https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/growing-tensions-with-ice-agents-in-chicago/vi-AA1NV0Xa
Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois blasted recent federal immigration enforcement efforts in Chicago on Sunday, dismissing assertions by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem that the city was a “war zone” and blaming federal agents for escalating a sense of conflict.
“The secretary doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” the governor said in an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union,” adding that Chicagoans were “booing her on the street.”
Mr. Pritzker singled out a late-night Border Patrol raid last week at an apartment building on Chicago’s South Side, when video taken by bystanders showed residents of the building restrained with zip ties.
Federal agents were “just picking up people who are brown and Black and then checking their credentials,” Mr. Pritzker said. He added: “They are the ones that are making it a war zone. They need to get out of Chicago if they’re not going to focus on the worst of the worst, which is what the president said they were going to do.”
Mr. Pritzker suggested that the Trump administration, which plans to send 300 National Guard troops to Chicago, was intentionally heightening tensions. The administration wants to “create the war zone so they can send in even more troops,” he said.
Mr. Pritzker said he had directed state agencies to investigate what happened at the apartment building, citing reports of “children who were zip-tied and held, some of them nearly naked” and “elderly people being thrown into a U-Haul for three hours and detained.” Mr. Pritzker added he believed that some of the people were U.S. citizens.
“What kind of a country are we living in?” he said.
The governor also said he wanted to know more about an episode in Chicago on Saturday when a federal agent shot and wounded a motorist who, according to federal officials, had rammed and boxed-in a law enforcement vehicle.
“It’s really hard to know exactly what the facts are, and they won’t let us access the facts,” Mr. Pritzker said. “They are just putting out their propaganda. And then we’ve got to later determine what actually happened.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/05/us/politics/pritzker-chicago-immigration.html
At around 1 a.m. on Tuesday morning, armed federal agents rappelled from helicopters onto the roof of a five-storey residential apartment in the South Shore of Chicago. As other agents worked their way through the building from the bottom, they kicked down doors and threw flash bang grenades, rounding up adults and screaming children alike, detaining them in zip-ties and arresting dozens, according to witnesses and local reporting.
The military-style raid was part of a widespread immigration crackdown in the country’s third-largest city as part of the Trump Administration’s “Operation Midway Blitz,” which has brought a dramatic increase in federal raids and arrests.
The raid has drawn outrage throughout Chicago and the state of Illinois, with rights groups and lawmakers claiming it represents a dramatic escalation in tactics used by federal authorities in the pursuit of Trump’s aggressive immigration crackdown.
Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker accused the federal agents of separating children from their parents, zip-tying their hands, and detaining them in “dark vans” for hours. Videos show flashbang grenades erupting on the street, followed by residents of the building—children among them—being led to a parking lot across the street. Photos of the aftermath show toys and shoes littering the apartment hallways, evidence of those pulled from their beds by the operation that included FBI and Homeland Security agents.
‘Military-style tactics’
Pritzker condemned the raid and said that he would work with local law enforcement to hold the agents accountable. “Military-style tactics should never be used on children in a functioning democracy,” he said in a statement on Friday. “This didn’t happen in a country with an authoritarian regime – it happened here in Chicago. It happened in the United States of America – a country that should be a bastion of freedom, hope, and the rights of our people as guaranteed by the Constitution,” he added.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has touted some 900 arrests in its Chicago operation since it began in early September, as well as the 37 arrests made in the nighttime raid on Tuesday, all of whom it said were “involved in drug trafficking and distribution, weapons crimes and immigration violators.” The DHS said the building was targeted because it was “known to be frequented by Tren de Aragua members and their associates.” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem posted a video of the raid on social media, overlaid with dramatic music, showing helicopters shining bright lights onto the apartment, kicking down doors and armed agents leading people out of the building in cuffs.
A DHS spokesperson told CNN following the raid that children were taken into custody “for their own safety and to ensure these children were not being trafficked, abused or otherwise exploited.” The DHS also said that four children who are U.S. citizens with undocumented parents were taken into custody.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to send federal authorities and troops to Chicago and other Democratic-run cities to assist in immigration raids and to address what he perceives to be rampant crime.
The Trump Administration launched expanded immigration enforcement operations in Chicago on Sept. 8 as part of a wider federal crackdown on sanctuary cities across the country.
“This operation will target the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens in Chicago,” ICE Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in support of the operation.
Chicago officials mounted a pushback ahead of the crackdown. The city’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, signed an order directing Chicago law enforcement and officials not to cooperate with federal agents and established an initiative intended to protect residents’ rights. The city of Evanston, an urban suburb of Chicago, issued a statement warning its residents of impending raids by ICE agents and urging them to report sightings of law enforcement.
Zip-ties and guns
In the aftermath of the sweeping raid, residents and city lawmakers have been demanding answers from the federal government.
Ed Yohnka, from the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois (ACLU), told MSNBC on Saturday that the raid represented “an escalation of force and violence” from the federal government in Chicago.
“What we saw was a full-fledged military operation conducted on the south side of Chicago against an apartment building,” he added.
