By Andrew Carter, Caroline Kubzansky, Gregory Royal Pratt and Laura Rodríguez Presa
After 64 days, they celebrated.
They gathered at one of Chicago’s most beloved landmarks, in the middle of a city where they’d wrought so much fear and pain, and they celebrated. It was the second Monday in November and early in the morning, the season’s first snowfall still fresh, when they parked along Monroe Street and made their way toward Millennium Park, more than 150 strong.
Some carried weapons. Two of them led dogs on long leashes. Some wore the camouflaged fatigues of military battle and others dark green uniforms. They all displayed markings that made clear their status as agents with the U. S. Border Patrol, and they’d arrived to complete one final Chicago mission — for the moment — to pose for the camera. One last made-for-social-media moment.
At least 100 agents, including their leader, Cmdr. Gregory Bovino, would return to Chicago six weeks later to continue a mission that President Donald Trump said hadn’t “gone far enough.” They would bring their cameras again. They would post their tweets. And they would argue with residents as they patrolled city and suburban streets in the days leading up to Christmas.
“We’re here to do a legal, ethical, moral mission,” Bovino would tell the Tribune outside a Home Depot on a cold December morning as bystanders blew whistles to warn of his whereabouts. “We’re going to keep doing that.”
Bovino’s mere presence — accompanied by his previous threat to return again in the spring and detain even more people — would renew the sense of alarm in a metropolitan area that has been demonstrably changed by the 64-day federal incursion and evoke memories of the most surreal autumn in recent local history.
The tear-gassing of Chicago neighborhoods. The rousing of suburban mothers in bathrobes, drawn into streets to yell at agents and shame them. The attempted deployment of the Texas National Guard, on Trump’s command, only for a federal judge to order the troops to stand down almost immediately upon their arrival in Illinois.
The agents who pointed guns and other weapons at bystanders. The arrests of more than 4,500 people in a mission, the Department of Homeland Security said targeted “the worst of the worst.” The reality is that most of them were people with brown skin who were at the right place — their landscaping jobs, the hardware store, a Dunkin’ Donuts drive-thru — at the wrong time.
The Trump administration, though, has steadfastly defended its mission, even when the facts did not support its claims or federal judges outright refuted them. Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for public affairs at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, sent a statement to the Tribune for this story praising the operation and providing the names of seven convicted felons who were detained as part of Midway Blitz.
“This operation targeted the criminal illegal aliens who flocked to Chicago and Illinois because they knew Governor (JB) Pritzker and his sanctuary policies would protect them and allow them to roam free on American streets,” the statement said. “So far Operation Midway Blitz has resulted in the arrest of more than 4,500 illegal aliens. There is no way to say Operation Midway Blitz has not been a success with these results.”
Yet the government’s own data shows the agents failed to meet their stated goal: In what data the government has so far released, covering the first half of the blitz, a Tribune analysis found only about 1.5% of those detained for immigration-related reasons had been convicted of a violent felony or sex crime.
But the operation’s toll is still being understood, with impact that goes far beyond data points. The families who’ve been torn apart. The U.S.-born children who are now without fathers or mothers because their parents have been sent back to places they tried to escape. The people who built lives here, held down jobs, contributed to their communities but now are just gone.
Detained. Deported. Disappeared, in some cases.
What happened here for more than two months is unlike anything in recent American history: the federal government sending agents dressed for war into neighborhoods of the country’s third-largest city to arrest mostly people who look Latino and to ask questions later. To target people largely on the basis of their skin color, on the presumption that they may be in the country without documentation, or that they may have a criminal record, or an association with a gang.
Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, a former history teacher, said she had never seen anything like the autumn raids in her lifetime and she believes the operation will be judged harshly.
“Historians are not going to be kind to us in this moment,” she said. “We should all be ashamed of what our country is doing in our name.”
When the Border Patrol gathered at Millennium Park, it was two days after one of the agents executed a drive-by pepper-spraying of a young couple and their 1-year-old daughter in Little Village. Five days after they stormed a Spanish-immersion preschool in North Center and arrested a beloved teacher.
It was less than two weeks after a dizzying stretch that left Chicagoans stunned in late October:
On Oct. 23, agents tossed tear gas behind the discount mall in Little Village, the proud Latino neighborhood that, from the beginning of Trump’s immigration enforcement operation in Chicago, had remained a focal point.
On Oct. 24, agents lobbed more tear gas in Lakeview, a wealthy neighborhood that up until that moment had been relatively unaffected by the chaos.
Oct. 25, agents deployed even more tear gas, this time right before a children’s Halloween parade in Irving Park, where a resident raced out of his house, still in his Chicago Blackhawks pajamas, to confront feds who’d tackled a man in his front yard.
On Oct. 31, agents fired pepper balls in Albany Park, pointed weapons and assaulted residents in Evanston and grabbed workers in Edison Park, Hoffman Estates, Skokie and Niles.
For some of the agents, the Nov. 10 trip to Millennium Park represented a return. The park, after all, is where some of them detained a Guatemalan family with children aged 3 and 8 as they ate Popsicles on a Sunday afternoon. That incident, in which a crying 8-year-old girl clutched her doll as she was led away by federal officers, became an early flashpoint.
Now, roughly two months later, early in the morning, before the crowds of tourists could gather in the quiet, cold dawn of a Chicago fall turning into winter, the agents entered Millennium Park. They headed toward the shiny metallic sculpture officially known as Cloud Gate but more commonly known as The Bean, and surveillance footage from that morning revealed an odd if not ironic scene.
It was one that suggested an appreciation for the artwork. An admiration, perhaps. A joy, even, in visiting one of Chicago’s most visible landmarks, and of having it all to themselves. On the pavilion, some agents can be seen stopping to take in the splendor of the sculpture. Some passed phones to each other and posed for photos, these masked agents of chaos behaving like tourists.
