It was 3:30 am when 10 American immigration and customs agents gathered in a parking lot in the suburbs of Chicago for a briefing on a suspect they hoped. They reviewed a description of the person, made sure that their radios were on the same channel and discussed the place where the nearest hospital was in the event of a problem.
“Intention of not being there,” said one of the police officers, before they go up in their vehicles and go.
Throughout the city and the surrounding suburbs, other teams moved to support “the Midway Blitz operation”. He sparked the agenda of the mass deportations of President Donald Trump on a city and a state which had some of the strongest laws preventing local officials from cooperating with the application of immigration.
Ice launched the operation on September 8, attracting activists and immigrant communities fearing large -scale arrests or aggressive tactics used in other cities targeted by the Republican President. They say that there was a significant increase in agents of the application of immigration, although a military deployment in Chicago has not yet materialized.
The Associated Press has taken a look with ice in a suburb of Chicago – a large part of the recent objective – to see how this operation takes place.
A wait before dawn, then two arrests
A voice came on the radio: “He got into the car. I don’t know if it’s the target.”
Someone corresponding to the description of the man whom Ice was looking out of the house, rose in a car and moved away from the street doubled with trees. Not knowing if it was their goal, the officers followed. A few minutes later, with the car approaching the highway, the voice of the radio said: “He has the physical description. We just can’t see the face well.”
“Do it,” said Marcos Charles, the actor in the application and dismissal operations.
The agents of several vehicles quickly exceeded the car and locked it. After talking to the man, they realized that he was not the person sought, but that he was in the United States illegally, so they placed him in police custody.
Finally, a little after Dawn broke on the brick houses of one and two floors, the man they were looking for came out of the house and rose in a car. Ice officers got closer. The man left the car and was arrested. Ice said the two men were illegally in the country and had legal lockers.
Mr. Charles called him a “successful operation”.
“There was no security problem on the part of our officers, nor the individuals we have stopped. And that went well,” he said.
“Ice does not belong here”
Activists and ice reviews say that this is more and more the norm in immigration operations.
They indicate videos showing that ice agents break Windows to apprehend the suspects, a chaotic confrontation in front of a popular Italian restaurant in San Diego, and stopped like that of a tufts university student in March by masked agents outside his apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts, as the neighbors looked at.
Charles said that Ice uses an “appropriate” quantity and that the agents respond to the suspects who do not follow the orders more and more.
There was “an increase in people who do not comply,” he said, blaming the inflammatory rhetoric of activists who, he said, encourage people to resist.
The alderman André Vasquez, who chairs the Committee of the Municipal Council of Chicago on the rights of immigrants and refugees, was lively opposed to this description, lacking the ice for all climbing.
“We are not here to provoke chaos. The president is ”, Mr. Vasquez. He accused agents of the application of the immigration law of having tried to provoke activists of reacting excessively in order to justify the appeal in greater use of force such as the troops of the National Guard. “The ice does not belong here.”
Immigrant death death by the ice agent increases tensions
Chicago was already on board when a shot on September 12 increased tensions further.
The American Department of Internal Security said that an ice agent had fatally killed Silverio Villegas González, a Mexican immigrant who tried to escape the arrest in a suburb of Chicago by driving his car to the officers and dragging one of them. The department said that the officer thought that his life had been threatened and had opened fire, killing the man.
Charles said he could not comment because there is an open investigation. But he said he had met the hospital officer, given his injuries and estimated that the strength used was appropriate.
The officer did not carry a bodily camera, said Charles.
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker demanded “full factual accounting” of filming. Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum sentenced death and said Mexico demanded an in -depth investigation.
“These tactics have led to the loss of life of one of the members of our community,” said the representative of the democratic state, Norma Hernandez.
In another use of the incident force under “Midway Blitz” which sparked criticism, an American citizen was arrested by immigration agents alongside his father and struck by a pistol paralyzing Tuesday in the suburbs of Plaines, Illinois, said the human lawyer.
Local defenders also condemned ice agents to wear masks, do not identify themselves and not use body cameras – actions that contrast strongly with the policy of the Chicago police department.
‘It was time to hit Chicago’
Charles said there were no calendar for the ice -directed operation in the Chicago region. Thursday, those responsible for the application of immigration laws arrested nearly 550 people. Charles said that 50% to 60% of them are targeted arrests, which means that they are people in charge of immigration specifically try to find.
He rejected the criticisms that Ice targets people at random, saying that the agents “did not come out in the parking lots of Home Depot” to carry out blind arrests.
Charles said that Ice had brought more than 200 officers from all over the country for the operation.
He said that for too long, cities like Chicago who limited cooperation with ice had enabled immigrants, especially those who have judicial lockers, to remain illegally in the country. It was time to act, he said.
“It was time to hit Chicago.”
This story was reported by the Associated Press.
The associated press writer Christine Fernando in Chicago contributed to this report.
