People in Little Village used to go to Baltazar Enríquez’s office to get their whistles. He estimates he handed out thousands last year during the immigration raids that roiled Chicago and its surrounding suburbs.
When they walk in now, it’s not whistles they’re after. It’s empathy. Someone to listen. A moment to vent or to grieve in the aftermath of what the administration of President Donald Trump touted as Operation Midway Blitz.
“How do we heal?” Enríquez, the president of the Little Village Community Council, asked recently. “That’s the part we’re learning.”
A still image from a video posted to Facebook shows Leodegario Martínez Barradas, detained by ICE agents on Sept. 7, 2025, in the Archer Heights neighborhood. (Gissele García)
It has been a year since the blitz commenced with the detainment of a man selling flowers in nearby Archer Heights. What began there, on the corner of South Archer Avenue and South Pulaski Road, with Leodegario Martínez Barradas dropping his flowers while federal agents handcuffed him and led him away, quickly spread throughout Chicago.
It left tamale carts deserted. Landscaping equipment abandoned. Cars on the side of the road, with keys still in the ignition. People, gone.
For 64 days, the city and its suburbs came to be under siege. For 64 days, starting with the detainment of the flower vendor on Sept. 7, 2025, and ending in November with Border Patrol agents posing for a mocking class picture in Millennium Park, their leader Gregory Bovino in the middle, the federal government carried out a militarized immigration enforcement operation under the guise of making Chicago safer.
How is it, then, that a year later, people can feel so unsafe?
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security asserted that it would target “the worst of the worst.”
“Operation Midway Blitz achieved what Chicago’s sanctuary politicians have refused to do for decades: decrease crime and remove the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens who put the American people in danger,” a spokesperson wrote in an email. The department highlighted 10 detained immigrants who had criminal convictions ranging from murder and sexual assault to shoplifting and driving under the influence.
But of the nearly 3,800 booked into a Chicago-area immigration detention facility, more than 2,200 had no criminal convictions or pending charges. Only 15% had a criminal conviction, according to a Tribune analysis of federal data obtained by the research group Deportation Data Project. On average during the blitz, Chicago-area ICE agents detained 35 people per day with no convictions or pending charges, while booking just one person per day who’d been convicted of a violent felony or sex crime.
All the while, the blitz attacked the spirit of a proud city. It also awakened it, said Gov. JB Pritzker.
“Most people are not protesters. They don’t normally want to go out and stand up to authority,” he said in an interview with the Tribune. “… And I think all of that’s changed. People are ready. People are more ready. They’ve seen themselves to be like, ‘Oh, we are the force that can push back peacefully on these ICE agents.’”
What’s left behind is a city on guard. There was no end to the blitz, not in any kind of official way, and so the threat of it lingers like the fear it inflicted. In Belmont Cragin, people keep their shades drawn. They ignore doorbells. In Pilsen, volunteers still pass out whistles.
Others decided to leave the United States for good.
The intersection of South Archer Avenue and South Pulaski Road in the Archer Heights neighborhood on Aug. 28, 2026. The corner is where Leodegario Martínez Barradas, a flower vendor, was the first person detained in Chicago during Operation Midway Blitz on Sept. 7, 2025. (E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune)
Last year, no one requested assistance to return to Mexico, said Reyna Torres Mendivil, consul general of the Mexican consulate in Chicago. This year, they are seeing approximately 20 cases per month. The true extent of reverse migration could be higher.
“There are families who tell us they need urgent help because they are returning to Mexico together,” Torres Mendivil said. “Those are the cases we are able to document and support, but knowing an exact total is impossible.”
Patrollers who spent much of last fall tracking Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Border Patrol haven’t stopped patrolling. The longer term reckoning, for many places and many people, has only barely begun.
In Little Village, one of the city’s most historic Latino neighborhoods, Enríquez has tried to guide some measure of recovery. On the second and third Sunday of every month, the community council hosts a desahógate. The most literal English translation is to “undrown yourself.” The desahógates have included dance lessons. An art class. Yoga.
“But it’s not really healing the psychosis. The PTSD,” Enríquez said, and on the window outside his office there’s still a sign advertising free whistles.
Baltazar Enríquez, president of the Little Village Community Council, patrols the neighborhood for federal immigration activity on Sept. 1, 2026. (Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune)
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Baltazar Enríquez, president of the Little Village Community Council, patrols the neighborhood for federal immigration activity on Sept. 1, 2026. (Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune)
What is there to offer now? There are times when Enríquez does not know. He thought of a woman who came to him with a memory she cannot escape, of federal agents at her house.
“She opened the door, and there was two guys pointing a semi-automatic gun,” he said. “She can’t get that out of her head. And she said, ‘Baltazar, I peed myself.’”