“They just treated us like we were nothing,” Pertissue Fisher, a U.S. citizen who lives in the apartment building, told ABC7 Chicago in an interview soon after the raid. She said she was then handcuffed, held for hours, and released around 3 a.m. This was the first time she said a gun was ever put in her face.
Neighbor Eboni Watson, who witnessed the raid, also told the ABC station that the children were zip-tied—some of them were without clothes—when they were taken out of the residential building by federal agents. “Where’s the morality?” Watson said she kept asking during the raid.
“As a father, I cannot help but think about what it means for a child to be torn from their bed in the middle of the night, detained for no reason other than a show of force,” National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) president Derrick Johnson said in a statement. “The trauma inflicted on these young people and their families is unconscionable.”
ICE and DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment from TIME.
Protests in the aftermath
The increased raids have turned Chicago into a flashpoint in the battle over Trump’s crackdown. Protests have hit the city in recent weeks over the ICE operations, and after the raid on Tuesday, they have concentrated outside the ICE Broadview detention facility near Chicago.
On Friday, at least 18 protestors were arrested near the facility as DHS head Kristi Noem said in a post late in the day that she and her team were blocked from entering the Village of Broadview Municipal Building.
“This is how JB Pritzker and his cronies treat our law enforcement. Absolutely shameful,” Noem said in a post on X.
On Saturday, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin shared on social media that law enforcement officers were “rammed by vehicles and boxed in by 10 cars.”
“One of the drivers who rammed the law enforcement vehicle was armed with a semi-automatic weapon,” McLaughlin said. “Law enforcement was forced to deploy their weapons and fire defensive shots at an armed US citizen who drove herself to the hospital to get care for wounds.”
ICE’s tactics were criticized again on Friday, when Chicago Alderperson Jessie Fuentes was handcuffed by federal immigration agents at a Chicago medical center after questioning agents about their warrant to arrest at the medical center.
Chicago’s Mayor Johnson called Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)’s tactics “abusive.”
The raids come just days after President Trump signaled a desire to make greater use of the U.S. military in American cities during a speech to top military leaders, as he assailed a “war from within” the nation.
“We are under invasion from within,” he said, “no different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways, because they don’t wear uniforms.” In the same speech, he called for U.S. cities to be “training grounds” for the military.
Trump has frequently singled out Chicago in his long-running feud with Democratic-run cities, threatening it with his newly named “Department of War.”
Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, and Gregory Bovino, a border patrol sector chief, were seen at an Ice facility in suburban Chicago on Friday where law enforcement has been cracking down on protesters.
In recent weeks the Broadview facility has become the site of escalations by federal agents against protesters and journalists. Videos of agents deploying tear gas, pepper balls and roughly throwing protesters to the ground have gone viral, amidst the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
The Trump administration targeted Chicago with federal law enforcement starting in August, falsely claiming there had been a rise in crime in the city in recent years. Since then, there have been increasingly aggressive reports of Ice enforcement in communities, including helicopters hovering over apartment raids. There have also been arrests of local officials and candidates for office who were protesting, including Illinois’ ninth congressional district Kat Abughazaleh, who went viral with a video of an Ice agent slamming her to the ground, Daniel Biss, the Evanston mayor, and a city alderman who were aggressively arrested while trying to advocate in a hospital setting.
In Broadview, several people were arrested early Friday morning, after Ice along with Illinois state police, the Cook county sheriff’s office and other local law enforcement arrested and shoved protesters gathered for a weekly demonstration.
A local cabinet-making business, adjacent to the Broadview Ice processing facility, has had tear gas seep into their warehouse and workers hit by pepper balls, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
On Thursday, a group of Illinois law enforcement agencies, including the Broadview police department had announced they were forming a unified command to “enable the peaceful expression of the first amendment”, as well as ensure that local businesses and people in Broadview were kept safe, according to a press release. The statement also said: “The agencies involved in this operation will neither assist nor obstruct enforcement of federal immigration statutes in compliance with state and federal law.”
Broadview, the mostly Black, working-class suburb of around 8,000 people, has become a flashpoint in what the Department of Homeland Security has deemed “Operation Midway Blitz.” There aren’t any figures publicly available for how many people are detained at the Broadview facility, which is not staffed or intended to be run as a detention center.
In the state of Illinois, almost 5,000 people have been detained this year, according to data from The Deportation Data Project and analyzed by the Chicago Sun-Times.
For the people detained inside the facility, they describe not receiving adequate food or water, and having to use the bathroom in public. One person described to a Chicago Sun-Times reporter, not having soap or toothpaste and dealing with severely overcrowded conditions.
Katrina Thompson, the Broadway mayor who has been in office in since 2017, said in a letter to DHS that Ice agents were “making war in our community”, last Friday, and in response the agency warned there would be a “s—t show” in Broadview.
The treatment of protesters and journalists has drawn attention to Broadview.
One protester, named A’keisha who declined to share her last name, said that it seemed like Ice agents wanted to hurt protesters.
“What was unique on the first day is that it didn’t feel like Ice had planned to use their legal tools to remove us,” she said. “They have the right, right to say, ‘Y’all gotta leave, arrest them.’ But they didn’t. They chose instead to be violent and, like, push us and throw us to the ground and drag us.”
