and have not said where they are, making it impossible to verify their claims about the immigrants’ criminal histories. Three people whom The New York Times was able to identify as being arrested in the raid had no known criminal histories.
Mr. Polk said his brother was let out of jail the day after the raid and returned home.
It was not long before state and local officials in Chicago protested the actions of the federal agents, saying they had acted with unnecessary aggression.
“This raid wasn’t about public safety,” Mayor Brandon Johnson said several days later. “It was certainly not about immigration. This was about a show of authoritarianism, a forceful display of tyranny.”
Days after the raid, a walk through the building showed the aftermath of the destruction, and efforts to clean it up. Debris was being cleared and lightbulbs replaced. In the front courtyard, workers trimmed branches from overgrown trees and removed broken windowpanes from a third-floor unit.
Roderick Johnson, 67, a longtime resident, said he was still suffering from the trauma of the raid, recalling federal agents breaking into his apartment with flash-bang grenades while he was trying to sleep.
Now he has a new fear: that the building will be sold, and that the new management will evict him. “The way it looks, they’re trying to close the building down.”
Susan C. Beachy and Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs reports on national stories across the United States with a focus on criminal justice. He is from upstate New York.
Julie Bosman is the Chicago bureau chief for The Times, writing and reporting stories from around the Midwest.
Hamed Aleaziz covers the Department of Homeland Security and immigration policy for The Times.
Jesus Jiménez is a Times reporter covering Southern California.
Brent McDonald is a Times senior video journalist based in Washington.
The post A Squalid Building, a Tip to the Feds, and Then ‘Straight-Up Chaos’ appeared first on New York Times.