In some Chicago communities, the mere sight of certain SUVs — American-made, with tinted windows — is enough to strike fear, and to send patrollers scrambling. There’s a sense that federal agents might always be lurking.
Even when behind the tinted exterior is just Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson.
Johnson said if he’s traveling to Little Village or Pilsen, he often calls ahead to let officials and rapid response teams know that his caravan is on the way.
“Because I don’t want the neighbors to panic,” he said, “and that’s hard, right? … To know that vehicles provocate fear and highlight a threat to person and place. So until the people of Chicago can feel absolutely secure and safe in our communities, where we can shop and take our children to school without the fear of being violated by the government, where our constitutional rights aren’t constantly being undermined — I won’t be satisfied until we have full recovery.”
Johnson has seen elements of recovery, he said during an interview with the Tribune. He credited the healing to “the resistance and the joy” in defying federal agents, and “the spirit of Chicago.”
“There is this, like, stubbornness about Chicago,” Johnson said, searching for the right word, “where we just refuse to be denied, and it’s because of that is why we are recovering.”
Shoppers take advantage of the Fourth of July holiday to shop in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood. (Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune)
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Shoppers take advantage of the Fourth of July holiday to shop in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood. (Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune)
Recovery, though, can be difficult to quantify. The city and suburbs have changed in different ways over the past year. But they’ve changed.
In some places empty parking spots and For Rent signs signal where immigrants used to live, but no longer do. In Little Village, the number of vendors selling tamales and elotes has decreased, said Jennifer Aguilar, executive director of the business district’s chamber of commerce. More informal markets — yard sales, food sold out of kitchens — have emerged. More people work overnight because they feel safer after dark, Aguilar said.
Locals like to tout not only the history of Little Village’s 26th Street but its economic might as the second-most powerful street in the city, behind Michigan Avenue. Up until last fall, vendors selling colorful wares and soccer jerseys and food from carts often complemented the mom and pops with their carefully arranged storefronts.
Then came the raids. Commerce plummeted by as much as 70%, Aguilar said. Business improved during the World Cup, she said, but is now operating at a 40% decline.
Researchers are still calculating the true economic toll of the blitz. A pancake vendor there, Ruby Alonzo, doesn’t need to study statistics to understand. Most mornings she sets up a griddle, her toppings just to the side and goes to work. She started selling pancakes after she labored to find another job. She’d come to America with the big dream of buying a home and for a while, it felt like it just might come true, one customer’s breakfast at a time.
Street vendor Ruby Alonzo, from Veracruz, cooks pancakes for passersby along 26th Street in Chicago’s Little Village on the Fourth of July, 2026. (Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune)
She used to bring 100 pancakes every morning and they moved off her griddle quickly. Now she brings enough for 30 customers and sometimes even that’s too many.
“People are scared,” she said.
The fear is hardly confined to any one place. A study by the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois Chicago, to be released Sept. 8, found that heightened immigration enforcement in 2025 was “accompanied by a substantial decline in commercial trips from Latino communities to businesses in other parts of Cook County, with significant consequences for businesses and local sales-tax revenue in the county,” said Matthew Wilson, senior associate director of Great Cities Institute. An early estimate from the study puts the county’s economic loss from all immigration enforcement in 2025 at more than $1 billion.
U.S. taxpayers paid, too. Based on an ICE estimate of the daily costs to detain someone, the blitz has so far generated $45 million in detention costs, according to a Tribune analysis of federal data. Of that estimated amount, less than $1 million went toward detaining immigrants with violent felony or sex convictions.
In Little Village, Bovino’s name has become something like a curse word, said in disgust. People still can’t believe his brazenness in the neighborhood last fall, when he and his agents roughly arrested U.S. citizens, crashed into passing cars and threw tear gas in residential neighborhoods.
U.S. Border Patrol Cmdr. Gregory Bovino, right, walks with other agents after detaining a person while conducting an immigration operation in Little Village on Dec. 16, 2025. (Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune)
Bovino retired abruptly in March after two U.S. citizens were killed during Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis. He was under internal investigation at the time.
But Enríquez has wondered where the accountability was, and is. He’s not alone. There was tough talk during the blitz of seeking justice. Of prosecuting federal agents who might have crossed lines and broken laws.
In Evanston, the police chief recently sent a “formal request for guidance” to the Cook County state’s attorney’s office asking if charges could be brought against federal agents. Earlier this year, Johnson ordered Chicago police to collect evidence for possible felony charges against agents.
But the decree, which Johnson called “ICE on Notice,” has gained little traction.