A’keisha has been involved in faith-based movements to end mass incarceration for years and has organized against militarization for almost a decade. She said she was moved to join protests because of her Haitian heritage and solidarity with immigrant communities.
Another protester, Reverand David Black of the First Presbyterian church of Chicago, said that he was pelted with about seven or eight “pepper exploding pellets” that hit his head, face, torso, arms and legs, while in a position of prayer.
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“I’m not a political ideologue, but I am very deeply rooted in my faith, in the ways that it calls me to show up in this moment as someone who can proclaim the good news and call these Ice agents into their right mind,” he said.
Local journalists have been detained or attacked by federal agents as well. Over the weekend, Steve Held, Unraveled Press co-founder and reporter, was detained by agents while covering a protest outside of the facility. A Chicago-Sun Times reporter was also tear-gassed and pelted with “rubber projectiles”, according to the outlet.
On Sunday morning, CBS Chicago News reporter Asal Rezaei, was attacked by an Ice agent who shot a pepper ball into her car from about 50ft away and was exposed to chemicals on her face. She said in a social media post that after the incident, she was “puking for two hours”.
In addition to protesters and journalists, legal observers, often delineated in the Chicago-land area by their bright neon green hats that read “legal observer” were also attacked in recent weeks by Ice agents.
“There has been an extreme escalation in the use of force by federal agents at that facility against people who are exercising their first amendment rights, and targeted attacks against members of the press and legal observers with The National Lawyers Guild,” said Molly Armour, a volunteer attorney with the National Lawyers Guild Chicago for over 15 years.
What was most troubling about the behavior of federal agents at Broadview for her, Armour said, was the use of “violent military-style offensive weaponry used against people, such as tear gas canisters, [and] different kinds of aerosol chemical agents”, particularly against people just observing what’s going on.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/04/ice-chicago-extreme-force-protesters-journalists
All they knew was that their mother, their only parent since their father died five years ago, was being taken from them.
Across the country, US-born children like Febe and Angelo have become collateral damage in the Trump administration’s unprecedented crackdown on undocumented immigrants.
CNN identified more than 100 US citizen children, from newborns to teenagers, who have been left stranded without parents because of immigration actions this year, according to a review of verified crowdfunding campaigns, public records and interviews with families, friends, immigration attorneys and other advocates.
These cases have unfolded as the Trump administration has abandoned the “humane enforcement” of immigration laws when deporting mothers and fathers who entered the country illegally, according to policy documents.
Since President Donald Trump took office in January, American children across the country have ended up in the care of relatives, neighbors, friends, co-workers and even strangers. Their parents were picked up during raids on workplaces ranging from farms to meatpacking plants, coming out of check-ins with Immigration and Customs Enforcement or dropping their kids off at school.
In some cases, ICE appears to have violated protections that still remain in official policies by failing to allow undocumented parents time to find an appropriate caregiver or to make travel plans for their children as they are taken into custody and deported, CNN found. Unlike immigrant children, American children of immigrants do not fall within ICE’s jurisdiction and are not tracked by the agency.
An ICE spokesperson did not provide any data on how many cases the agency is aware of where US citizen children have been separated from their parents and would not comment on the removal of “humane” from official ICE policies. The spokesperson claimed that ICE “goes out of its way” to give parents the opportunity to designate a guardian or have their children accompany them upon removal.
“CNN is trying to obscure the fact that each of the illegal alien parents they are defending willingly chose to break our nation’s criminal and administrative laws and as a result of those choices, are responsible for what happens to their children – just as any U.S. citizen parent who breaks the law is when they are taken to jail,” the spokesperson said.
Accounts gathered by CNN included an autistic 11-year-old who was placed in foster care in Nebraska when her father was picked up by ICE in June, and a 10-month-old left with family friends when her single mother was arrested during a workplace raid at a cannabis farm in Southern California in July. In Michigan, the oldest daughter of four reportedly scrapped plans to attend college in the fall so she could raise her three younger siblings after their widowed father was detained.
“It’s literally a kid’s worst nightmare having someone come take your parents in the middle of the night,” said Wendy Cervantes, a longtime immigration policy expert who has worked with Democratic and Republican lawmakers to help craft federal policies that protect the children of immigrants. “No matter the outcome, you are turning a kid’s life upside down.”
‘Children at risk’
Federal agents donned riot gear and lobbed flash bang grenades and smoke bombs at protesters as they raided a pair of cannabis farms near the California coast this summer. When the smoke cleared, multiple employees were left injured and a worker fleeing one of the facilities plummeted 30 feet from the roof of a greenhouse to his death.
The raids made headlines for the chaotic and deadly scene that unfolded, as well as reports that a protestor fired at ICE agents.
What went largely unnoticed was just how many US citizen children — more than a dozen, according to CNN’s analysis — were left without parents to care for them.
One 15-year-old ended up on his own with his two younger brothers, 8 and 9, when his mother was arrested, her immigration attorney told CNN. From detention, the mother had told the attorney she wanted to see her children as soon as possible. But she was deported to Mexico only three days after the raid.