Soon enough, they lined up in rows on the stairs. There were at least 166 of them, but the photo that was shared later, the one DHS used to sell a story of a job well done, is blurry upon zooming, making it difficult to tell exactly how many agents stood in front of The Bean for what looked like a celebratory class picture.
What’s clear is that some of the agents were family men, with wedding rings. And that some of them held weapons. And that some of them came with their tactical vests. And that at least 89 of them wore face coverings and that at least 65 others did not, leaving their faces to be blurred out with the smudge of a Photoshop brush before the image became public.
In the middle of the front row, the leader of Operation Midway Blitz stood without a mask, as usual, and without a blurred face. He was meant to be seen. His command of the mission drew ire from residents, local leaders and U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis, who characterized him as “not credible” and chided him for “outright lying” in testimony about his actions throughout the fall in Chicago.
While Bovino posed at The Bean, he wore the stony expression of a man trying to look his most intimidating. Days later, as expected, he posted the photo on social media.
“Since we’ve BEAN here,” Bovino wrote, “crime is down,” falsely claiming credit for a decrease in homicides, shootings and carjackings that had dipped well before the feds’ arrival. By the time Bovino shared the class picture, he had already left town and was on his way to North Carolina. His agents were gone, too.
What they left behind will be remembered in Chicago for a long time.
The Before
They knew something was coming but they did not know what, exactly. They could not know, because there was no modern precedent. No way to know how to balance the Trump administration’s typical bluster with the specter that it might actually follow through.
For years, Chicago and its home state, with their Democratic leadership, had been in the crosshairs. Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker had grown used to the attacks, but the president had always hit them with inflammatory rhetoric or insults, never tear gas or rubber bullets.
On social media and in off-the-cuff moments over the past decade, Trump displayed disdain for the city, railing against its challenges with crime and gun violence and using “sanctuary city” as a slur. He described Chicago as an all-caps “DISASTER” in 2013 and 2020. As a “WAR ZONE” in August 2024, months after he used his same social media platform to promote “the best hotel in Chicago” — the one bearing his name on a tower along the river.
Pritzker became governor in 2019, toward the end of Trump’s first term, and as the possibility of a second began to crystallize in 2024, he started to worry about Trump’s familiar threats to send troops into American cities.
Still, “I hadn’t fully absorbed the idea,” Pritzker said in a recent interview with the Tribune. “It was something I have feared, but there were things I feared during Trump’s first administration that didn’t come about.”
In time, the governor would come to think of Operation Midway Blitz in an extraordinary way:
“An invasion,” he said.
It’s not that immigration enforcement was new to Chicago. There’s long been a gray area between what the nation’s outdated immigration laws say and what has been allowed. Most Americans agree on a middle ground: Go after bad guys and let law-abiders stay. But Congress hasn’t been able to convert that sentiment into law, creating an unease for years in places like Chicago where ICE continued to operate, targeting undocumented immigrants with serious criminal records while trying to draw little attention to itself.
Then voters handed Trump the mantle of power again.
Pritzker and Johnson, who became mayor in 2023, both point to the same moment when, in hindsight, they began to understand what might be coming. The harbinger was Tom Homan, the former U.S. Border Patrol agent who had served as a high-ranking Immigration and Customs Enforcement official under President Barack Obama.
Homan’s role grew during Trump’s first presidency and, at the start of the second, Trump afforded him a new title, and one that hadn’t previously existed: White House border czar. During Homan’s visit to Chicago for a Republican fundraiser in December 2024, Pritzker took note of his rhetoric.
“Chicago’s in trouble because your mayor sucks and your governor sucks,” Homan said then, while indicating that Chicago would be among the Trump administration’s first targets for immigration enforcement.
It wasn’t long after Trump’s inauguration that ICE activity increased in the city. Pritzker followed the news of the more robust immigration enforcement efforts in Chicago and couldn’t help but notice a difference: that they appeared manufactured. That they looked like scenes from some kind of twisted reality show. He noted the camera crews and the social media influencers wearing ICE jackets and pumping out content.
“So you could tell,” Pritzker said. “This is going to be different.”
For months, apprehension built. State and city leaders traded intel and speculation, trying to predict the actions of an unpredictable and, as it relates to speaking in facts, often unreliable president. On social media, Trump first referenced his desire for troops to infiltrate Chicago in 2013. In 2017, not long after his first swearing-in, he warned that “if Chicago doesn’t fix the horrible ‘carnage’ … I will send in the Feds!”
Trump’s criticism of the city and its leadership long focused on crime. His broader emphasis on securing the southern border and facilitating the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, though, provided another way for him to target the city. In the weeks and months after the initial burst of ICE activity early this year, Pritzker began receiving word of plans that concerned him.
“I would call them informed rumors,” he said. “Over the years, you know, you have relationships in various agencies of bureaucrats, I guess you’d say, who just hear things and know things and people who care about Chicago and Illinois. And so we would get a call, a text, something.”
From 2,000 miles away, Johnson and Pritzker paid close attention to what was happening over the summer in Los Angeles, where immigration raids sparked outrage and fiery protests. Trump deployed the National Guard there in June, and Johnson began a dialogue with Karen Bass, the Los Angeles mayor. The conversations were part exercises in empathy and part a desire, as Johnson put it, to “prepare for what was to come.”
He figured it was only a matter of time. In early September, Trump on his Truth Social account wrote that “Chicago is about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.” In the same post he referenced the 1979 movie “Apocalypse Now,” declaring: “I love the smell of deportations in the morning.”
Soon, the federal government gave the mission a name: Operation Midway Blitz. At an ICE processing and detention facility in Broadview, protesters gathered in larger numbers and tension heightened. Across the city and into the suburbs, residents braced themselves.
