ICE Launches ‘Operation Midway Blitz’ Targeting Immigrants in Chicago

The Washington Post

13:19 JST, September 9, 2025

CHICAGO – The Department of Homeland Security said Monday that it has launched an immigration enforcement operation here as part of the Trump administration’s effort to target “sanctuary cities,” and immigrant advocates said several people in heavily Hispanic communities have been detained.

The agency did not provide details of the scale or duration of the undertaking in Chicago, which will be led by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The announcement came after President Donald Trump vowed for weeks that his administration would send federal law enforcement officers – including, potentially, National Guard troops – to the city as part of an effort to crack down on crime.

Local officials and immigrant advocates said federal immigration officers began making arrests in Chicago on Sunday and had taken at least five people into custody, including a well-known flower vendor and people waiting at a bus stop and on the sidewalk. The advocates said there had been “an escalation” in enforcement actions and reported several sightings of ICE vehicles.

The number of reported arrests is relatively few, but immigrant rights advocates said the operation appears to mark a shift in ICE tactics. Before this operation, local activists said, agents had been targeted in their tactics, presenting warrants at specific homes or detaining people at immigration court. Stopping people on the street in what appeared to be a fairly random fashion is new, they said.

“We believe this operation signals the beginning of ICE’s full escalation in Chicago and Illinois,” said Rey Wences, the senior director of deportation defense for the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.

DHS named the enforcement action “Operation Midway Blitz” and said it was in honor of an Illinois woman allegedly killed by an undocumented immigrant driving drunk when he crashed into her vehicle. In announcing the operation, the agency republished an interview with the parents of 20-year-old Katherine Abraham, who died in January after being rear-ended by a vehicle authorities said was driven by Julio Cucul-Bol of Guatemala.

“President Trump and [Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L.] Noem have a clear message: No city is a safe haven for criminal illegal aliens,” DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said. “If you come to our country illegally and break our laws, we will hunt you down, arrest you, deport you, and you will never return.”

Immigrant advocates and Democrats in Chicago and Illinois rebuked the administration, accusing it of using the pretext of cracking down on violent crime to target undocumented migrants as part of the president’s mass deportation campaign. Studies have found that migrants who enter the United States either legally or without authorization do not commit other crimes at a higher rate than U.S. citizens.

“As President Trump continues to wrongly hyper-fixate on deploying the military to Chicago, his Administration is now ramping up its campaign to arrest hardworking immigrants with no criminal convictions,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) said in a statement.

The ICE operation in Chicago comes after the Trump administration ramped up enforcement actions in Los Angeles, Washington and Boston. Like those jurisdictions, Chicago and Illinois are led by Democratic officials, setting up a clash over immigration at a time when public polls show waning support for some of Trump’s hard-line enforcement tactics. Democrats, however, have struggled to project an alternative vision for how the nation should move forward on the issue.

Trump and his top aides have long railed against “sanctuary city” policies that limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement and have been embraced by many Democratic-led jurisdictions. Chicago and Illinois adopted statutes that prohibit city and state law enforcement from inquiring about a person’s immigration status during an arrest or transferring custody of people who are arrested to federal immigration agents unless instructed by a court order.

Over the weekend, DHS launched “Operation Patriot 2.0” in Boston as a successor to an enforcement operation earlier this year.

Joe Abraham, the father of Katherine, said in an interview with The Washington Post on Monday that DHS reached out to him over the weekend to inform him of the new ICE operation in Chicago.

Illinois police have said the man charged in the death of Katherine Abraham and her friend attempted to flee the country on a bus headed to Mexico before the U.S. Marshals Service apprehended him.

“I thought, ‘Okay, well, I’m glad to hear someone recognizes and acknowledges Katie because she is someone that should be recognized, should be honored,’” Joe Abraham said of the Trump administration.

“If it’s an operation where they’re looking to get after undocumented criminals, I’m not sure there’s any controversy around that,” he said. “If another parent doesn’t have to go through what I’m going through … I’m all for it.”