Martita Martinez-Bravo and her small nonprofit organization, Friends of Fieldworkers, have been attempting to fill in some of the gaps — gathering donations and delivering diapers, formula, clothes and toys to those in need. Since the raids, which swept up more than 300 undocumented workers, Martinez-Bravo’s phone constantly rings. Many families contacting her have had their primary or sole income-earner ripped away, leaving the remaining parent without a way to pay rent and other bills.
She said some of the most alarming calls have come from people who are now unexpectedly caring for children. She recalled one call about a babysitter who showed up to one of the farms with two babies in her arms the morning after the raid. Their parents had never come home, Martinez-Bravo said she was told.
“There is no government support, so all the support that is happening is from nonprofit groups and families,” said Martinez-Bravo. “It’s leaving children at risk.”
Martinez-Bravo wore a cheerful, embroidered red blouse on a Friday afternoon last month when she dropped off a large Target bag full of supplies — including toothbrushes, toothpaste and Lysol wipes — at a one-bedroom apartment where seven people had been living for more than a month.
The apartment had been tight when it was just a family of four living there – two farmworkers and their two children. But then the couple took in three more children – their niece and two nephews – when those kids’ parents were detained and quickly deported.
The aunt and uncle struggled to pay for food and rent, and their landlord told them too many people were living in the small apartment. The stress had become so great that the aunt — who is also undocumented — kept getting headaches. Just the week prior, she ended up in the hospital, she said.
When she could no longer afford a babysitter for the youngest of the children, she said, a family friend drove the 2-year-old boy — a US citizen — across the border to live with his father in Tijuana, Mexico. The father said he had come to the United States days after he found his own father shot dead in his house in Mexico. He said he and his son are now sharing a room with a roommate while his wife stays with her family thousands of miles away. He found a job on a farm and works six days a week, but nets less than $20 a day. After paying for child care, it’s a struggle to afford food and diapers, he said.
Back in California, the aunt says she worries about being separated from her own children, a teenager and 4-year-old, who were both born in the US and are citizens. She wants a better future for them, one where they don’t come home from long days picking produce, caked in mud like her and their father.
“Now I feel sad for everything happening,” she said in Spanish. “What happens if ICE takes me?”
A new kind of family separation
Previous immigration crackdowns had primarily focused on immigrants who had violent criminal records or were recent arrivals.
But now, as immigration agents scramble to meet the Trump administration’s aggressive quotas of 3,000 arrests a day, many immigrants who have lived in the country a decade or longer with no criminal records are being arrested, detained and deported — often within a matter of weeks or even days.
Many parents in the cases CNN identified had dutifully attended immigration appointments, paid taxes and received work permits and other authorization to remain in the country, according to interviews and records from parents, families and attorneys.
In prior policy documents, ICE noted that there were “limited circumstances in which detention is appropriate” for parents. While it was not unheard of under past administrations for immigrant parents to end up deported, ICE has historically given agents “discretion” to prevent children from being separated from their sole caregivers.
ICE has taken a different approach under Trump’s second term. The administration’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, has repeatedly said parents are to blame for entering the country illegally and having children here without being documented. “If (you’re) in the country illegally and you choose to have a US citizen child, that’s on you,” Homan told Politico in July. “If we want to send a message to the whole world … go have a US citizen child and you’re immune … we’re never going to solve this problem.”
ICE echoed this in its statement to CNN, saying that even if an undocumented immigrant attends immigration appointments, pays taxes or receives authorization to work in the US, they “are not absolved of their original offense of illegally entering the country.”
The agency’s “Detained Parents Directive,” meanwhile, has been changed to weaken protections for undocumented parents, most notably removing a written commitment to pursue “humane enforcement” of deportation laws. Instead, the guidance states that agents should “remain cognizant of the impact enforcement actions may have on a minor child.”
The administration’s updated policy still provides that undocumented parents should be given time to find an appropriate caregiver or to make travel plans for their children. Yet, some detained parents have alleged they were not given such accommodations, according to immigration attorneys and accounts detailed in interviews and online fundraisers.
In one case, a young girl was placed in foster care despite having family members who were willing to care for her, according to a nonprofit. In others, parents were deported so quickly that there wasn’t enough time for them to secure passports for their children to be able to join them.
“This ICE is not using their discretion,” said Heidi Altman, vice president of policy at the National Immigration Law Center. “The checks and balances that used to exist are gone.”
In Honduras and Guatemala — two countries many undocumented immigrants are being deported to — parents are arriving without their US citizen children and saying they weren’t given the option to bring them, researchers from the nonprofit advocacy group Women’s Refugee Commission said after visiting both places.
“Some parents were showing up inconsolable because they did not know where their children were or who was caring for them,” said Zain Lakhani, the group’s director of migrant rights and justice. “This is the new family separation crisis.”
In its statement, ICE said parents are given the opportunity to designate a guardian to care for their children or to have their children accompany them when they are deported. “That decision is entirely up to the illegal alien parents, and they are given a reasonable amount of time to make that decision,” the spokesperson said.
