Archie Collins went to sleep the night of the raid like he often does: on the floor and hungry. He was up on the fifth floor of the five-story brick building at 7500 S. South Shore Drive, in Apartment 502. He had no gas for his stove. No electricity, except for that provided by an extension cord from a neighboring unit. The U.S. Postal Service stopped delivering mail long ago.
He didn’t hear the approaching helicopters. He didn’t see their spotlights shining through the windows, or hear the snipers land atop the roof, ready to take aim. He didn’t feel the presence of the federal agents, from ICE and the FBI, until they were at his door. He awoke only when they kicked it down. When they were upon him.
What happened in his building in the early-morning hours of Sept. 30 has become perhaps the most astonishing moment in a month of astonishing moments surrounding Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in and around Chicago since the start of the Department of Homeland Security’s so-called Operation Midway Blitz. A military-style deportation crackdown made for cameras and funded by taxpayers, the mission was announced on Sept. 8 with promises to “target the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens” in the city.
In the five weeks since, more than 1,500 people have been arrested, according to an ICE spokesperson. Protesters and agents have clashed outside an ICE detention facility in Broadview, where residents have become familiar with the burning sensation of tear gas on their skin. A single father with no known history of violence was fatally shot by an ICE agent who said the man was trying to run him over. The sight of agents chasing people and loading them into unmarked vehicles has become common throughout Chicago.
With no immediate regard for citizenship or legal status, the agents have repeatedly detained people first and sought information about them later. It’s a scene that has played out repeatedly since early September in small-scale street stops, on courthouse steps, outside hardware stores and, infamously, inside a neglected apartment building at 7500 S. South Shore Drive.
Inside the 130-unit mid-rise, hastily nailed wooden boards now cover entrances where those who were detained used to live. During the raid, agents broke down doors and smashed windows. They forced residents outside and bound some of their hands with zip-ties. They corralled them into rented box trucks, while ignoring their cries of being fellow Americans.
In what appears to have been a warrantless operation in a largely Black community, the federal government has provided no public accounting of how many people were detained, who remains in custody and what happened to the children who were living in the building before the blitz but haven’t been seen by residents since that night. As a result, the distrust and anger has only deepened in a neighborhood already living with the generational trauma inflicted by police brutality.
Paul Gowder, a Northwestern University professor with expertise in constitutional law, described the raid as a “mind-blowing violation of the Fourth Amendment.” He considered the military-style siege of the building to be likely “one of the most unconstitutional things the federal government has ever done.”
“The whole point of our system of warrants for searches, due process rights to defend yourself in court, and so forth, is that we don’t actually know that somebody’s a criminal,” Gowder said. “We don’t actually know that somebody’s apartment building or somebody’s individual apartment is a crime area, unless a court has said so.
“You can’t just start with, ‘Oh, you know there’s crime, therefore we can do whatever we want.’”
No public criminal charges have been filed against anyone in connection with the raid as of Friday, either in U.S. District Court or in Cook County. A federal law enforcement source said no cases had even been sent for referral by the agencies involved, which would be the first step in pursuing a federal criminal charge.
The Tribune has been able to confirm the identity of only one immigrant taken into custody by federal agents that night: a 41-year-old pizza delivery man whose family said he first came to the United States from Mexico when he was 10 years old. Currently in a Kentucky jail, he has no apparent criminal history.
While DHS has said the raid was the result of federal criminal warrants, none have been made publicly available. In fact, in a video released by the Chicago Police Department on Friday, a federal agent confirmed he didn’t know about a warrant involving one U.S. citizen until after the man had been detained.
By the time Midway Blitz arrived at his door, Collins had already had enough. He’d grown tired of living without reliable power and without gas, tired of living in a place he described as “infested, man” with “rats and roaches, termites.”
“Everything, you understand?”
And then came the influx of migrants, he said, and the further neglect of a building already in disrepair and, eventually, the sound of helicopters he didn’t register until the agents were already inside, yelling. Even before the night they came through his door, “we were already living (expletive) up,” Collins said.
“Now, when those people came, they made it even worse.”
Two days after the raid, DHS featured it in a slickly produced video on social media. The clip begins with the sound of the helicopters. The spotlights dance on the side of the building. Instrumental music — a song titled “Elysia” and described as “serious, tense, uplifting” in an online catalog — begins to play.
The agents hold guns and wear tactical gear while they climb a ladder into the building. It looks like a scene from a movie as they apprehend people and lead some into vans. Along with the video is a message from DHS: “Darkness is no longer your ally.” it says. “We will find you.”