On the first Sunday in September, ICE agents detained a man in the parking lot of a car dealership in Archer Heights. The man’s name was Leodegario Martínez Barradas. He became the first known person detained in Operation Midway Blitz and, a week after his arrest, he was already back in Mexico.
After his apprehension, Barradas’ niece, Olga Sangabriel, worried that she and her husband, both of whom are undocumented, might be next to be detained. They have three children who are U.S. citizens.
“We are scared because we think that (agents) will show up at our house at any moment,” she said, “and I have my children here. Or that they will grab us when we go drop them off at school or while we’re out walking.”
Her uncle, meanwhile, had no known criminal record. ICE provided no information that suggested Barradas had been a threat, or belonged among “the worst of the worst.”
At the time of his arrest, he’d been selling flowers on a street corner.
The During
For 64 days, the pace remained relentless.
In the darkest moments, one of America’s most diverse yet segregated cities united in outrage. The regular tear-gassing of neighborhoods, eight of them in all, brought everyday people into the streets in opposition. Days into the blitz, federal agents fatally shot Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, an undocumented immigrant and single father who agents say fled when they tried to arrest him.
Though the Department of Homeland Security claimed at the time of the shooting that Villegas-Gonzalez had endangered their agents’ lives, body-worn camera recordings from Franklin Park police captured an agent with bloody hands and knees describing his injuries as “nothing major.”
Less than a month into the blitz, an agent shot Marimar Martinez five times in Brighton Park and bragged about it afterward in text messages to colleagues.
Other moments, ones that fueled more mockery than fury, might’ve been comedic if they hadn’t underscored the cruel absurdity of it all: Bovino and his agents riding down the Chicago River in boats, as if reenacting Washington crossing the Delaware; agents in uniform marching down Michigan Avenue, toting weapons and bemusing tourists; the clumsy and viral attempt to apprehend a man who escaped on a bike downtown.
But there was one incident — the arrest of the family with small children in Millennium Park — that seemed to change everything for politicians and the public.
It was then, Pritzker said, when he understood that this was an “invasion.” It was then, Johnson said, when he understood “what it meant for us as a city,” that, indeed, Operation Midway Blitz “was everything that people were warning us about.”
There became no place to escape in or around Chicago. No suburb. No neighborhood. Little Village and Pilsen remained obvious targets, where some residents lived in hiding, but no street offered refuge.
Even in Lakeview, on some scaffolding high above the intersection of Belmont Avenue and Broadway, there remains a literal sign of the mission’s reach. It reads: “a man was kidnapped from right here, 10-24-2025,” and it references the moment agents apprehended someone off the street.
It happened just outside the Laugh Factory, the comedy club that draws national acts and offers a launching pad for locals. Nate Griffin, one of the club’s night managers, lives in an apartment on the same block. He was on his way to breakfast with his mother and sister when Border Patrol agents arrived at Belmont and Broadway to make an arrest.
While agents struggled to detain their target, “we stood there for a second, kind of in disbelief,” Griffin said. Moments later, after the arrest, Border Patrol officers returned to the intersection. A car door opened, and Griffin shut it on one of the agents’ legs.
For that he was wrestled to the ground, arrested, taken to the FBI’s Chicago headquarters and charged with assaulting, impeding or interfering with a federal officer. His moment of resistance put him at risk for an eight-year prison sentence.
And while Griffin appeared on an agent’s body-worn camera “mouthing off the entire time” about what he thought of Operation Midway Blitz during the ride to the FBI, he said weeks later that it had been a defense mechanism.
“I make jokes when I’m in tense situations,” he said. “I was just afraid.”
It took weeks for his charges to be dropped after a grand jury refused to indict him. Griffin became one of at least 10 American citizens whose cases have disintegrated in the wake of federal charges.
But, by that time, the damage had been done.
Griffin said his mom has relived his arrest over and over. He has learned to live with anxiety and the feeling of looking over his shoulder. He lives in the shadow of where federal agents executed what many locals consider a kidnapping and he doesn’t know what he’d do if he witnessed a similar scene again.
“It’s kind of hard because they do successfully scare you,” Griffin said.
Fear is something Chicagoans have learned to endure, and fight. For some it’s a much more arduous battle. Mario Hernandez Garcia is among those who suffers from nightmares. Sometimes he awakes in the night unable to breathe.
In his dreams, he’s being chased again. He’s being arrested. He’s being taken back to a room inside ICE’s Broadview facility. There are 80 people there, trying to sleep standing up, even in the bathroom, where the floor is covered in urine — just as it was in real life.
Hernandez, 33, arrived in Chicago in 2011 from the Mexican state of Michoacan. He aspired to find work and help his parents back home. Since 2023, he has had a pending U-visa — intended for crime victims who assist in investigations — made possible after he and his brother were carjacked in the Humboldt Park neighborhood.
When Trump became president again, Hernandez feared what it might mean for him and others like him. Then came Sept. 14. Hernandez said he was driving to get propane in Brighton Park when five vehicles of federal agents surrounded him.
They ordered him to roll down his window, he said, then broke the window when he didn’t roll it down far enough. After his arrest he passed out and needed hospitalization. A doctor diagnosed him as having a panic attack, Hernandez said, while the agent keeping watch over him accused him of faking it. Then he was taken to the Broadview processing center. His experience there mirrors those described in a federal lawsuit against DHS that accuses the government of maintaining dirty, unsafe conditions at the facility.
The lawsuit alleges that agents crammed more than 100 people into four small rooms and held them there for days. In the room Hernandez found himself, he initially did not understand why the floor was wet.
“Then I figured it out,” he said through a translator. “It was people urinating outside the stalls.”
