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The music starts slow and ominous, the video shows flashing searchlights chicago Apartment building and heavily armed immigration agents moving in. The guns are drawn. Unmarked vehicles roam the roads. Agents rappel from a Black Hawk helicopter.
But soon the soundtrack grows more stirring and the video – edited into a series of dramatic shots – is released. Department of Homeland Security A few days after the September 30 raid – agents are shown carrying away shirtless men, their hands bound with zip ties behind their backs.
Officials said they were targeting Venezuelan Gang Train de Aragua, although he also said that only two of the 27 immigrants arrested were gang members. He gave few details on the arrests.
But the apartments of dozens of American citizens were targeted and at least a half-dozen Americans were detained for hours, residents said.
The huge show of force signaled a sharp increase in the White House’s immigration crackdown and heightened tensions in an already tense city.
“To every criminal illegal alien: The darkness is no longer your ally,” Homeland Security said in a social media post accompanying the video, which has been viewed more than 6.4 million times. “We will find you.”
But third-floor resident Tony Wilson, born and raised on Chicago’s South Side, sees only horror in what happened.
“It was like we were attacked,” Wilson said a few days after the raid, speaking from the hole where his doorknob used to be. Agents had used a grinder to cut off the deadbolt, and he still couldn’t close the door properly, let alone lock it. So he closed the door with furniture and locked himself inside.
“I didn’t hear them knock or anything,” said Wilson, a 58-year-old disabled American citizen.
dreams and decay
The raid took place in the heart of the South Shore, a largely black neighborhood on Lake Michigan that has long been a nexus of middle-class dreams, urban decay and gentrification.
It’s a place where teams of drug dealers troll for customers outside the beautiful apartment buildings located along the lakeshore. It has some of the best vegetarian restaurants in the city, but also takeout places where catfish fillets are ordered through bullet-proof glass.
It’s home to well-paid University of Chicago professors, but it’s also where a third of households spend less than $25,000 a year.
The apartment building that was raided has been in trouble for a long time. Five stories high and built in the 1950s, residents said it was often strewn with garbage, the elevators rarely worked and crime was a constant concern. Residents said things had become more chaotic after the arrival of dozens of Venezuelan migrants over the past few years. Although no residents said they felt threatened by migrants, several described an increase in noise and litter in the corridor.
Owned by out-of-state investors, the building hasn’t passed an inspection in three years, with problems ranging from a lack of smoke detectors to a smell of urine and dirty stairs. Repeated calls to a Wisconsin resident named Trinity Flood, a major investor in the limited liability company that owns the building, were not returned. Attempts to reach representatives through realtors and lawyers were also unsuccessful.
Fears about the crime increased in June when a Venezuelan man was shot in the head “execution style,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement. Another Venezuelan was charged in the death.
A few days after the raid, the doors of dozens of the building’s 130 apartments were found unlocked. Almost all those apartments were vandalized. Windows were broken, doors were broken and clothes and diapers were strewn across the floor. In one apartment, a white tuxedo jacket hung in a side closet knee-deep among broken furniture, piles of clothes, and plastic bags. In another, water is dripping from the ceiling and a refrigerator is lying next to it. Some kitchens are full of insects.
Wilson said three men wearing body armor bound her hands with zip ties and forced her to go outside with dozens of other people, most of whom were Latino. After being kept on hold for two hours, he was told that he could leave.
“It was horrible, man,” he said. He could hardly leave the apartment some days.
A city under siege?
Chicago, The white House It is said that it is under siege.
Gang members and immigrants in America illegally have taken over cities and crime is rampant, President donald trump Emphasizes. National Guard troops are needed to protect government facilities from radical leftist protesters.
“Chicago is the worst and most dangerous city in the world,” he posted on Truth Social.
The reality is much less dramatic. Violence is rare at the protests, although angry confrontations are common, especially outside a federal immigration center in suburban Broadview. And while crime remains a serious problem, the city’s murder rate has nearly halved since the 1990s.
Those realities haven’t stopped the Trump administration.
