A city on guard: What the raids left behind after Operation Midway Blitz

In warmer months, Elvira Arzeta’s homemade popsicles sell with little trouble. She makes them from strawberries and mangoes, coconuts and limes. At $2 each, she earns enough to keep her gas tank full while she remains on constant lookout for the threat of federal agents.

Soon, though, she knows it’ll get cooler, then cold. She worries about how she’ll pay for her gas when she sells fewer popsicles. She worries about a lot of things. When federal agents shot and killed two people earlier this year in Minneapolis, Arzeta, who lives just outside of Chicago, couldn’t sleep. That could’ve been her, she thought.

“I am scared,” Arzeta said, who still wears a whistle around her neck. “But if I can help, I will do it. Even if it’s just saving a single person from being deported.”

It has been a year this month since the Trump administration’s Operation Midway Blitz began. What it left behind can be measured in the number of neighborhood patrollers, like Arzeta, who are still making their daily rounds. It can be measured in places still coming back to life, where people keep a wary eye from apartment balconies and from behind cracks in window curtains.

By 5 a.m. most days, Arzeta is on the streets of Bensenville, a northwest suburb in the shadow of planes near O’Hare International Airport. Bensenville is a place, in some parts, of million-dollar homes and pristine lawns. Arzeta often drives to the other parts.

“Little Guatemala,” as locals know it, is one of those parts. It’s tucked between a pair of dead-end roads, near car dealerships and modest strip malls. Locals say that federal agents detained 35 people in a day there last year. Now Arzeta arrives to let those who remain know it’s safe for them to go to work.

That, for now, there’s no sign of Immigration and Customs Enforcement or U.S. Border Patrol.

Arzeta’s four children tell her they’re worried about her. Her husband, too. But, as a U.S. citizen, she can’t help doing what she does, and so she continues to make the popsicles and to keep her gas tank full and to go on patrol, morning after morning.

“It breaks my heart to see what’s happening,” she said, and so the close watching continues. Patrollers like Arzeta have become important parts of an underground network that the most vulnerable use to stay informed.

Former U.S. Border Patrol Cmdr. Gregory Bovino and his agents left Chicago late last year, but in some neighborhoods and on some streets, it’s as if they never left at all. As sporadic arrests continue, it’s like a wound that won’t heal.

In Elgin, witnesses still stand guard over Mulberry Lane. A street name that sounds idyllic, and quintessentially American, belies what happened there last fall. On Chicago’s Northwest Side, in the heavily Latino Belmont Cragin, a restaurant owner has tried everything to make up for the lost business while ICE agents parked down the street.

In affluent Lakeview, a homeowner remains appalled by a raid that arrived on his property, and ended in a haze of tear gas that hung over his block. And in East Side, the working-class immigrant community closest to the Indiana line, a man who runs a bakery lives in fear of deportation.

The toll of the blitz can be calculated in detainments and deportations, and in dollars. In Bensenville on a recent warm weekday morning, it could be quantified, too, by the dozen people who lined up in the sun outside of a community center, waiting for the doors to open to one of the few places they felt safe.

Upon walking inside, “you can tell that they can breathe,” said Dulce Porras-Goldstein, a librarian and Spanish-language community liaison at the Bensenville Community Public Library. She has become a lifeline among the most fearful in Bensenville, where a small but robust network of Guatemalan immigrants had built a community.

The raids upended it. Even now, Porras-Goldstein said, “I have families that don’t let the kids outside.” She organizes outreach events where families can find essential services and maybe a few moments of peace. Where maybe they can forget, for a time, why they rarely leave home in the first place. One of Porras-Goldstein’s regulars, a mother of three, doesn’t walk outside without first talking to God.

“I pray that nothing happens because my children are waiting for me at home,” she said.

She only wanted to be identified by her first name, Jasmine, and like many she’d come to plan her days with the guidance of helpers. The information on neighborhood Signal chats or WhatsApp groups can be the difference in whether a child can go outside to play, or whether a mother feels safe enough to drive to a doctor’s appointment.

On the morning of Porras-Goldstein’s most recent gathering — and she didn’t want to share the specific location or date, for fear that federal agents would target it — people walked inside to a one-stop shop. There was a makeshift driver’s license office. A place to get a quick passport. Paperwork to register for school, or healthcare. Free food, around lunchtime.

A woman named Maria, who also didn’t want to share her last name, had come in part to tend to the small garden out back. The one that Porras-Goldstein helped her start in June. Maria, originally from Guerrero, Mexico, has been in the United States for 20 years. She and her husband and her two American-born children liked Bensenville for how quiet it used to be.