On the fourth day of his detention, Hernandez refused to sign a form that would have led to his transfer to a detention facility in Michigan. On the fifth day, he said, he witnessed a fight between a detainee and four federal agents. Two hours later, he was released without explanation and on his way to 25th Avenue in Broadview.
Hernandez walked to a gas station and called his girlfriend. He was happy at first, he said, “because the nightmare was over.” The ones in his sleep had yet to begin.
He was, in a way, one of the lucky ones. He disappeared for only five days.
‘An extraordinary thing’
The first part of their journeys often ended in Broadview, at a charmless two-story brick building surrounded by railroad tracks and the hum of the Eisenhower Expressway. In the early days of Operation Midway Blitz protesters and agents routinely collided outside in a storm of expletives, pepper balls and tear gas.
If those detained and brought to Broadview could prove their American citizenship, their time in the system often ended. For many, though, Broadview was just the start. A place of holding before bus rides to the airport, or to prisons or immigration facilities all over the country.
People arrested by ICE or Border Patrol in Chicago wound up confined in Wisconsin or Indiana, Michigan and Kentucky. Some were imprisoned in Texas. Others in Missouri or Kansas or Louisiana. Some in Oklahoma. Some in Arizona. Some in New Mexico.
Their trips to those places may have passed through Broadview but they all began with a moment before. A traffic stop. A chase through a parking lot, on a stranger’s front lawn. An interrupted walk across the street on a sunny fall day, with agents rushing out of a vehicle to surround them. One minute free, the next on the ground, the one after in handcuffs.
Chicagoans tried to bear witness. They tried to fight back. The city’s reaction to federal immigration agents followed a long-established pattern of resistance born here during the workers’ rights movement of the 1880s and the Civil Rights Movement more than a half-century later. Despite the racial segregation that still defines many of its neighborhood borders, Chicago, as much as any American city, is a place that unites against forces its people find unjust.
And so a city came together. Its residents marched down streets and made noise at the sight of federal agents roaming neighborhoods. People came out of their houses to point cameras at attempted apprehensions or heated interactions between agents and citizens. In some moments, they locked arms to block the agents’ vehicles, forming a human chain. In many other instances, locals hustled through their blocks in Revere-esque fashion to give warning: ICE is coming.
These actions often came with a price. There were bruises from pepper balls and fits of sickness, of respiratory stress from the tear gas. But more than that there came to be the shattering of illusions and the loss of an inherent faith that what they witnessed could not happen in America. And that if it did, it certainly couldn’t happen on their street, or right outside their door.
The blitz was proof that these things could happen in those places. They did happen.
Kevin Boyle, a professor of American history at Northwestern University, said the federal incursion into Chicago was “quite an extraordinary thing” and “a political act meant to intimidate people.”
“I hope the country should, and I think historians will, judge this sort of action really harshly,” Boyle said.
“This is disturbing in two different ways. One is … it’s the federal government doing something that breaks the guardrails in a really dangerous way. Sending federal authority into a city that you have, yes, rhetorically, disparaged as a hellhole, but to send those federal authorities in against the expressed wishes of state and local authorities is a really big line to cross.
“It’s breaking guardrails that are important not to break. Then there’s the desire of the federal government to target places that vote for the other party to assert a police power that is meant to intimidate people.”
Witnesses to what agents wrought in Chicago provided declarations that are a part of a federal lawsuit against Kristi Noem, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, and others. In dozens of court statements, people provided testimony to their experience with federal agents.
In one of them, an Oak Park resident named Scott Blackburn recalled an encounter at a Broadview protest in which he claimed that Bovino and his agents tackled him to the ground. In another, Andrea Pedroza recounted watching TV at her home off of 105th Street on the East Side when she heard the noise of agents crashing into cars on her street. A crowd gathered. She watched those agents tear-gas protesters and recalled one with his finger on a trigger, aiming a weapon at a minor.
“I spent the whole rest of the day thinking about how I never thought something like this would happen in front of my house.”
On the morning of Oct. 25, a Saturday, James Hotchkiss was about to leave his house with his wife and his two children, both in costume. They were all headed to a neighborhood Halloween parade in Old Irving Park.
He said he went into his garage to “get a second spinny toy” for one of his kids and that’s when he heard commotion. As Hotchkiss walked down the street he watched two agents tackle a man in a neighbor’s front yard. The neighbor, Brian Kolp came outside, still wearing his Chicago Blackhawks pajamas.
According to Hotchkiss’ declaration, agents accosted a woman in her 60s and pushed another man to the ground, putting him in a headlock before letting both go. Moments later, Hotchkiss heard someone say, “Oh my God, they’re putting on their gas masks,” and soon a plume of tear gas filled the street.
Kolp, a former prosecutor with the Cook County state’s attorney’s office, picked up the tear gas canister and preserved it for evidence. In his declaration he said the agents “showed no respect for the rule of law.”
“As someone who supports law enforcement and has represented them as an attorney, I feel that the behavior of these agents is embarrassing and tragic,” he said in his signed statement.
In some moments there were no witnesses. Only the recordings of agents’ body cameras.
‘Not our problem’
One such recording captured a pursuit on a sunny early-October day on a quiet corner in Little Village. The footage shows agents roaming the city in a silver Chevy Silverado. There’s at least three of them, all in green Border Patrol uniforms, the driver wearing a backward hat with the logo of Sitka, a company that makes hunting gear.
The agent in the back twists open a bottle of water. The truck comes to a sudden stop.
The agents rush out and toward two people crossing the street: an older man in dark pants and a white shirt, and a much younger man, in his early 20s, in shorts and a light shirt. It is a father and his son.
