The Department of Homeland Security blasted out a hype reel for “Operation Midway Blitz” in Chicago, thumping music, helmet cams, battering rams, and masked ICE agents flooding stairwells, bragging of “OVER 900 ARRESTS,” and warning, “Darkness is no longer your ally. We will find you.” What the video doesn’t show, residents and advocates say, is what happened hours earlier inside a South Shore high-rise, where kids and seniors were allegedly dragged into the night and loaded into rental vans, some of them U.S. citizens.
Neighbors described a siege. Doors splintered, apartments ransacked, people zip-tied on the sidewalk for hours while agents swept floor by floor. One witness told the Chicago Sun-Times she watched “kids coming out buck naked,” a scene she called “heartbreaking” as families were herded toward Budget vans. A 67-year-old U.S. citizen, Rodrick Johnson, said agents smashed his door, cuffed him outside, and kept him there while they “looked him up,” despite his questions about warrants or a lawyer.
DHS has framed the South Shore raid as a targeted enforcement action that netted 37 people, including alleged gun offenders, drug traffickers, and immigration violators, and it has cast the neighborhood as frequented by members of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang. Local reporting notes that officials offered no proof that anyone arrested was linked to the group, even as the agency leans on the label to justify the scale of the operation…