Citing the increasing likelihood that undocumented parents could end up in ICE custody, nonprofits have been holding community workshops to help parents consider their options, such as designating guardians for their children in the event they are separated. Lawmakers in several states have also recently introduced legislation to make it easier for parents to designate appropriate caregivers if they are taken.
“We are witnessing families being torn apart in real time — parents detained, unable to pick up their children from school and childcare,” Democratic California Assemblywoman Celeste Rodriguez said in a statement about legislation that is currently awaiting the governor’s signature. “This bill is not just about planning; it’s about creating a safety net.”
Lasting trauma
Mimi Lettunich was in the middle of work when she received a call from an immigration agent asking her whether she could pick up her friend Jackie Merlos’ four children. Merlos was being detained, and if she didn’t immediately find a US citizen to take her kids, they would end up in foster care.
Within hours, Lettunich found herself driving along the highway with 9-year-old triplets and their 7-year-old brother to care for indefinitely.
The children sat stunned in the back seat. Lettunich herself was trying to wrap her mind around what was happening, she told CNN. She couldn’t understand why immigration authorities would take away Merlos and her husband, well-regarded local business owners who had come to Portland, Oregon, from Honduras decades ago.
Lettunich hadn’t cared for young children in years — her own kids were now grown up. And she had a full-time job. As they drove to her Portland home, she realized she and her husband hadn’t even started to think about what they needed or how this was all going to work: Did they have toothbrushes? Where were they going to sleep? What were they going to have for dinner? How do we make sure they feel comfortable but also give them their space?
That first night at Lettunich’s, the children slept in their clothes because they didn’t have pajamas. She comforted them before bed, telling them they were safe and reading them stories. She told them they could think of this as “summer camp,” and the kids now call it “Camp Reindeer” because of how many deer they see in the backyard. In the days and then weeks that have followed, she and her husband have taken the kids swimming, to the zoo and out to dinner — anything to try to cheer them up. Because they have had to keep working too, they enrolled the children in day camps, and they often visit their parents in detention on the weekends.
But Lettunich said she worries every day about the impacts that they will be coping with for the rest of their lives because of the ordeal. “They fear for their parents,” she said. “They ask, ‘are Mom and Dad not coming home?’”
One of the kids has been keeping everything bottled up, she said. He doesn’t want to hear anything about what happened or talk about it, only wanting to “think of happy things.” And all of the children have started talking with a psychiatrist to try to begin processing the trauma, she said.
Less than three hours away in her cell at an ICE detention center in Tacoma, Washington, their mother, Jackie Merlos, is grappling with her own emotions, writing regular journal entries about her experience and her worries. US Customs and Border Protection, which initially detained Merlos and her husband, told CNN she was arrested “as she attempted to smuggle illegal aliens into the United States” and that formal removal proceedings were underway. Neither Merlos nor her husband has been charged with a crime related to this allegation, however, and Merlos has said she and her family were simply meeting her sister — a Canadian resident — at a park along the US-Canada border. ICE did not comment.
It has been more than 70 days since Merlos was separated from her kids, and her next court date isn’t until the middle of October.
“I feel powerless not being able to see or hug my children, play with them, and watch them grow,” she wrote a week after her children were separated from her. “I’m suffering, and my children are suffering psychologically. It’s not fair to separate children from their mom and dad.”
Sometimes Merlos convinces herself that what is happening is just a nightmare that she will wake up from. “My life feels meaningless without them,” she wrote.
But until the whole family is reunited, she urged her children to keep praying and to continue living their lives without her.
“Please don’t stop practicing your piano (David), guitar (Carlitos), violin (Abigail), and piano (Caleb),” Merlos wrote.
An untracked issue
Pleas for donations to help stranded children have been popping up online since immigration efforts ramped up earlier this year.
In some cases, the children themselves are asking for financial support to help pay for food, rent and utility bills. Teenagers describe being left on their own with younger siblings, and recent high school graduates say they have dropped out of college and returned home in the hopes of keeping their siblings housed, fed and out of the care of strangers.
“My mother is the most hard working woman I know, she is a single mother of 3 and has worked for us to always have everything we need and everything she’s had worked for her whole life was just taken away from her,” a daughter wrote in a July fundraiser. “Truly anything helps.”
Because the number of kids left behind by the ongoing ICE raids and deportation efforts is not being publicly tracked, CNN used the crowdfunding platform GoFundMe as a way to provide a snapshot of the issue, as well as interviews with families and attorneys, who confirmed additional cases to reporters. CNN’s count of more than 100 US citizen children does not include dozens of children whose citizenship status or age was unclear, or where fundraisers couldn’t be verified.
The fundraising accounts, which GoFundMe confirmed to CNN had been verified by the company’s trust and safety team, also served as a window into where separated children have ended up. Some were taken into foster care. Most were being cared for by family friends, community members or relatives.
ICE said it couldn’t comment on CNN’s analysis because it included anonymous families and some of the information had come from what it called “notoriously biased and unreliable” crowdfunding websites. The spokesperson did not respond to questions about how often children were ending up in this situation or whether this was something being internally tracked by the agency.