In the video, the building at 7500 S. South Shore Drive appears as though it’s part of a set. In reality it’s a place of despair and neglect, one the Postal Service has deemed too “hazardous or unsafe” to provide service, according to a spokesperson. One that has failed city inspections seven times in the past year, and where a legal fight has led to its foreclosure.
Now Collins and his neighbors, the ones left, are trying to make sense of what happened — how migrants, many of them Venezuelan, could’ve been placed there only to be targeted.
“What was the purpose of having them here, just to come and take them back?” Collins asked.
‘A prisoner housing area’
It was a little after 2 a.m. on Sept. 30 when agents crashed through Collins’ door, he said. They led him outside and placed his hands in zip ties. He turned to notice the sidewalks full of people, some only partially clothed. He waited for a while on a bus, which the federal agents referred to as “a prisoner housing area.”
He kept saying, “I’m a citizen of the United States.” He kept saying, “I’m not who you’re looking for.”
“They was really trying to come and get the Venezuelans,” Collins said, referencing the migrants who had moved into the building, many of them fleeing whatever terrors they faced in their homeland only to end up in another untenable situation in Chicago. “But I don’t understand this. … They don’t know the difference between American citizens and Venezuelans?”
Authorities have disclosed the name of only one person taken into custody that night. Records show Nathan Howard, 47, was handed over to Chicago police after federal agents discovered he had an outstanding warrant for missing a court date in a drug-related criminal case.
In a video recording released by the Chicago Police Department on Friday, a Chicago police officer asked about the circumstances surrounding Howard’s apprehension. A board patrol agent — identified as the arresting officer — acknowledges that no one knew about the warrant until after Howard was detained.
“Just tell me who handcuffed ’em and what time frame,” the Chicago police officer says in the video.
“Everybody was detained by the special ops guys and brought here to a prisoner housing area,” the agent replies. “I took his information, I determined he was a U.S. citizen, I ran his info, and he has a bench warrant.”
As he pleaded his case in the so-called “prisoner housing area,” Collins said, the agents “hear you, but they don’t hear you.”
His account is typical among those who experienced the raid or witnessed it. Across the street, Tyrone Billups, who had come to the neighborhood to visit family, heard the helicopters and then watched while federal agents descended on ropes, as if something from “video games or movies,” he said. Then he heard the unmistakable boom of the flash-bangs.
Dewayne Jackson, who has lived in the building for two years, could still see the rush of the “army people,” as he put it, a week later. He vividly recalled the agents forcing everyone out of the building in the dark of night, refusing to give them time to gather their things or even get dressed.
“All the males … and then the females and the kids,” he said. “A lot of people ain’t have no clothes on.”
It was, he said, like something from TV, the agents with “glow sticks, and all type of (expletive).”
Samantha Stamps, another resident, said she watched the raid from her fourth-floor window. She witnessed agents leading zip-tied people to separate buses: one for migrants and one for Black people.
Cassandra Murray was not among those forced outside, but she watched everything “in disbelief,” she said, from the entryway of her fourth-floor apartment. Armed men told her to remain inside, so she looked on as they entered units that Murray said were occupied by squatters and forcibly removed them.
“I felt sorry for them because they had absolutely nowhere else to go,” she said.
When Venezuelans started moving into the building in 2023, she said they were normal neighbors but left garbage in the hallways and “didn’t clean up enough.” The building had become overrun with rodents. Murray’s complaints to building management went unanswered, she said, so she used a translator app on her phone to communicate with the migrants:
“I love all of y’all, but if we live together we have to clean up after ourselves,” the message said.
And things got a little better. For a while, at least.
Since the raid more than two weeks ago, Murray has moved out. Others can’t. At least one of her former neighbors, a 45-year-old woman who asked to remain unidentified, said she’s close to leaving. She’d been out seeing friends when she returned home to the sights and sounds of the raid. She estimated that five children were among those zip-tied, alongside roughly 30 adults.
Another witness, Ebony Sweets Watson, 31, said she watched while agents separated men from women and children, zip-tied their hands, and loaded them into Budget rental trucks.
“Imagine somebody coming in the middle of the night, taking your kids away from you, zip-tying them, and you have no idea where they’re going, what’s going to happen to them, you don’t know if you’ll ever see them again —especially if those kids are U.S. citizens and you’re not,” said Watson, who volunteers with COFI, a Chicago-based organization that helps empower Black and Latina mothers.
The Tribune spoke with four South Shore residents who said they saw children zip-tied that night, but has not seen any pictures or videos to independently confirm those recollections. The Department of Homeland Security has denied on social media that it restrained children that night, but the agency did not respond to repeated requests for comment on this story.
