‘No place here for me’: U.S. citizens getting caught in immigration crackdown in Chicago, suburbs

If you rolled past Bedrosian Park after the final bell rang at Waukegan High School on any given weekday this fall, you were likely to find Diego Rosales, basketball in hand, grinning and playing down to the level of local middle-schoolers. Until Oct. 6, when Rosales watched two dark SUVs come to an abrupt stop while he waited for the bus to school.

Rosales saw three White men in green fatigues, cloth masks and body armor emerging from the vehicles with pistols on their hips. They stared and then rushed toward him.

His first thought was to run home to his mother. She had warned him that even though he was a U.S. citizen, born in Waukegan 15 years ago, the streets were no longer safe for people who looked like him. Federal agents had arrived in the Chicago area and were arresting people first and asking questions later, she told him.

Surveillance footage from a nearby school captured Rosales in full sprint, curving around a building and through a parking lot, backpack in hand, the agents trailing by a stride. After a three-block race, they tackled the teenager to the pavement and shouted a question:

“Where were you born?“

Rosales didn’t return to Bedrosian Park in October, refusing to leave his home for fear of meeting immigration agents again. The Department of Homeland Security’s Operation Midway Blitz was still in full force. And while Secretary Kristi L. Noem recently said no U.S. citizens were detained in the crackdown, Rosales and numerous other Latinos in the Chicago area say their experiences show that is not true.

How many U.S. citizens were stopped or arrested during Midway Blitz and other operations is not known. DHS did not respond to requests for comment on the incidents described in this story and has not provided any figures. The Washington Post identified several cases of U.S. citizens being targeted by immigration enforcement agents that are documented in video and witness accounts.

The Supreme Court recently cleared a path for immigration officers to use skin color as a factor in determining whom to stop and ask about their legal status, stretching DHS powers far beyond that of traditional policing guardrails. Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote that if lawful residents were picked up in raids, their detention would only result in a temporary inconvenience.

But in Chicago and elsewhere, Latino U.S. citizens and lawful residents describe being detained for hours, and in some cases, days. Others were not detained, but say they were assaulted because of the color of their skin.

Upon being tackled, Rosales stammered that he was a U.S. citizen, born in Waukegan. And then, just as abruptly as the agents entered his world, he said, they vanished.

A sudden detention

Before the chase, Rosales was skeptical of his mother’s warnings about the masked agents, he said.

“I raised good kids who’ve never been chased by police,” said his mother, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she came to the U.S. from Mexico illegally as a child. “And my son was chased by police because he has brown skin.”

According to the 2023 American Community Survey, more than 20 percent of Chicago’s roughly 560,000 foreign-born residents are undocumented. DHS officials said Midway Blitz would target the hardened criminals among them — “the worst of the worst” — but available records indicate serious offenders make up a small portion of arrests in Chicago.

Citizens and legal residents soon began describing encounters with immigration officers, too.

Dayanne Figueroa, who was born and raised in the U.S., had been driving to her job as a paralegal on Oct. 10 when she heard a chorus of car horns — warnings that immigration agents were nearby. She honked at the vehicle blocking her path. Seeing her lane clear, she said she accelerated forward to steer clear of the action.

Video of the incident shows an unmarked SUV swerve to the right as Figueroa’s vehicle moves forward and then crashes into the driver’s side. A moment later, immigration agents exited the SUV with guns drawn. They pulled Figueroa out of the car by her shoulders and handcuffed her as she thrashed on the pavement.

Figueroa was placed in the third row of a red van between two trembling Hispanic men also in handcuffs. A supervisor, she said, made eye contact with her in the rearview mirror as she begged the masked agents to identify themselves and their agency. She said she told them she was a U.S. citizen.

“No one is going to help you,” she recalls the supervisor saying. “You’re all criminals.”

Then a young, brown-skinned agent behind a cloth mask seated in the second row turned to take photos of the detainees’ faces. He had spoken Spanish to her and the men. His nameplate was obscured, but she could see the last two letters, and deduced he had a Latino surname.

“I told him how big of a disgrace he was,” Figueroa told The Post. “... As a Latina, to be kidnapped, threatened and brutalized by someone who shares my language, my skin, my heritage, felt like a betrayal in its purest form.”

A video of the incident went viral. In the aftermath, DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin accused Figueroa of using her vehicle to “block in agents, honking her horn,” and said she “struck an unmarked government vehicle.” She described the 31-year-old Figueroa as an “agitator” “arrested for assault on a federal agent” in comments to the Chicago Tribune.

A handful of people accused of using vehicles to closely follow or block agents have been charged under a federal law that prohibits interfering or resisting officers going about their official duties. But Figueroa said she was not following agents.

Figueroa was held for four hours and released without charges. She had recently undergone kidney surgery, and said she was hospitalized after her detention. She sustained bruising and a urinary tract infection she believes was brought on by the conditions in which she was held.

That was just the beginning of her odyssey. DHS’ remarks, she said, sparked a wave of online misinformation and backlash. She does not believe she would have been written off as a violent agitator if she were a White woman, and she has wrestled with that.

“I love my country very much,” Figueroa said. “And I also love my roots and my culture and my community. And I have to protect both.”

‘A violation of trust’

Rafael Veraza, 25, said he pulled into Sam’s Club with his wife and baby on a grocery run on Nov. 8 when he saw a commotion surrounding what looked to be unmarked vehicles full of immigration officers in Cicero.

The family decided to leave, he said. On his way out, he believes a passing agent mistook him for one of the protesters who have followed immigration officials throughout Chicagoland.

Veraza’s wife was filming the parking lot scene on her smartphone. She aimed her camera at a passing SUV and captured the moment when an officer filled the family’s vehicle with a mist of pepper spray.

Veraza and his wife poured water on their crying baby’s face and rushed to the hospital. A doctor called in a poison control specialist for an expert opinion because they’d never seen such a young person pepper sprayed, Veraza said. They advised bringing the child to a specialist for follow-up visits to gauge potential long term damage to the child’s lungs and eyes.

McLaughlin denied that federal agents pepper-sprayed anyone outside of Sam’s Club. She did not offer an explanation for what is shown in the video.

“I have a hate toward the government now,” said Veraza, a sales representative for a local clothing store who was born in the U.S. “I don’t know how I’m going to explain it to my daughter one day — that she got pepper-sprayed on our way to buy Pampers and milk.”

‘No life here’

Weeks after his encounter with masked agents, Rosales, the Waukegan teen, said he’s been jolted awake in the early morning, breathing heavily, palms sweating.

He still avoids taking the bus to school. His mother planned for him to see a therapist, but Rosales saw online that immigration agents were active in downtown Waukegan the day of the appointment and called it off.

Rosales once envisioned working in construction or home remodeling after high school, eventually making enough money to help his mother retire. Then the masked men gave chase, and he limped home, terrified for what might happen if his mom had been in their crosshairs instead of him.

Rosales’ mother hadn’t wanted to leave Mexico at 6 years old, but her own mother insisted on chasing the opportunities the U.S. provided. Now, Rosales’ mother wants out.

“There’s no life here anymore,” she said.

Her U.S.-born son agreed: “I feel like there’s no place here for me either.”