Immigration experts said said it is difficult to fully assess how widespread the issue is until the federal government comprehensively tracks and releases that data. There are millions of US citizen children living in households where their only parent or both parents are undocumented, Brookings Institution research shows.
Attorneys told CNN about cases ranging from an 8-year-old who allegedly watched her single mother get handcuffed and taken away by ICE to a one-year-old who is currently living with a foster family as the toddler’s mom fights for custody from detention.
“It’s stunning that we’re putting so much emphasis on hitting deportation numbers, and not thinking about all the collateral damage we’re doing,” said Leecia Welch, deputy litigation director at nonprofit Children’s Rights, who has been visiting families in immigrant detention centers to monitor conditions. “We’re traumatizing everybody involved in these situations and completely destabilizing their lives and causing long-term trauma.”
‘It terrifies me’
It was around 6:30 in the morning when Kenia Perez arrived home from her overnight shift at the hospital.
She had stopped at the store to get milk for her daughter’s cereal and was planning to go inside and wake her kids up and get them ready for school, when she saw two large, unfamiliar cars parked outside her apartment.
ICE agents were waiting for her.
“Run away as far as you can,” she texted her 14-year-old son, Isaac, who jumped out the window. Since Isaac was also undocumented, she worried ICE would take him too — leaving Febe and Angelo without any family in the country.
Agents in tactical vests and local police officers surrounded her in the parking lot.
Desperate to keep her children out of foster care, her next call was to Jeff Chaney, a family friend and coworker who had agreed just a day earlier to take guardianship of the children if ICE came for her — something she had become increasingly nervous about under the Trump administration.
Perez had been in the US for roughly a decade, fleeing cartel violence in her native Honduras. She described to CNN how she was assaulted, raped and left in a dumpster on her journey. She was pregnant when she was apprehended at the border and records show she was released under an order requiring regular check-ins with ICE. She met and married her husband in the years that followed and created a family in Galveston, Texas. Only months after she gave birth to her third child, her husband passed away from Covid in 2020, and she suddenly became the sole caregiver for her three children — two of whom, Febe and Angelo, are US citizens.
Perez said she paid taxes and documents show that she never missed a check-in with ICE. Her work permit is not set to expire until the spring of 2026. But ICE came for her anyway.
Unlike other cases examined by CNN, Perez said she was allowed to go into her apartment, wake her children, and tell them goodbye.
“I need you to be strong,” she remembers telling Febe and Angelo. “You see those men. They’re going to take Mom.”
Perez prayed she would be able to take her children with her to Honduras. Even though she knew it would be dangerous, she couldn’t imagine being separated.
But she was deported 11 days after her arrest, leaving her friend, Chaney, trying to lighten the kids’ moods. He took them to IHOP on the weekends and held movie nights at his house.
Chaney couldn’t keep the kids at his house given the long hours he worked at his two jobs, so the children spent several days bouncing around among a network of Perez’s coworkers’ homes until one of her undocumented friends gave them a place to stay, at least temporarily. Because the kids didn’t have access to any of the funds Perez had saved from her job, community members began supporting the family through a GoFundMe campaign.
In an interview with CNN, Chaney said that when he voted for Trump last year, he understood that immigration enforcement was a top priority for his administration. He supported the Republican Party’s promise to secure the border and to go after criminals and gang members.
But he never imagined that someone like Perez, his close friend and co-worker, would end up caught in the crackdown.
“This is not what I voted for,” he said, adding that he never supported the targeting of working-class people who had been doing everything right. “You don’t do this. This is inhumane what they’re doing.”
An ICE spokesperson told CNN Perez asked to be reunited with her children before she was deported, but that she refused to provide agents with their specific location. Perez told CNN she did not want to endanger any of her undocumented friends who were helping to care for her kids when she was first arrested, but that she had hoped that while she was in detention, she would have an opportunity to secure their passports so that they could be reunited when she was deported. “After exhausting all efforts, ICE proceeded with her removal in accordance with federal law,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
The spokesperson described Perez as an “irresponsible parent,” who “chose to use her children as a bargaining chip in an attempt to prevent her own removal from the country.”
“Any claims by her now that ICE improperly separated her from her kids are patently false and just another attempt to manipulate the system for her own benefit,” the spokesperson said.
From a small home on a dirt road in a neighborhood of San Pedro Sula, Honduras, known for gang violence, Perez called her kids every night, telling them everything was going to be OK. Her daughter’s dolls and her son’s toys sat waiting for them, along with two spots next to her in her bed.
More than two months after she was deported, Perez was finally able to secure the paperwork and passports needed for Febe and Angelo to reunite with her in Honduras, where her oldest son had also joined her. But she told CNN she worries about her children and the life they will have in one of the most violent countries in the world.
“It terrifies me,” she said. “I don’t like the decisions I’m making, but I’m tied hand and foot.”