Almost immediately, the camera captures the fear in their eyes. And almost immediately, the son steps in front of his father, shielding him. The agents approach and the son holds up his hand and pushes his father a little farther away.
“He has a disabled kid, honestly,” the son says.
“How about we start with you,” an agent says to the younger man. “Who are you?”
“I’m a United States citizen.”
“OK,” the agent says. “Can I talk to him, please?”
“No. … He has a disabled kid, honestly,” the son says again, pleading.
“That’s not our problem,” another agent says.
“You’re a father, right?” the son asks.
Behind him, his father has been grimacing. He looks scared but resigned.
He tells his son to relax, again and again. He seems to understand and to accept what is to come.
Moments later, agents push the son away and onto the ground. While he’s placed in handcuffs, the father is taken down, too. In the commotion they both cry out before they’re taken away. From start to finish, the entire encounter lasts a little more than three minutes.
Had it happened in another time, the scene might’ve commanded more attention. It might’ve conjured widespread heartbreak or outrage or become a flashpoint. As it was, though, it happened days after the militarized raid of a South Shore apartment building, in the days of endless raids, chases, gassings. It blended into all the rest.
In 2025, it was just another October morning in Chicago.
‘Less than human’
In the moments before he rode in a white van from a downtown Chicago immigration facility to the ICE building in Broadview, Jhoanni Pineda Mesa pleaded with officers to allow him to use the bathroom.
“Please,” he recalled asking after being placed in chains and put in a room with other detainees. “I have a medical condition and I really need to pee.”
The request was denied, he said, and Pineda Mesa was led into the van headed to Broadview. During the ride he could no longer hold his bladder and he wet himself. Thus began a disorienting, weekslong descent into a detention system that operates like a black hole, one that causes people to “disappear” within custody, according to human rights lawyers.
Pineda Mesa’s ordeal began with a regularly scheduled check-in at a downtown immigration facility on Oct. 29. The appointment was a routine part of his pursuit of asylum. He’d come from the Dominican Republic three years ago to reunite with family in Chicago, and though he wasn’t a full-fledged American citizen he had a work permit and a social security card.
During the blitz, though, check-ins like Pineda Mesa’s became easy targets for agents with a mission to detain people. He had attempted to comply with the law. He arrived for an annual check-in, just as required, and he expected to receive a date for his next one.
The refusal of a bathroom in the moments after agents apprehended him was only the start of a series of indignities. At the facility in Broadview, with Pineda Mesa’s pants now wet and soiled, agents again denied his request for a restroom, he said. He used a phone call to contact one of his sisters who tried to deliver medication, but he said the delivery never reached him.
For three nights, Pineda Mesa said, he remained in a large room with about 100 other detainees. There were no beds, he said. No food. No hygiene products. He described it as “humiliating.” He said several other detainees, like him, had been brought there after routine court appearances.
“People wouldn’t sleep because there were no beds,” he said. “Some would cry, others would pray.”
Agents presented Pineda Mesa with forms to sign to ensure his voluntary deportation. He refused.
“And they told me, ‘OK,’” he said. “‘Then you’re going to be here for a long time.’”
After his third night in Broadview, at 5 a.m., agents again placed him in chains. They escorted him and about 40 others to a bus. There was no indication where they were going, Pineda Mesa said, and he came to have one terrifying, recurring thought.
“I was afraid that they would disappear me and that I would never see my family again.”
“Tenía miedo de que me desaparecieran y nunca volver a ver a mi familia.”
For several hours he did not know where he was or where he was going. The bread and water agents handed out remained difficult to consume, with the restriction from the chains. At a stop at an unknown location, agents transferred Pineda Mesa and others to another bus.
They were all “hungry, sleepy, dirty and lost,” he said.
“We felt less than human.”
They spent several more hours on the second bus. His thoughts grew darker.
“I thought we were going to die or that something really bad was going to happen to us.”
The ride ended at another detention facility. Pineda Mesa believed it to be in Missouri, based on road signs. In a phone call that lasted seconds, he let his family know he was alive, in jail and didn’t really know where.
At the time of that phone call, Pineda Mesa’s family had been trying to locate him for days. The effort continued after the call. A sister who spoke with him said their family’s attempts to go through ICE turned up nothing. The DHS phone numbers they scrambled to find were dead ends.
“We were desperate and hopeless,” said his sister, who asked that her name not be used out of fear of retaliation. “We couldn’t believe that this government operated this way. We ran away from governments that disappear people, that have no accountability, and the same thing is happening here.”
Stories like Pineda Mesa’s have become common in Chicago and in other parts of the country where federal agents have targeted undocumented immigrants, according to families, advocates and immigration attorneys. Accounts of “disappearing” people — of those lost in a maze of transfers and unobtainable records — have been some of the most difficult to document during the blitz.
“There’s just several factors and policies working together that make it so that it is challenging to know where your loved ones are, and challenging to know the cause of the arrest,” said Jennifer Babaie, associate director of the National Immigrant Justice Center’s Adult Detention Project.
For attorneys who have spent years navigating ICE’s bureaucracy, the past year feels different. Rapid and unannounced transfers of those in custody, sometimes across multiple states within 48 hours, have become routine. Even attorneys of record are often never notified of a transfer, Babaie said, and that’s if those detained are somehow able to get an attorney.
“You can have a legal call scheduled, be preparing for an upcoming hearing, and then your client just vanishes,” she said. “They disappear from the detainee locator for a few days.”
Sometimes they don’t show up at all.
“There’s not a lot of reliability with the ICE detainee locator. So it’s not unheard of to have you put in an A number” — a record associated with immigrants used to locate them in federal custody — “and the person doesn’t show up, even though you know that they were arrested.”
Soon, Pineda Mesa was on the move again. Agents transferred him from Missouri to Texas.