About a week after the raid, the halls and stairwells smelled like rotting garbage and urine. It’d been like that for a long time. What was new was that remnants of the 37 people ICE apprehended littered the halls. There were new diapers. An old pizza box. A hot pink Huffy bike with training wheels.
Collins didn’t have much before that night, and now he doesn’t have a door, either. As a man who often never knows where his next meal will come from, he constantly worries someone might come in and steal the canned food he receives from a nearby church.
‘Hostile theater’
The building’s exterior tells a story of neglect and abuse, of a place that was forgotten — until the night the helicopters descended — in a neighborhood of contrasts. In the days after the raid, broken and twisted blinds lined open windows. Others had extension cords hanging out of them. Side doors hung open. Dirt and grime lined the hall just past the front entryway.
Out front, a sign advertised “newly renovated apartments” for rent. Ones with “elevator access,” despite the broken elevators, and “stainless steel appliances,” despite the lack of working utilities and an “integrated security system,” despite the absence of any security.
There was history here, at least, in South Shore. A strong sense of place and enduring community pride.
Kanye West grew up just half a mile south. Michelle Obama’s childhood home stands about a mile away off of Euclid Avenue, where she and Barack Obama lived, briefly, after they were married. Jesse Jackson lived for a long time in South Shore’s Jackson Park Highlands, an enclave of stately residences also once home to Chicago Bears legend Gale Sayers.
Decades ago, the Thunderbird Motel stood atop the land now occupied by the building at 7500 S. South Shore Drive, near the corner with East 75th Street. The motel lured visitors with an inviting roadside sign — the kind that would’ve been fitting on the old Route 66 — and its close proximity to Rainbow Beach. In time, though, 75th Street in South Shore morphed into a place to fear.
“That quadrant of South Shore had this nickname that people in the neighborhood do not like, and I understand why they don’t like it,” said Carlo Rotella, an English professor at Boston College who grew up in South Shore. That nickname: “Terror Town,” which became synonymous with gang violence and crime, and representative of the plight of parts of the South Side.
Rotella grew up in the 1960s and’ 70s in South Shore and visited often in recent years while working on a book, “The World Is Always Coming to an End,” about his old neighborhood. It has taken many forms, from its origins with German truck farmers and English railroad workers and its transformation to an Irish neighborhood, then Jewish, before the white flight of the 1950s and ’60s. In Boston, Rotella followed the news of the ICE raid back home and had one thought:
“People in South Shore have felt starved for the attention of government, of anyone in power, for decades,” he said. “It seems like an especially cruel irony that, when such attention finally comes, it takes the form of hostile theater — making a spectacle out of beating up on poor people.”
In the hours after the raid, a DHS statement described it as an “enforcement operation” meant to target “a location known to be frequented by Tren de Aragua members and their associates.” Tren de Aragua is a gang known for its origins in a Venezuelan prison. President Donald Trump declared it a foreign terrorist organization earlier this year, reflecting his administration’s emphasis on deporting its members in the United States.
In the aftermath of the raid, though, it’s unclear how many — if any — of the 37 people ICE detained were gang members or associates. The Trump administration is often quick to celebrate the capture of the “worst of the worst,” as it has described them, by releasing mugshots and purported criminal records of those detained. That fanfare has been noticeably missing, however, from all its news releases related to the raid at 7500 S. South Shore Drive.
Mark Fleming, associate director of federal litigation for the National Immigrant Justice Center, said the “absence of answers from the federal government” in the wake of the raid has cast even more doubt on the constitutionality of the operation. The Department of Homeland Security has done little, he said, to prove its “vague representations” that the raid was tied to intelligence about Venezuela-based Tren de Aragua gang members living in the South Shore building.
“They have not demonstrated what their evidence is for any claim about Tren de Aragua,” Fleming said. “We have no criminal warrant, we have no people presented in criminal court. We have very vague claims that they had intelligence that TDA members or associates spent time at that building, yet they have not produced a shred of evidence of that.”
What’s also unclear is how and why the building became a landing place for so many migrants in the first place. Starting in 2022, more than 50,000 migrants, mostly from Venezuela, arrived in Chicago on buses sent by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. After spending months in cramped city shelters, many of the asylum-seekers eventually settled in apartments on the South and West sides.
The rent was cheaper in those areas, some migrants said then, and landlords more likely to participate in the state’s short-term rental assistance program. The state often paid above market rate for units in neighborhoods considered among the city’s most violent. The program, though, did not thoroughly vet buildings or landlords, and so some migrants landed in places that seemed unlivable.