“Muy tranquilo,” she said. Until last fall.

The garden, at least, had helped her reclaim a small bit of tranquility. She’d planted tomatoes. Cilantro. Peppers. Her 13-year-old son had taken a keen interest in it, and she was happy about that. But it was difficult to find happiness in much of anything in the aftermath of the blitz.

“I used to like being outside,” Maria said. But now, “I don’t find joy in anything anymore.”

For her, that was the cost of the blitz. During the height of it in Bensenville, her 9-year-old daughter noticed federal agents parked across the street from their apartment. The girl began to cry, Maria said, and told her mother not to come outside. That she would walk to the bus by herself.

For María, that was one of the hardest parts: She could not shield her children from reality. Her 13-year-old son began asking her and her husband to leave for Mexico. “Vámonos, vámonos, vámonos,” he would tell her. Amid the fear, his grades dropped, María said.

The children have never lived in Mexico, or visited. To them, though, leaving felt easier than living with the possibility that their parents could be detained. That one day they would return from school and not find them at home. It had happened to so many of their neighbors.

Beyond Bensenville, similar remnants remain, from far-flung suburbs to neighborhoods in the heart of the city. Notices in doors of restaurants and businesses still say ICE is not welcome. “Hands off Chicago” signs line windows of homes. People remain on guard, and even those with documentation that would suggest safety do not feel secure.

“I have my work permit,” said Joaquin Brito, 51, who runs a bakery in East Side. “But immigration, they don’t care.”

Last fall, a few blocks from his store, dozens of locals stood off with federal agents following a car chase and crash. Brito recently leaned against a glass case filled with layer cakes to pull up a picture of the helicopter that flew overhead the day of the standoff, last Oct. 14.

“A lot of people, they (didn’t) come in and buy bread, because they don’t want to see immigration.”

A year later, people are still being targeted and rounded up, even if it’s quieter and even if those actions don’t come with Department of Homeland Security hype videos on social media. Throughout the city, word of an ICE arrest is enough to shut down blocks of businesses.

In Belmont Cragin, Alma Santamaria is still trying to make up for lost business. She runs a chicken restaurant, Pos’ Yo, that sits not far from where agents often parked nearby. She has tried home delivery for customers still scared to leave home. A punch card program with specials.

She’s had one of her employees dress up as a chicken, like the mom-and-pop version of the Chick-fil-A cows. Santamaria features her mascot on TikTok, in “adventures of the chicken” videos. Sometimes it seems to be working.

But then there’ll be a whisper. A rumor on social media that ICE is back.

And then, once again, “people disappear,” Santamaria said. “There’s still a lot of fear.”

Chicago is a city of distinct neighborhoods, each with its own character and identity. Few were targeted as much and as often as Little Village and the other neighborhoods with deep Latino roots and a significant immigration population. Others were barely targeted at all.

But even in places that remained relatively unscathed, effects can linger. On his flower-lined street in Lakeview, for instance, Leo Feler has a self-awareness about his advantages. In his part of Chicago, the first several weeks of the blitz felt far away.

Last October, though, he began to feel the heaviness of a looming threat. At the time, he was having work done on his house. The installation of new siding. Feler spoke with the workers and expressed concern about their safety.

“They said, ‘Oh, we have work authorization, we’re not worried at all,’” he said.

Last Oct. 24, Feler was in Canada for business, with plans to run the Niagara Falls Marathon. He was in his hotel lobby, sipping tea. A Ring notification flashed on his phone. He watched what he could see of the raid on the screen.

One of the workers was detained. Another, who sought refuge inside Feler’s house after his tenant unlocked the door, needed more than a dozen stitches. As they left, the agents filled the block with tear gas. Feler returned to blood splattered in his front room and spent his first night back cleaning. Some things, he has learned, cannot be wiped away.

He still feels “this wave of heat” when he recounts the raid. He also feels a moral obligation to be vocal about it, and what it meant for him, his neighbors and the workers who were targeted.

“Of all the people who have had something like this happen to them during Midway Blitz, I probably have the least to lose,” he said recently, sitting near the bay window of his house, surrounded by monumental houseplants and contemporary art.

“I’m probably in the best position to be the one that actually speaks out about it. And if I don’t do it then I have to be OK living with that for the rest of my life and my own judgment of myself.”

In the days and weeks after the raid, he helped the detained worker get a lawyer, who filed a habeas petition that led to his release. The worker had no criminal record, Feler said.