METHODOLOGY
CNN’s analysis, which provided a snapshot of the number of US citizen children being stranded by ICE actions, included accounts from interviews with families, attorneys and nonprofit organizations, as well as fundraisers from the crowdfunding platform GoFundMe. CNN provided GoFundMe with a list of roughly 150 campaigns to confirm which fundraisers had been verified by the company’s Trust & Safety Team as part of its standard verification process, and reporters contacted the organizers and family members. The count does not include dozens of children whose citizenship status or age was unclear, or where fundraisers couldn’t be verified.
CNN’s Abel Alvarado, Norma Galeana and Yahya Abou-Ghazala contributed to this report.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/23/politics/us-citizen-children-separated-parents-deported-ice-invs
Adults and children alike were pulled from their Chicago apartments, crying and screaming, during a large overnight raid that has left tenants and neighbors shaken.
“I’ve been on military bases for a good portion of my life,” said Darrell Ballard, who lives in the building next door. “And the activity I saw – it was an invasion.”
Ballard recalled seeing residents detained outside the building for hours, after seeing a Black Hawk helicopter flying over the five-story building in the city’s South Shore neighborhood and military-sized vehicles and agents filling the parking lot early Tuesday morning.
All were part of a multiagency operation that led to the arrest of 37 undocumented immigrants, most of them from Venezuela but also including people from Mexico, Nigeria and Colombia, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told CNN.
In the past weeks, federal agents have been deployed on the streets of Chicago and have arrested more than 800 undocumented immigrants since September 8 during what the administration has titled “Operation Midway Blitz,” according to a news release from DHS.
It is unclear if those arrested at the South Shore apartment building are included in that number.
The building was targeted because it was “known to be frequented by Tren de Aragua members and their associates,” and two people arrested are believed to be members of the Venezuelan criminal gang, according to DHS. A number of others arrested had criminal histories that included aggravated battery and possession of a controlled substance, the agency said.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker condemned the federal operations in a statement released Friday.
“Federal agents reporting to Secretary Noem have spent weeks snatching up families, scaring law-abiding residents, violating due process rights, and even detaining U.S. citizens. They fail to focus on violent criminals and instead create panic in our communities,” the governor said.
Shattered windows marked the apartment building as seen in photos from the aftermath of the raid. Hallways were lined with debris and plastic bags while clothing, wall decor and lamps became piles of litter inside apartment units. CNN has reached out to the apartment building managers for comment.
People detained no matter their status
Tenants said it appears everyone in the building was detained by federal officers, including US citizens.
“It was scary, because I had never had a gun in my face,” Pertissue Fisher, who lives in the building, told CNN affiliate WLS. “They asked my name and my date of birth and asked me, did I have any warrants? And I told them, ‘No, I didn’t.’”
Fisher said she was handcuffed anyway, before being released around 3 a.m. and was told anyone with an outstanding warrant, even if it was unrelated to immigration, would not be released.
At least one US citizen with an active narcotics warrant was arrested during the operation and turned over to the Chicago Police Department, DHS said.
Ballard said the majority of those he saw handcuffed outside were Black residents and “quite a few” were detained for two to three hours.
Four children who are US citizens with undocumented parents were taken into custody, DHS said, including a child who was allegedly found with a Tren de Aragua member.
“For their own safety and to ensure these children were not being trafficked, abused or otherwise exploited, these children were taken into custody until they could be put in the care of a safe guardian or the state,” a DHS spokesperson said.
Across the country, US-born children have become collateral damage in the Trump administration’s unprecedented crackdown on undocumented immigrants. CNN identified more than 100 US citizen children, from newborns to teenagers, who have been left stranded without parents because of immigration actions this year, according to a review of verified crowdfunding campaigns, public records and interviews with families, friends, immigration attorneys and other advocates.
Another neighbor, Eboni Watson, said she and others ducked for cover when hearing several flash bangs go off.
“They was terrified. The kids was crying. People was screaming. They looked very distraught. I was out there crying when I seen the little girl come around the corner, because they was bringing the kids down, too, had them zip tied to each other,” Watson told WLS, recalling trucks and military-style vans were used to separate adults from their children.
In its statement addressing the raid, DHS noted it was still gathering information about those arrested “due to the size” of the operation and will provide more information.
“Federal law enforcement officers will not stand by and allow criminal activity flourish in our American neighborhoods,” DHS said.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/03/us/chicago-apartment-ice-raid
A Chicago community is reeling following a late-night immigration raid on a South Side apartment complex.
Over 300 armed federal agents swarmed a five-story apartment complex late Tuesday evening in what became an hours-long immigration raid.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, alongside the FBI and U.S. Border Patrol agents, were targeting over 30 suspected members of the Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said 37 people were arrested.
Federal agents were seen rappelling from a Black Hawk helicopter on top of the building.
“My building is shaking. So, I’m like, ‘What is that?’ Then I look out the window, it’s a Blackhawk helicopter,” witness Dr. Alii Muhammad told ABC7 Chicago.
Residents said they ducked for cover as they heard several flash bangs go off, reports MSNBC.
One resident described the experience as “terrifying.”
“It was terrifying. The kids was crying. People were screaming. They were very distraught. I was out there crying when I seen the little girl come around the corner because they were bringing the kids out too, they had them zip-tied together,” said resident Eboni Watson to ABC7 Chicago.