Then from Texas to St. Louis. And finally to the Miami Correctional Facility in Crawford, Indiana.
He came to see it as a “strategy,” he said later, and more deliberate than dysfunctional.
“They move you,” he said, “so no one can find you.”
The After
On Nov. 17, a week after Bovino and his agents gathered for their team picture at The Bean, Jhoanni Pineda Mesa received news he craved. He did not expect to receive it and weeks later he could not explain why it happened. But it happened , nonetheless: He’d been granted his release from the Miami Correctional Facility in Crawford. After 19 days, he was free.
He was released, he said, without a phone call and without his belongings. He made his way to a nearby Mexican restaurant and used the phone there. He was hungry. He told a worker that his sisters could pay for a meal when they arrived to pick him up, and the worker began to prepare one.
“May God bless that woman,” he said of one of the restaurant employees, “because she gave me a taco and a Coke. I tried to eat slowly until my sisters arrived so they wouldn’t kick me out.”
Soon he was on his way back to Chicago. For many others, the blitz brought an end to their time in America. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security did not answer questions about how many of its 4,500 arrests in the Chicago area ended in deportations. Nationwide, more than 2.5 million undocumented workers left the country in 2025, including 1.9 million who departed voluntarily, according to the Trump administration.
Adriana Rivera, 44, was among those who’d decided to leave. She’d lived in Chicago for 14 years when she packed her life into one large suitcase and two carry-ons and said goodbye to a small circle of friends. There were tears and embraces. On Dec. 14, a bitterly cold Sunday, Rivera went on her way to reunite with her deported husband in Michoacán, Mexico.
Theirs had been a story, at one time, of hope and American aspiration. Rivera’s husband, Arturo Rodríguez Bellos, lived in the United States for 25 years and settled into Little Village. Rivera joined him there years later. Both undocumented, they initially wanted to earn money to pay for the education of their two sons and then, later, to build their children a home.
In recent years, health problems plagued Rivera and Rodríguez Bellos, 44. They hoped to remain in Chicago long enough to save more money for their family. But then came the start of the blitz, and Bovino’s performative visits to Little Village, where he often tangled with protesters, and perhaps where he most embraced his mission with a militaristic bravado made for the cameras.
Rodríguez Bellos understood the danger of the raids. Everyone in Little Village did. But he was not a criminal, he said during a recent phone call from Mexico, and so he thought it was worth the risk to remain in public and continue working as a street vendor. For years, he’d sold farm-fresh eggs from Wisconsin.
And then, just like that, he was detained when Bovino and his agents made one of their many sweeps of the neighborhood. Rodríguez Bellos could have fought to stay. He’d been here for more than two decades. He’d built a life.
“We didn’t know how long he would be detained or how much money we would need for an attorney,” Rivera said. “So we decided it was best for him to return to Mexico.”
Rivera spent most of the next two weeks in bed. For the first time since arriving in Chicago 14 years earlier, she was alone. She said she barely ate. She spent a lot of time crying, unable to move. She felt trapped. She had no savings. She feared that if she attempted to sell eggs, she’d suffer the same fate as her husband.
Two friends, who also happened to be two of her husband’s most loyal customers, wanted to help. Maria Hernandez and her husband, Javier Tlaxcala, both 75, had always bought their eggs from Rodríguez Bellos. They made Rivera an offer:
“We will help you sell the eggs.”
For weeks, Rivera weighed her future. She faced limited job prospects. All around her in Little Village were stories of upended lives and families torn apart. Leaving the country came with its own burdens. The cost, for one. The challenge of starting over in an unfamiliar place.
Hernandez tried to offer reassurance.
“We will find a way to help you,” she said, and others in the community offered assistance, too. When Rivera decided to leave Chicago and join her husband in Mexico, one woman donated money to cover Rivera’s remaining rent and part of her plane ticket. Others offered to buy eggs.
“They’re my angels,” Rivera said.
The day before Rivera left, Hernandez hosted a farewell party. Surrounded by hundreds of Wisconsin eggs that Hernandez and her husband promised to sell, Hernandez kissed Rivera goodbye. The women embraced.
“I’m going to miss you very much,” Hernandez said as she wrapped Rivera in a hug. “But we will stay in touch. Maybe one day you can come back.”
The next day, Rivera boarded a plane with a one-way ticket to Morelia, Michoacán. Her deported husband waited. While he spoke by phone from Mexico during a recent interview, Rodríguez Bellos walked through the plaza of the town where he grew up. He lacked money and good health but, he said, “I’m glad we are both safe.”
“And I’m grateful that we will be together again. The rest, we will figure out. Our life must go on.
“We have to find a way to keep living.”
Despite the ending, their time in Chicago was worth it, they said. They were able to send money home. They put one of their sons through college. Little Village, Rivera said, “will always be in my heart.”
“It took part of our lives, but it also gave us so much. We knew we couldn’t stay forever.”
They could never apply to adjust their undocumented status because they lacked a sponsor. They doubt whether they’ll be able to live in the United States again. They left their old lives behind, and a lot of eggs. Hernandez and her husband promised to sell them and send the money to Mexico.
‘A miracle story’
They arrived in the dim light of a freezing December Friday morning, temperatures in the low 20s just after sunrise, and gathered as close as they could to the ICE detention facility in Broadview. They secured an iPad to a tripod for those joining online and handed out prayer cards while an elderly woman in scarves and a heavy winter coat went around giving out rosary beads.
About two dozen people trickled in, some holding coffees in gloved hands while they walked over an ice-covered road to join the group. A couple of them carried American flags. One brought a large Mexican flag. Another came with a flag in honor of Our Lady of Guadalupe, as this particular Friday happened to coincide with her feast day.