“We got his paperwork — he pays taxes,” he said. “He has a W-2. He’s been here for decades.”

Eventually, the workers returned to his house to finish the job. Feler canceled his travel plans last Thanksgiving and kept watch from the bay window. He has suffered from nightmares.

In July, he filed a federal lawsuit against the government and agents who executed the raid, alleging violations to his Fourth Amendment rights and seeking compensation for property damage.

“I owe it to my neighbors to make sure that we at least get an investigation and maybe get some accountability,” he said. “I’m the one who has standing to bring the lawsuit, since it was my home.”

He would consider himself a coward for the rest of his life if he did anything else.

People have been driven by their own convictions to continue taking a stand. It’s a shared sense of responsibility. In Bensenville, there’s Elvira Arzeta, the woman who funds her patrolling with the proceeds from her homemade popsicles.

In Elgin, a local Facebook page keeps a legion of followers informed of ICE activity. It has 74,000 followers, and posts regular updates. When there’s not much to report, it can be the best news of all for those who follow.

“Good morning and happy Sunday,” read the start of one recent post. “We’ll let you know if we see anything.” Then in the comments: “10:10am No updates in the Elgin area and its surroundings … 12:35pm No updates in the Elgin area and its surroundings.”

Followers express their gratitude with prayer hands emojis.

During the blitz, some parts of Elgin were hit especially hard. Agents targeted apartments there along Mulberry Lane, the way they targeted ones in Bensenville. A woman named Odilia Ochoa, who lives on the second story above Mulberry Lane, kept watch from her balcony.

She keeps a chair outside her front door, and she still has her whistle hanging just inside. Upon the sight of federal agents, “I’d go out,” Ochoa said, in Spanish, and she mimicked blowing the whistle.

She repeated what she’d yell in those moments: “La migra. La migra.”

She is from Acapulco, and has been in the United States for 10 years. She knew one of her neighbors who was detained and deported to Guatemala. Ennis Ayala, Ochoa’s 4-year-old granddaughter, who was born in the United States, prayed to Jesus that her father would be safe.

The neighborhood used to be a place of cookouts and gatherings, she said. That stopped last fall.

“No more carne asada, no more fiesta,” she said. “Nobody here on the street. Nobody outside.”

Ochoa still keeps watch. Her daughter, Katherine Ayala, often joins her. They came to be known as “the ladies on the balcony” for how often they sat out there, keeping an eye. Life is slowly returning to the neighborhood. On a recent Saturday, there were people cooking out. Children playing.

But there were also plenty of empty parking spaces. And vacant units. Ochoa still limits her time beyond the balcony. She used to “ask God,” she said to “guide me so that they don’t grab me on my way to my diabetes appointments.”

She and her family try to limit their exposure. They rely on monthly food and grocery delivery from a local network of volunteers. On a recent Monday afternoon in August, Ochoa and her daughter greeted the arrival of another delivery with smiles and gratitude. Sherry Liske, one of the volunteers, greeted Ochoa with a hug.

The back of Liske’s SUV was full of bags from Whole Foods and Aldi. Liske was a community patroller, and still patrols, but now makes the delivery rounds, too. Like Arzeta and so many others she’d come to feel a need to act and to help her community.

And to act, now, meant making deliveries for people still wary of leaving home.

“It’s not as dramatic as it was at that time, or as intense,” Liske said. “But it’s as intense for each person who’s being affected by it.”

As a self-described “white lady,” she understood her comfort. That the blitz and what remains of it “doesn’t affect me personally, as far as being in danger.” But, she said, “it should affect people, actually.”

She unloaded the groceries while members of Ochoa’s family helped. The bags were full of food and hygiene products. Diapers. Ennis Ayala, the little girl who prayed for her father’s safety, bounced about happily in the parking lot. Ochoa and her daughter carried the donations upstairs, down the balcony where they so often kept watch.

“I worried about leaving my daughters here, my granddaughter,” Ochoa said. “But it’s calmer now.”

She still spends plenty of time on the balcony overlooking Mulberry Lane, on the lookout. In some pockets of the city and surroundings, the raids left a certain kind of hypervigilance. The absence of agents in a given moment provides only temporary relief.

In Bensenville, Arzeta often has trouble sleeping. She began to seek counseling after federal agents in Minneapolis killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Arzeta never needed medication but now takes sleeping pills, and ones for anxiety and depression.

At night her husband tells her to stop watching the news, to turn off the lights. To try to rest.

“But it doesn’t go away,” she said. “My mind keeps going in circles.”

And then she gets up at 4 a.m. and prepares to begin another patrol.