What began with a few arrests in Latino neighborhoods in early September was part of a crackdown called “Operation Midway Blitz” that has expanded throughout Chicago. There are increased patrols by masked, armed agents; detention of U.S. citizens and immigrants with legal status; a fatal shooting; A protesting priest was shot in the head with a pepper ball outside the Broadview facility, with his hands raised in prayer.
In early October, officials said more than 1,000 immigrants had been arrested across the region.
The raid has shaken Chicago.
Mayor Brandon Johnson said after the September 30 raid, “We have a rogue, reckless group of heavily armed, masked individuals roaming throughout the city.” “The Trump administration seeks to destabilize our city and promote chaos.”
To Trump’s critics, the action appears to be a deliberate effort to stoke anger in a city and state run by some of his most vocal Democratic opponents. They say uncontrolled protests would reinforce Trump’s tough-on-crime image while embarrassing Johnson and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, seen as a potential Democratic presidential contender.
So the South Shore raid, designed for social media with its display of military hardware and agents armed for battle, was seen as wildly out of proportion.
“It was a crazy-looking military response that they cooked up for their reality show,” said Lavonte Stewart, who runs a South Shore sports program to steer youth away from violence. “It’s not like there are groups of Venezuelan teenagers hanging around.”
Officials say this was not a reality show.
The operation, led by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, was based on months of intelligence, according to a U.S. official who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. The building’s landlord told authorities that Venezuelans were trespassers in about 30 units and had threatened other tenants, the official said, adding that the show of force was necessary due to the size of the building. Immigration agencies declined to comment further.
Even before the “Midway Blitz”, Trump’s election had affected Chicago’s Latino communities.
Stewart said Venezuelan children began disappearing from his programs months ago, though it was often unclear whether they left, returned to Venezuela or were simply living at home.
“I had 35 kids from Venezuela in my program,” he said. “There is no one now.”
a wave of migrant newcomers
The raids echoed across the South Coast, reminiscent of increased violence during the drug wars of the 1990s, as well as economic divisions and sometimes uneasy relations between black residents and a wave of more than 50,000 immigrants, the majority of whom were Latino, who began arriving in 2022, often by bus 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 newcomers were settled.
“They felt like these new arrivals got better treatment than people who were already part of the community,” said Kenneth Phelps, pastor of Concord Missionary Baptist Church in Woodlawn, a largely black neighborhood.
It didn’t matter that many immigrants were crowded into small apartments, and most of them just wanted to work. The message to residents, he said, is that newcomers are more important than them.
Phelps tried to fight that perception, creating programs to help new arrivals and inviting them to his church. But this provoked more anger among the people, including his own congregation.
“I even asked people to leave the church,” he said.
It’s easy to hear the bitterness in the South Shore, even though the neighborhood’s remaining immigrants are an almost invisible presence.
“They took everyone’s jobs!” said Rita Lopez, who manages neighboring apartment buildings and recently stayed at the site of the raid.
“The government gave all the money to them – not to Chicagoans,” he said.
Changing demographics and generations of skepticism
For more than a century, the South Shore has attracted Irish, Jewish and then black people because of its lakeside location, affordable bungalows and early 20th-century apartment buildings.
Each wave viewed the next wave with suspicion, in many ways reflecting how Black South Shore residents viewed the migrant influx.
Former First Lady Michelle Obama’s parents moved to the South Shore when it was still mostly white, and they watched it change. A neighborhood that was 96% white in 1950 had become 96% black by 1980.
“We were doing everything we were supposed to do — and better,” she said in 2019. “But when we moved in, the white families moved out.”
But skepticism also came from the South Shore’s black middle class, which watched with trepidation as several housing projects closed in the 1990s, leading to an influx of poor residents.
“It’s always been a complicated community,” Stewart said of those years.
“You can live on a block here that’s very clean, with very nice homes, then go a block away and there’s broken glass, trash everywhere and gunfire,” he said. “It’s the strangest thing and it’s been happening for 30 years.”
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Associated Press reporters Ayesha I. Jefferson in Chicago, Elliot Spagat in San Diego and Claudia Lauer in Philadelphia contributed to this report.