For 19 years, Chicago-area priests and nuns have led prayer vigils every Friday morning outside of the ICE facility in Broadview. That’s when the buses would emerge from a gate next to the ICE building, carrying detainees on their way to be deported.
The gatherings were started by the late Sister Pat Murphy and Sister JoAnn Persch, who were longtime advocates for immigrant rights. They would pray the rosary just outside the entrance of the building. There was a time they were even allowed onto the departing buses, offering one final Hail Mary, one last sign of the cross, to detainees headed to O’Hare.
In mid-September, there came to be a “much, much different vibe” surrounding the vigils, said the Rev. Brendan Curran, a Catholic priest who has been a regular in Broadview since the Friday gatherings began almost 20 years ago. Four days after DHS announced the start of the blitz, Curran arrived like usual early on a Friday and noticed the windows of the ICE building had been boarded.
It was as if there’d been preparations “for a riot,” he said, and the scene reminded him of when he worked 20 years ago along the Gulf Coast in the days before Hurricane Katrina.
“You had to board up because a hurricane was coming, right?” he said. “So I’m like, ‘What’s the hurricane here?’ I know when you’re at a federal building, it’s about, ‘What’s the riot you expect?’”
He saw camouflaged and masked agents atop the building. They carried what Curran perceived to be guns, though they could have been pepper ball launchers. Either way, the agents aimed them at Curran and others while they met to pray. It was the last time for a while that the prayer group met so close to the building.
On that day, and on many that followed, tensions in Broadview simmered. Confrontations between agents and protesters sometimes became physical. The release of tear gas and pepper balls became routine. Residents who lived nearby could recount agents chasing people through their yards and the burning sensation of gas and pepper spray on their skin and in their eyes.
Some were afraid to let their children go outside. While Broadview became the epicenter of a lot of the ire that amassed throughout Chicago, the prayer group continued to meet on Friday mornings. They were forced to gather more than a block away, but on Dec. 12 they were as close as they’d been in three months. Curran considered it a small victory.
He considered it “a miracle story of the holidays,” too, that, all things considered, the city had kept its relative cool over the past several months. There had been no riots. No need for the boards on the windows at the ICE facility in Broadview. To Curran, the story of the blitz was as much about people coming together in opposition to it as any of the trauma it inflicted.
“Throw all of the policy stuff out the door for a minute,” he said. “In the midst of inciting violence by federal officials — which is, in my estimation, especially in a place like Chicago, a very dangerous, pouring-oil-onto-a-fire kind of thing — I was shocked at the discipline, the civic discipline.
“People kept their cool in a remarkable way.”
In the same breath, he said, “I don’t know how long that can last,” though he prayed it would.
The vigil that cold Friday morning in December began at 7:15 sharp, just like always. It was a reflection of the broader faith that spread throughout the past several months in Chicago. In the spring, the city united to celebrate one of its own, Robert Prevost, rising to become Pope Leo XIV, and the first American-born pope. In the fall, the city united in opposition of what many considered to be an invasion, and one unlike any in American history.
Pope Leo inserted himself into the movement from the Vatican, as he spoke out against the treatment of migrants in the United States and the Trump administration’s refusal to allow religious leaders to pastor to Broadview detainees.
By mid-December in Broadview, few signs of the turmoil remained. The ICE facility held far fewer detainees than it did in September. On the road, someone had written “we love our resistance” in chalk. The attendees huddled together and recited the Our Father and three Hail Marys, first in English and then in Spanish.
They prayed for immigrant children. They prayed for those detained, and for the country.
And while they prayed a gate opened down the street. A white bus slowly emerged and pulled away.
‘The federal government is powerful’
On the same mid-December Sunday when Rivera boarded her flight to Mexico, a group of seven women from the city’s farthest northwest corner gathered at a coffee shop just beyond the Chicago border.
Culturally and ideologically, Edison Park and Norwood Park are as far removed from Chicago’s Latino enclaves as any place around the city. And yet even there, locals gathered to organize against the threat of federal immigration agents.
The women, part of the Ebinger ICE Rapid Response team — named for one of their local elementary schools — wanted to be ready. They wanted to provide training for neighbors. They wanted to connect with other groups of parents on the Northwest Side who’d grown wary of agents sowing mayhem in their communities.
In the aftermath of the most frenzied part of the blitz, the gathering at Off the Wall Cafe in Park Ridge reflected one of its most enduring lessons: that leaders with the most power actually had little to combat what they considered to be an invasion. That it was instead up to citizens to protect their communities.
Pritzker earlier in December compared the learn-on-the-fly response to Operation Midway Blitz to what it was like during the pandemic. Every day, or week, brought new lessons. Slowly, he and his leadership team understood more and more about what they were dealing with.
Part of that process, though, included an uncomfortable truth: They couldn’t do a whole lot.
“I think we’ve learned what their tactics are,” he said of federal agents. “We’ve learned what things can be done. We’ve learned what the protest looks like, and we’ve learned what the limitations are on us with regard to addressing the brutality and breadth of the ICE-CBP invasion and then, of course, everything legally we’ve learned about the National Guard.”
“I do want to liken this to COVID, because we knew more six months in than we knew, you know, one month in. And it wasn’t that we had all the answers, but you kind of — you understood. And understand now the tactics and what the likely trajectory is, (and) that’s helpful for the next time this happens.”
“One thing I learned during COVID was that the public without solid information or without truthful information is lost,” he said. “The public is uneasy and wants somebody to tell them what’s really going on.”
Johnson put it more bluntly: “I will say the big thing we learned is that there is a way in which we can be united around a mission,” he said, “and also wrestle with the fact that there are some limitations to what we can do. And that’s a tough lesson.”
