In Chicago, the massive show of force signals a sharp escalation in Trump’s anti-immigration campaign

CHICAGO (AP) — The music begins at a low, ominous sound, as the video shows searchlights shooting along a Chicago apartment building and heavily armed immigration agents storming inside. Guns are drawn. Unmarked cars fill the streets. Agents landing from a Black Hawk helicopter.

But the soundtrack quickly becomes more dramatic, and the video — edited into a series of dramatic shots and released by the Department of Homeland Security days after the Sept. 30 raid — shows agents leading shirtless men with their hands tied behind their backs.

Read more: Official defends use of tear gas in Chicago and says immigration enforcement agents have cameras

Authorities said they were targeting the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang, although they also said that only two of the 27 migrants arrested were members of the gang. They provided few details about the arrests.

But residents said the apartments of dozens of American citizens were targeted, and at least six Americans were detained for hours.

The massive display of force signals a sharp escalation in the White House’s anti-immigration campaign and exacerbates tensions in an already tense city.

“To every criminal illegal alien: Darkness is no longer your ally,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a social media post accompanying the video, which has received more than 6.4 million views. “We will find you.”

But Tony Wilson, a third-floor resident born and raised on Chicago’s South Side, sees only horror in what happened.

“It was like we were being attacked,” Wilson said days after the raid, speaking through the hole in his door handle. The customer used a grinder to cut the latch, and he still couldn’t close the door properly, let alone lock it. So he barricaded himself inside, barricading the door with furniture.

“I didn’t even hear them knock on the door or anything,” said Wilson, a 58-year-old American citizen with a disability.

Dreams and decay

The raid was carried out in the heart of the South Shore, an overwhelmingly black neighborhood on Lake Michigan that has long been a tangle of middle-class dreams, urban decay and gentrification.

It’s a place where teams of drug dealers prowl, looking for customers outside the ornate lakeside apartment buildings. It has some of the best vegetarian restaurants in the city, but it also has takeout places where catfish fillets are ordered through bulletproof glass.

It has well-paid professors from the University of Chicago, but it’s also where a third of families live on less than $25,000 a year.

The apartment building where the raid took place had long been suffering from unrest. Residents said the five-story building, built in the 1950s, was often littered with trash, the elevators rarely worked and crime was a constant concern. Residents said things have become more chaotic after the arrival of dozens of Venezuelan migrants in the past few years. While no residents said they felt threatened by migrants, many described an increase in noise and litter in the hallways.

The building, owned by out-of-state investors, has not been inspected in three years, with problems ranging from lack of smoke detectors to the smell of urine to dirty stairs. Repeated calls to the lead investor in the LLC that owns the building, a Wisconsin resident named Trinity Flood, went unanswered. Attempts to reach representatives through property owners and lawyers were also unsuccessful.

The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that fears of the crime heightened last June when a Venezuelan man was shot in the head “execution style.” Another Venezuelan has been charged in the death.

Days after the raid, the doors of dozens of the building’s 130 apartments remained open. Almost all of these apartments were looted. Windows were shattered, doors were smashed, and clothes and diapers were scattered on the floor. In one apartment, a white jacket was hanging in a closet next to a room cluttered with broken furniture and piles of clothes and plastic bags. In another photo, water falls from the ceiling next to a refrigerator lying on its side. Some kitchens are full of insects.

Wilson said three men wearing body armor tied his hands and forced him outside with dozens of other people, most of them Latinos. After being detained for two hours, he was told he could leave.
“It was terrible, man,” he said. He had barely left the apartment in days.

A city under siege?

The White House says Chicago is under siege.

President Donald Trump insists that US gang members and immigrants are illegally flocking to the city and crime is rampant. National Guard soldiers are needed to protect government facilities from angry left-wing protesters.

“Chicago is the worst and most dangerous city in the world,” he wrote on Truth Social.

The reality is much less dramatic. Violence is rare at protests, although angry confrontations have become increasingly common, especially outside the federal immigration center on the outskirts of Broadview. Although crime is a serious problem, the city’s homicide rate has dropped by nearly half since the 1990s.

These facts did not stop the Trump administration.