Instead, Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke, whose office is responsible for filing those charges, described “ICE on Notice” as “wholly inappropriate.” She said she and her office had not been consulted before Johnson’s order, and that it “jeopardizes our ability to effectively prosecute and secure convictions when federal law enforcement agents have committed a crime.”
For Pritzker, one of the most difficult lessons exposed the limitations of his office.
“I’m frustrated that there have not been attempts at prosecution. And you know, as governor, I don’t have a prosecutorial capability. The state’s attorneys are on the front lines of doing that,” he said. “Now they get to choose what laws they enforce. And to me, though, these were obvious. These were violent crimes that were being committed.”
While federal agents swept through Chicago last fall, leaving behind a trail of trauma, Pritzker said he took advantage of his bully pulpit to galvanize the public. But he knew the state could only offer intangible protection.
Now Pritzker thinks more about accountability: Who will hold agents responsible for breaching protocol and policy if no one will at the federal level? He created the Illinois Accountability Commission to collect evidence of agents’ actions that might have broken laws.
Hundreds of people, meanwhile, from individual homeowners to those detained at the ICE processing center in Broadview, have been part of a flurry of lawsuits against the federal agents and their supervisors. In one of those suits, a young Chicago father, Rafael Veraza, alleged that an ordinary shopping trip turned into an attack.
The Veraza family heard fireworks, flash bangs and blaring horns. Then a crying baby.
On the way to Sam’s Club one morning last fall, Veraza, then 25, encountered a caravan of federal agents that had spent the morning wending through Little Village. His wife, Evelin Herrera, pulled out her phone to record and it was then, the lawsuit alleges, that “without just cause or provocation, defendants deployed tear gas” at Veraza, his wife and their then-1-year-old daughter.
“What’s the reason, exactly?” Veraza asked the next day at a news conference.
Rafael Veraza and Evelin Herrera hold their daughter, Arianna Sofia Veraza, Nov. 9, 2025, in Chicago’s Little Village. The previous day, the family was planning to shop at a Sam’s Club in Cicero when their vehicle was pepper-sprayed by federal agents driving past. (Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune)
The question could be asked of countless moments now approaching their one-year anniversary. What was the reason, exactly, for agents dressing for battle and toting weapons and riding in boats down the Chicago River? Or marching down Michigan Avenue, to the bemusement and bewilderment of tourists and the ire of people who followed, shouting “Shame! Shame!”
It was easy to mock the downtown military parade late last September, and people did. Bovino, in particular, looked cartoonish leading the charge on the river, as if it was a satirical reenactment of Gen. George Washington crossing the Delaware River. But then, the next day, Bovino’s men grabbed a Guatemalan family in Millennium Park, their anguished capture splashed across social media as it happened.
Jaime Ramírez, his daughter, Dasha, 8, and his wife, Noemi Chavez, are taken into custody by federal agents near Millennium Park in Chicago on Sept. 28, 2025. (Lindsay Rich)
Dasha Ramírez, now 9, still remembers the day armed, uniformed Border Patrol agents arrested her family, her mother, Noemi Chavez, told the Tribune. The family still fights for their asylum case.
“The children are struggling to recuperate,” she said. “But with God’s help and the support of the school and our neighbors, we are doing better.”
A day after their arrest brought the raid of a decrepit South Shore apartment building, where agents repelled from helicopters and broke down doors and forced residents outside in the night, all while claiming — falsely, without evidence — that the building was full of violent Venezuelan gang members. DHS then released a video celebrating it all.
“There is an overwhelming amount of documented evidence of crimes committed by federal agents during Midway Blitz,” said Craig Futterman, a University of Chicago law professor. Last year, he helped journalists, clergy and protesters in a federal lawsuit that led to a restraining order on agents’ use of force. Plaintiffs declared victory when agents left town and a judge dismissed the case.
Throughout Chicago there are some wounds, though, that no amount of accountability can heal. That even time cannot fix. People who’d been in America for decades have been deported back to home countries that are hardly home. Families have been separated.
As of Aug. 4, the most recently available data shows at least 2,676 were deported. Another 1,005 were released, and 93 people remained in custody.
Nury Ortega now sees her partner, Oscar Burciaga, only in FaceTime calls. Sometimes the signal is not clear and she does not even see him then. Last December, agents arrested Burciaga and four co-workers at a construction site at 53rd and State streets in Washington Park.
He had no criminal record. In March, Burciaga, 41, was deported to his native Durango, Mexico. He hadn’t been there in 22 years.
According to the Mexican consulate, 97% of the Mexican nationals detained during Midway Blitz were men. And nearly half the people detained had lived in the United States for more than 15 years.
Ortega, of Little Village, has used dance to help cope with the loss of her partner. On a recent Monday night, she wore a headdress and shells around her ankles and led others in movements rooted in an Indigenous tradition. At the height of the raids, “we couldn’t meet to dance,” she said.