One woman, in a Morgan Park bungalow, lived amid a crumbling ceiling and wet floors. Another, in South Shore, lived in an apartment infested by bedbugs. State records indicate that the building at 7500 S. South Shore Drive took part in the migrant housing program. Gradually, residents there noticed more and more migrants.
“After a while, you see them so much, and then it’s like, we’re friendly,” said Dewayne Jackson, one of the building’s residents.
Jackson walked along East 75th Street days after the raid alongside a friend, who also lives in the building. They watched while a crew of workers cleared debris out of a back exit and thought about the night when many of their neighbors disappeared.
He and others in the neighborhood, in the building and out, were still trying to understand the mechanics of it all. The ones most well-versed in the recent history wondered how it made sense for Abbott to send busloads of migrants to Chicago and for those migrants to wind up in inhospitable places throughout the city, only for the federal government to come for them.
And now Abbott, too, has supported the Texas National Guard’s deployment to Illinois.
“This is the arsonist who also sells insurance who also has a fire department,” said U.S. Rep. Jonathan Jackson, who represents part of the city’s South Side and the south suburbs.
Congressman Jackson lives not far from 7500 S. South Shore Drive. In the early-morning hours of Sept. 30, he said, his phone started ringing. A neighbor who’s a military veteran later told him the sounds of the helicopters triggered his post-traumatic stress disorder. It was as if an invasion was starting.
A vulnerable building
The federal forces arrived past midnight on Sept. 30, the dark of a Monday night stretching into Tuesday morning. The agents — from ICE, the FBI, U.S. Customs, Border Patrol and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — were dressed as though they were “Call of Duty” soldiers, said Tyrone Billups, the witness across the street.
Those who arrived came prepared for battle. As if going to war. It looked that night along South Shore Drive as though Trump was serious when he suggested that American cities could serve as training grounds for soldiers.
What the federal agents found, though, was a building as vulnerable as any in the city. A building that “is basically 7-Eleven,” said one resident, Darren Hightower, because “you can come any time you want,” in and out of unlocked entrances. Living in the building is “like being held hostage,” Hightower said. “You want to go, but you can’t go.”
“It’s disgusting day after day and it seems to only get worse day after day. This is before and after the migrants, since everybody wants to blame the migrants,” he said.
Jonah Karsh, a community organizer with the Metropolitan Tenants Organization, first visited the building last year after receiving word that residents had gone weeks without cooking gas.
“From day one, the conditions in the building were deplorable,” said Karsh, who made at least seven trips to 7500 S. South Shore Drive in an attempt to organize residents to take action. “This is the worst condition of any building that I’ve seen.”
The building’s recent history conveys a story of failed policies and oversight that have left some of the city’s most forgotten in even more precarious positions. The recent legal history surrounding 7500 S. South Shore Drive is messy, and has been since the Wisconsin-based investor Trinity Flood purchased the property, along with two others in the neighborhood, in 2020.
Not long after, Flood sued the previous building owners, alleging they had misled her about its condition and that she was unaware the building required 24-hour armed security at a cost of $15,000 per month. That lawsuit was settled in 2023 but the property has gone into foreclosure, with Wells Fargo alleging it’s owed more than $27.5 million.
Flood, the owner, didn’t return multiple phone calls seeking comment. After the building failed an inspection earlier this year, the city filed a lawsuit against its owners in Cook County Circuit Court, records show.
At 7500 S. South Shore, the trickle-down effect of the building’s neglect resulted in the loss of security and the gradual erosion of basic services. Somewhere along the way, routine maintenance stopped, Hightower said. Service calls went unanswered. Loitering increased, along with the migrant population. Hightower came to believe that gang members were among some of the building’s residents, but he never saw anyone interfering with the maintenance or operation.
“On the narrative that gang members were running the building, that is false,” he said.
In June, though, a killing in the building underscored its danger and became a political opportunity. It happened in Apartment 300, where a man named Gregori Arias was fatally shot. Three months later, police arrested Jose Coronado-Meza, 25, and charged him with first-degree murder. On Sept. 22, ICE sent out a press release about Coronado-Meza, identifying him as a “criminal illegal alien” from Venezuela charged with “a brutal, execution-style murder.”
The statement blamed Coronado-Meza’s presence in Chicago on the Biden administration. ICE announced it “lodged an arrest detainer with the Cook County Jail to ensure he is not released into American neighborhoods.”
Eight days later, in the middle of the night, agents arrived at Coronado-Meza’s old apartment building.
Pepe’s story
At the building, there are mementos of the departed and no way to know where anyone was taken. It is as if they’ve vanished, leaving behind traces of lives interrupted. After masked agents took pizza delivery man Jose Miguel Lopez away, almost two weeks passed before family members heard from him, and when they did, the conversation lasted four minutes.