What began in early September with some arrests in Latino neighborhoods, as part of a crackdown dubbed “Operation Midway Blitz,” has escalated throughout Chicago. There are increased patrols by masked armed agents. detention of US citizens and immigrants with legal status; fatal shooting; A protesting priest shot himself in the head with a pepper ball outside the Broadview facility, his arms raised in prayer.

By early October, authorities said more than 1,000 migrants had been detained across the region.

The raids shook Chicago.

Read more: Immigration agents have become increasingly aggressive in Chicago

“We have a rogue and reckless group of masked and heavily armed individuals roaming throughout our city,” Mayor Brandon Johnson said after the September 30 raid. “The Trump administration seeks to destabilize our city and foster chaos.”

For Trump’s critics, the crackdown is a calculated effort to incite anger in a city and state run by some of his most outspoken Democratic opponents. They say the out-of-control protests will reinforce Trump’s tough-on-crime image, while embarrassing Johnson and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who is seen as a potential Democratic presidential contender.

Therefore, the South Shore raid, ready to be posted on social media with its military equipment and armed agents for combat, was deemed highly disproportionate.

“This was a crazy military response that they cooked up for their reality show,” said Lavonte Stewart, who runs a sports program on the South Shore to steer youth away from violence. “It’s not like there are touring bands of Venezuelan teenagers.”

Officials insist it was not a reality show.

The operation, led by US Customs and Border Protection, was based on months of intelligence gathering, according to a US official who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. The building owner told authorities that Venezuelans were in about 30 squatters and threatened other tenants, the official said, adding that the size of the building required a show of force. Immigration agencies declined to comment further.

Even before the “Middle of the Road Blitz,” Trump’s election had swept through Chicago’s Latino communities.

Stewart said Venezuelan children began disappearing from his programs months ago, though it is often unclear whether they have moved or returned to Venezuela or are just staying home.
“I had 35 kids in my program from Venezuela,” he said. “Now there is nothing.”

A wave of new immigrants

The raid reverberated across the South Shore, bringing back memories of escalating violence during the drug wars of the 1990s, as well as economic divisions and sometimes uncomfortable relationships between Black residents and the wave of more than 50,000 migrants, most of them Latino, who began arriving in 2022, often riding buses from southern border states.

Chicago spent more than $300 million on housing and other services for immigrants, sparking widespread resentment on the South Shore and other black neighborhoods where the new arrivals settled.

“They felt like these newcomers were treated better than people who were already part of the community,” said Kenneth Phelps, pastor of Concord Missionary Baptist Church in Woodlawn, a majority black neighborhood.

It did not matter that many of the immigrants were crowded into small apartments, and most simply wanted to work. He said the message to residents is that the new arrivals are more important than they are.

Phelps tried to combat this perception, by creating programs to help newcomers and invite them to his church. But it sparked more anger, including within his congregation.

“I even made people leave the church,” he said.

Read more: More Americans believe the United States benefits from legal immigration, a new AP-NORC poll shows

It’s easy to hear the bitterness on the South Shore, even though the neighborhood’s remaining immigrant presence is almost invisible.

“They took everyone’s jobs!” said Rita Lopez, who manages apartment buildings in the neighborhood and recently stopped by the site of the raid.

“The government gave all the money to them — not to the people of Chicago,” she said.

Changing demographics and generations of doubt

For more than a century, the South Shore attracted waves of Irish, Jewish, and then black immigrants for its lakeside location, affordable cottages, and early 20th-century apartment buildings.

Each wave viewed the next with suspicion, which in many ways reflects how Black South Shore residents viewed the influx of immigrants.

Former First Lady Michelle Obama’s parents moved to the South Shore when it was mostly white, and she watched the situation change. A neighborhood that was 96% white in 1950 was 96% black by 1980.

“We were doing everything we were supposed to do — and better,” she said in 2019. “But when we moved, the white families left.”

But skepticism also came from the South Shore’s black middle class, which watched nervously as many housing projects began to close in the 1990s, leading to an influx of poorer residents.

“This has always been a complex community,” Stewart said of those years.

“You can live in an apartment block here that’s really clean, with really nice homes, and then you go a block away and there’s broken glass and trash everywhere and gunfire,” he said. “It’s the strangest thing, and it’s been like this for 30 years.”

Associated Press reporters Aisha Jefferson in Chicago, Elliot Spagat in San Diego and Claudia Lauer in Philadelphia contributed to this report.