“It was scary because I never had a gun put in my face,” another resident told the outlet.
Although the raid was aimed at detaining the suspected gang members, many residents say that U.S. citizens and children were swept into the mix.
Watson told the outlet that trucks and military-style vans were used to separate parents from their children. Other neighbors said agents destroyed property to get in the building, with doors blown off their hinges and holes in the wall, reports ABC7 Chicago.
According to MSNBC, dozens of residents were pulled from their homes in zip ties, including children. Residents were detained and held for hours, and cops told them that if they had any unrelated warrants, they would not be returning to their residences.
The raid on the apartment complex comes as Chicago residents have continuously staged protests against increased immigration enforcement activity in downtown Chicago. U.S. President Donald Trump previously vowed to deploy National Guard Troops to fight crime in Chicago, mirroring his current approach in Washington, D.C.
Beginning on Sept. 9, the Trump administration sent ICE to the city through Operation Midway Blitz. The U.S. The DHS launched the operation, which focuses on individuals in the country without legal status who also have criminal records or pending charges.
On Tuesday, during a massive military meeting at the Marine Corps Museum in Quantico, Virginia, Trump declared that Chicago is one of many Democratic cities that should be used as a “training ground” for the U.S. military.
https://www.irishstar.com/news/us-news/ice-agents-drag-children-bed-36011822
Rodney Taylor, a Liberia-born man who is a double amputee and is missing three fingers on one hand has filed a habeas corpus petition in federal court seeking release from Georgia’s Stewart detention center, after being held there by Ice for eight months.
“What is at stake in this case … is one of the most profound individual interests recognized by our legal system: whether Ice may unilaterally take away – without a lawful basis – his physical freedom, ie, his ‘constitutionally protected interest in avoiding physical restraint,’” the petition says.
The action is “a canary in the coal mine for what’s about to happen” nationwide, said Sarah Owings, Taylor’s immigration attorney. “[T]housands of habeas claims are going to be filed across the country,” she said, after a Board of Immigration Appeals decision on 5 September dramatically curtailed the immigration system’s ability to release detainees while awaiting decisions on their status.
This is making immigration attorneys turn to federal district courts, observers told the Guardian.
Taylor’s continued detention despite his extensive medical needs is “yet another stark example of the cruelty of this administration”, said Helen L Parsonage, the attorney who filed the petition.
Brought to the US by his mother on a medical visa when he was a child, Taylor had 16 operations for his medical conditions. Now 46, he has lived in the US nearly his entire life and works as a barber. He got engaged only 10 days before Ice detained him in January – due to a burglary conviction from when he was a teenager and for which the state of Georgia pardoned him in 2010, according to Owings, who shared some of Taylor’s paperwork with the Guardian.
Taylor has a pending application for US residence – commonly known as a “green card” – but has not been released on bond while the federal government determines his immigration status. He says he has been subjected to multiple mishaps in detention, including the screws coming out of his prosthetic legs, causing him to fall and injure his hand; and, during different periods, not being able to charge the batteries in his prosthetic legs or get them calibrated, leading to other injuries.
Concurrently, the Trump administration has dismantled the office for civil rights and civil liberties (CRCL) and the immigration detention ombudsman (Oido) – two federal offices that provided oversight for healthcare and other issues.
Habeas corpus, a legal tool meant to challenge the legal basis for detention, “predates the United States and goes back to the English legal system”, said César García Hernández, a law professor at Ohio State University. It fundamentally means that a detained person has the right for a judge to rule on whether their detention is unlawful.
Taylor’s petition is important because it comes after the September decision, which “virtually eliminate[d] bond for people no matter how long they’ve lived here and whether they have jobs and contribute to our nation”, according to the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA).
“The meaning of this case at this point in time is because it is a direct challenge to this administration’s … recent attempt to expand detention authority,” García Hernández said.
Immigration attorneys nationwide are pursuing the same strategy – but it requires a few steps.
“Most immigration lawyers have never seen the inside of a federal court,” said Charles Kuck, an Atlanta immigration attorney of more than three decades. That’s because immigration courts are a separate system from federal district courts.
This is leading to training sessions for immigration attorneys on filing habeas claims being staged nationwide, so they can try to get tens of thousands of detainees released from detention while their cases are resolved.
Since district courts are separate from immigration courts, immigration attorneys are also having to follow a process of admission into district courts, which then authorizes them to file habeas petitions. In Georgia and some other states, this can include traveling to the district court with jurisdiction over the area where the detention center is located and attending a ceremony.
“We’re having to adapt,” Owings said. “We’re figuring out how to respond.”
Several observers familiar with Taylor’s case said he would never have been detained without bond for eight months during previous administrations, given his medical condition. “This case is an example of what happens when Ice is judge, jury and executioner,” Owings said. “Now, if you’re coming in the door, there’s no going out,” she said.
In the months to come, she added, “There will be more Rodneys. There will be more claims from people treated the same – without medical care, without guardrails to review their situations, without the ability to be released.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/25/ice-immigration-rodney-taylor-georgia