Lopez, known as Pepe to family, was born in Mexico and first came to the United States when he was 10. He skipped his delivery shift the night of the raid because of the immigration enforcement action throughout the city.
He was in his apartment with his girlfriend when agents grabbed him. In a video from that night, she can heard saying, “I love you, Pepe,” as they load him into a box truck.
His family knew nothing about his whereabouts for nearly a fortnight. Then at last came a quick phone call.
“At least now we know he is alive,” said his cousin Jose Luis Lopez, who said Pepe had been pressured by agents to sign a voluntary departure form. For now, Pepe is detained at the Hopkins County Jail in Kentucky, about 330 miles south of his old home in South Shore.
Family members insist Pepe has no ties to criminal activity or any affiliation with a gang. A Tribune search found no criminal charges in his name, and his cousin described him as “a hardworking man.” The building is full of stories like Pepe’s, but most of them come without names or personal details.
Nothing is known about most of their whereabouts. Little remains of what they left behind. Ana Gil, the co-founder of the Venezuelan Alliance of Illinois, has sought answers but “no one has been able to confirm who was arrested or where they were taken,” she said. They’ve spoken to surrounding schools and churches. They can’t even locate the name of a single missing child.
“These people fled political persecution and authoritarianism,” she said. “Now they are being persecuted here. In South Shore, those taken have practically disappeared.”
‘That building will have a memory’
Felipe Dominguez arrived at 7500 S. South Shore Drive on a recent Monday morning and walked into the entryway filled with grime. He ignored the trash everywhere, and the smell, as he walked up the stairs toward Apartment 411.
By then, politicians and legal experts were trying to make sense of the raid, but from a distance that provided a measure of comfort. Gowder, the constitutional law professor at Northwestern University, questioned how federal agents could’ve raided an entire apartment building, and forced their way into units, without warrants.
U.S. Rep. Robin Kelly, a Democrat whose district includes the apartment building, said she’s received no details and is left wondering whether there actually is evidence of gang activity in the building. She said agents had no regard for “human dignity” or “due process” and likened their actions to “gestapo tactics.”
“We need to get answers. I mean how many times are they going to do that,” she said. “I’m sure it will only be done in certain parts of the city — maybe South, maybe West sides — but they’re not going to do that all over. They’re not going to do that in communities where the income is higher, I’ll put it like that.”
Cassio Mendoza, a spokesperson for Mayor Brandon Johnson, called the raid “a social media stunt for Trump to point to in his ongoing war on Chicago.” And Rep. Jackson, who lives near 75th and South Shore Drive, predicted the raid will leave one more layer of “scar tissue” that will require healing in a place where there’s already so much of it.
“That building will have a memory,” he said. “The neighborhood will have a memory.”
Back in the building, Dominguez climbed the stairs and made his way to the fourth floor. He walked past a child’s teddy bear, legs crossed and facing up, next to an empty beer bottle, and past the abandoned pink bike with training wheels at the end of a hallway littered with what remained from the people who’d been taken away.
Dominguez, himself, had been sent to the building to collect things his ex-girlfriend left there. Her name was Maria, he said, and she’d been rounded up in the raid. Where was she, now?
“I don’t know, really,” he said in broken English. When he arrived at Apartment 411 he found a wooden board where the door used to be, and a large plastic trash can filled with what he presumed to be her things. None of it was worth sifting through. Dominguez, 73, identified as Mexican but said he’d been an American citizen for 59 years. His ex-girlfriend was not.
She’d wound up in this place through happenstance, “in a (expletive) apartment,” he said in Spanish, and there was no trace of what little money he’d been told to look for. There was no way to get inside her old apartment, and Dominguez stared at the wooden board for a few moments, and then the trash can, before concluding that whatever she had was now gone.
And so he turned around and walked back down the dimly lit stairs, past the teddy bear and the bike again. And even though he and his ex-girlfriend were no longer together, he said he still loved her. He felt a responsibility to try to find her belongings and felt badly that he could not. Outside, a few residents wandered in and out. Most did not want to talk about what they experienced.
The ones who did described similar scenes of fear and could recount the flash bangs and helicopters and the barking of agents that looked more like soldiers. Archie Collins described all of those things and more.
And he, too, questioned the point of it all.
“I thought this was the United States of America,” he said.
Story reported by Andrew Carter, Cam’ron Hardy, Rebecca Johnson, Caroline Kubzansky, Jason Meisner, Antonio Perez, Dan Petrella, Gregory Royal Pratt, Laura Rodríguez Presa, Sam Charles and Jake Sheridan. Written by Andrew Carter.