ICE has said it is focusing enforcement operations on immigrants who commit violent crimes. But those individuals have consistently represented a small percentage of the overall arrests of undocumented people as the administration has sought to meet the president’s mass deportation goals, according to a Post analysis of ICE data from June. The examination found that the administration is increasingly targeting unauthorized migrants with no criminal record.

Call volume to Chicago’s hotline for immigrant families has been high since Sunday, organizers said. But the calls have reportedly included false alarms amid growing citywide awareness about ICE activity.

Chicago Alderman Gilbert Villegas, who represents the 36th Ward – which includes the predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods of Humboldt Park, Hermosa and Montclare – said his constituents are increasingly fearful in the wake of the reported DHS operation.

“People are concerned about, if they’re walking somewhere, they’re gonna be asked for their papers,” he said. “How do you prepare to leave your home to make sure that you can come back?”

As the arrests began late Sunday into Monday, community leaders said they spotted unusual cars in the southwest neighborhoods and began confronting suspected federal agents. Groups of residents who organize themselves to provide assistance to families of those arrested by ICE fanned out as soon as reports of unmarked vans with tinted windows appeared, activists said.

Elías Cepeda, a community advocate with Pilsen Defense & Access, said volunteers had increased their presence during morning school drop-off patrol, where they collectively help ensure that children make it to school if their parents are afraid of leaving the house because of the presence of ICE officers.

“We pulled up after the first detention had gone down, and neighbors came out and people honked their horns to let people know that ICE is out,” said Karina Martinez, a spokesperson for the Brighton Park Neighborhood Council, noting that she had not seen that response before. “In the middle of the chaos, it’s really beautiful to see the community making its own defense mechanisms.”

She said the community group was aware of at least three arrests in the Archer Heights neighborhood on Sunday. The arrests unfolded between late morning and early afternoon in the span of roughly one square mile around a major thoroughfare, Martinez said.

ICE detained older Latino men, including a popular flower vendor, a man walking outside a gas station and another person out for a walk, she said. The neighborhood council connected the relatives of two of the detained men to legal aid support.

Witnesses said far-right personality Ben Bergquam – who is affiliated with Stephen K. Bannon’s conservative network Real America’s Voice – accompanied ICE on patrols and emerged from one of their vehicles to confront a gathering crowd of neighbors questioning police about an arrest, according to videos of the incident and the outlet’s social media.

Bergquam accused Chicago neighbors of “protecting” criminals. In a social media post on X, Bergquam posted video of the confrontation and wrote: “Sickening. As we were out on an #ICE operation to pick up a criminal illegal alien in Chicago, a bunch of leftist showed up and this happened! These are the enemies within our founders warned us about!”

Researchers have found that immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans and “do not raise crime rates in U.S. communities where they settle,” according to the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.

The organization cited a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research that found immigrants were 60 percent less likely to be incarcerated than people born in the United States in 2020. Another study, based on data from the Texas Department of Public Safety and published in 2020, found “considerably lower felony arrest rates among undocumented immigrants compared to legal immigrants and native-born U.S. citizens.”

Sociologist Robert J. Sampson’s Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, which studied crime trends among neighborhoods in the city in the 1990s and 2000s, found that communities with high concentrations of first-generation immigrants experienced less violent crime than other communities in similar economic shape.

There is very little recent research on the connection between crime and immigration in Chicago, in part due to local laws that limit the collection and sharing of individuals’ immigration status.

Cook County Commissioner Alma Anaya, whose district includes most of Chicago’s predominantly Latino neighborhoods, said the arrests have “no real strategy, no logic.”

The result, she said, is not safer streets, but communities fearful of everyday activities such as going to work or to school.

“The fact that Mexican American communities have been targeted just for being who they are – this is something that’s happened before in the history of our country,” Anaya said. “There is no due process and no guidance in what is actually happening. That’s scary, and every American should be looking at this.”