“We couldn’t perform because we were afraid that federal agents would target us based on how we looked.”
Nury Ortega, center, practices with members of her Atl-Ehecatl dance group in the Little Village neighborhood on Aug. 31, 2026. Ortega’s partner, Oscar Burciaga, was detained by federal agents in December while working at a construction site. (Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune)
Oscar Burciaga and Nury Ortega at a family party. (Family photo)
She considered leaving to reunite with Burciaga in Mexico. But she has three boys, all born in Chicago, “and they all have dreams of going to school and achieving everything I couldn’t,” she said.
She had just ordered lunch at Atardecer Acapulqueño, a small restaurant in Little Village. She and Burciaga dined there often. Last fall, the restaurant became a safe haven for those who feared ICE. The owners locked the doors and hosted events to make whistle packages.
Now the restaurant is one of the places where Ortega carries on with life without Burciaga, who went back to his parents’ remote hometown in the mountains of Durango. Sometimes there’s no electricity; in others, the internet antenna does not work.
“There are days in which we are just happy to be here and to be alive,” she said as she sipped her favorite chicken stew. In the months since Burciaga’s detainment and deportation, Ortega has become a conduit for others with detained loved ones. She’d experienced the same fear and knew how to navigate a system many families find impossible to understand.
“People are still calling me because this is far from over,” she said. “Thankfully, I know how to reach almost every facility.”
Sometimes, just knowing where someone is can be a victory. For many, the supposed American Dream has turned into the American experience of deciding whether to continue seeking legal status in the place they’ve built a life, or had American-born children, or to give up and leave the country amid relentless pressure to self-deport.
There’s no way to combat the fear, in the way the whistles helped people feel like they were offering warnings a year ago. During the height of the raids, Chicagoans united. Protests filled streets and neighbors came together to help the most vulnerable members of their communities, the people without legal status but who’d built respectable lives; who’d worked and paid taxes or raised American-born children. The coming together, in a way, was the easy part.
The aftermath has left people with their own traumas. They’re similar but no two are exactly alike.
Baltazar Enríquez argues with a federal immigration agent near West 33rd Street and South Wolcott Avenue in Chicago on Aug. 24, 2026. (Arthur Maiorella/Chicago Tribune)
And what to do, now, after the whistlemania campaigns served their purpose? What to do after the agents left, but the reminders of what they did are everywhere? Pritzker believes the city and state have learned to respond to the tactics that Bovino and his men brought, and those that continue.
Still, he said, “My nightmare is that they’re going to dream up something new that we don’t know how to respond to, and it’s going to take us weeks or months to figure out how to stop them.”
He’s hopeful that people who learned to protect their neighbors by keeping their eyes open, staying mobile and being loud are ready to be what they’ve been: “The force that can push back peacefully on these agents.”
In Little Village, residents spent much of last fall pushing back. The intangible toll of the fight is still coming into focus, and those who’ve suffered the most “can’t go to the doctor and get a prescription,” Enríquez said.
Chela García, a member of the Little Village Community Council, walked into his office and nodded along.
“Is there a pill for witnessing my neighbors being kidnapped in front of me?” she asked, and now she most feared how that trauma might manifest and linger.
“A little 5-year-old girl that witnessed her father being taken will tell that story for generations.”
A few miles away from 26th Street in Little Village, south across Interstate 55, is where it all began. There was no particular reason why it started there, but it did, and for a while there were flowers where the flower vendor was taken. People placed them along the sidewalk.
The Honda car dealership at the intersection of South Archer Avenue and South Pulaski Road in Chicago’s Archer Heights neighborhood on Aug. 28, 2026, where Operation Midway Blitz began last fall. (E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune)
Some left candles, too, and a memorial grew at the corner of South Archer Avenue and South Pulaski Road in the Archer Heights neighborhood. A year later, the memorial is long gone. There’s nothing to commemorate the day federal agents chased Leodegario Martínez Barradas into the parking lot of a car dealership, placed him in handcuffs and led him away. He’d been working the nearby intersection for about a year. Some of the salesmen at the dealership knew him by sight.
One of them, who did not want to be named, recalled seeing Martínez Barradas on the corner around Easter, selling “little chicks. Like, little toy chicks.” The salesman could not be sure why he remembered that but he did. Sometimes he looked outside the window and he missed a man he did not really know. Martínez Barradas had been there often. And then he was detained and deported.
The very next day, the Trump administration gave a name to what started on that corner.
Operation Midway Blitz had arrived, and in some ways what it brought still remains. Even if you can’t see it.
Chicago Tribune’s Joe Mahr and Lila Hempel-Edgers contributed.