Johnson, who grew up in Elgin, considered the blitz an attack on his adopted city, and perhaps one that was inevitable. He saw no use in trying to engage Trump in hopes of softening the blow, and was adamant that “there was nothing that was going to stop the president of the United States of America from invading the city of Chicago.”
“Nothing,” Johnson said.
“It would have been a fool’s mission to go in there and try to explain to him … to convince the president from not invading an American city. Tell me someone who has a template around how that works?”
Like many in Chicago, Johnson experienced a mix of outrage and empathy throughout the fall. When stories emerged of people being chased through neighborhoods, or a downtown park, he imagined his own family on the receiving end. The little girl with the doll in Millennium Park made Johnson think of his own daughter.
He tried to decompress with long rides on a bike. He tried to present strength in the midst of attack after attack. He received regular briefings throughout the blitz and found a lot of details — about South Shore, and the shooting in Brighton Park — to be “graphic” and “horrific,” he said.
“The federal government is powerful,” Johnson said, “and it’s more powerful than the state, more powerful than local government, and it didn’t stop us from coming up with ideas to figure out how to mitigate some of the harm. Right?
“And here’s what I believe, and this is not just gut or intuition or my heart, it’s just based upon evidence. If we did not acknowledge that pain and we didn’t do what we did do, it would have been far more severe in this city, hands down.”
Back in the coffee shop at Park Ridge, the women of the Ebinger ICE Rapid Response team went to work. In the early days of the blitz, they didn’t necessarily think it would reach their corner of the city. But then came raids in Lakeview. In Irving Park.
“It’s like a literal storm,” said Charity Haines, one of the group members. Haines, 47, had joined a group of concerned neighbors on Signal a few days before Halloween, when Bovino and his agents made an arrest outside of Frederick Stock Public School as children played outside. Not long after, agents were on Haines’ block, questioning a pair of Polish workers who turned out to have legal status. Haines had been bringing in her groceries.
“And you’re just overcome with anger,” she said.
In the weeks since, the response group has grown. Some of its members regret that they didn’t start it sooner. There are similar groups all over Chicago, ones that have led the whistle-packing events and that have spread the word when ICE arrives in a given neighborhood; groups that have tried to protect members of their community and embraced a grassroots power.
One of the group members got in touch with Liz Rincon, who works for state Sen. Robert Martwick, and volunteered to help the group organize a “know your rights” training. The workshop took place days before Bovino and his men took their photo at The Bean.
“I don’t want people to think they got involved too late,” said Rincon, 45. She believes that if and when federal agents returned, they’d “be met with a bunch of very prepared people.” That if ICE and Border Patrol came back to the Northwest Side and expected little resistance, they’d be met with something else, entirely.
“A little army of Lululemon women,” Rincon said, “with our Stanley cups.”
And then, not long after, word spread throughout Chicago.
Bovino had indeed returned.
The epilogue
He stood on a snowy Little Village curb while his men escorted a grimacing man down 27th Street and into one of their Wagoneers. It was a Tuesday morning, Dec. 16, and except for the thick green winter coat, with the yellow U.S. Border Patrol patch on his right arm, everything about Greg Bovino looked the same as it did in the fall.
He wore his usual helmet. He moved, like usual, as if ready to fire, with his right finger near the trigger of a gun. He listened to furious neighbors with an expression that conveyed a mix of calm and contempt. For weeks he’d been gone, but “we never left,” Bovino told those gathered around him.
“We never left, guys.”
It was as if the photo at The Bean never happened. As if it hadn’t been a celebratory farewell.
That Tuesday morning in mid-December, sightings of the federal convoy and all-caps warnings of arrests in a Cicero parking lot filled social media. People lined 26th Street in Little Village, craning their necks on business steps and street corners, whistles in hand and horns blaring in the distance. Around the federal convoy, traffic slowed and brakes squealed as dozens of cameras rolled.
Among those arrested during Bovino’s return was 23-year-old Sergio Ceballos, who was detained while riding his bike in Little Village. He is currently being held in Texas, awaiting deportation.
His family knows well the fear and uncertainty of the situation. They went through it three months earlier with Ceballos’ older cousin, Leodegario Martinez Barradas, the flower vendor who became the first known arrest in Operation Midway Blitz.
Despite their age difference, the cousins have much in common. Neither have criminal records. Both came to Chicago seeking a chance.
“That is our crime,” Barradas’ niece Olga Sangabriel said. “Seeking a better life for our family.”
While he encountered people upon his return to Little Village, Bovino ignored onlookers’ questions and phone cameras. He simply said, “Merry Christmas if I don’t see you again,” before he sauntered toward his white Suburban. Later, stopping in a Forest Park gas station, he couldn’t resist offering angry onlookers another pun, this one holiday-inspired:
“We love Chica-ho-ho-ho.”
The next day, it took the convoy most of a morning of driving before it stopped in the parking lot of an Evanston Home Depot. Everyone assumed their familiar roles.
Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss, who had protested outside the Broadview facility early in the blitz, demanded that the agents stop arresting his residents. Bovino, flanked by two masked agents, kept a straight face amid the forest of cameras and phones.
“They’re illegal aliens,” he said. “They’re not residents.”
Biss called the campaign a “reign of terror.” Bovino smirked and pledged to continue conducting “legal, ethical and moral” immigration enforcement.
Less than two days later, federal agents gathered for another farewell photograph, this time at the DuPage Airport. This one appeared more impromptu than the one at Millennium Park more than a month earlier.
There were no face coverings. No dogs or guns. They dressed in jeans and sweatshirts and smiled in front of a U.S. Coast Guard plane.
Soon they were gone again, for now, but the past several weeks and months had come to underscore a difficult truth for a wounded and resilient city: that the mission Bovino and his agents started in September was not, in fact, over. That it was only a matter of time before they’d be back.