Federal immigration agents detained an immigrant Tuesday morning after chasing his car through the quiet Northwest Side streets until it crashed into a tree, according to federal officials, surveillance footage and neighbors.
Home security footage provided to the Tribune shows two dark-colored vehicles chasing a red car on West Grace Street toward the 3800 block of North Olcott Avenue in the city’s Dunning neighborhood at 10:24 a.m.
As sirens blare in the background, footage shows one of the vehicles ram the red car as it approaches the intersection of Grace and Olcott. The red car then skirts right onto Olcott out of view while the other vehicles slow and continue to follow.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson in a statement confirmed that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducted a “targeted enforcement operation” on Tuesday to arrest Konrad Wojciech Darlak, which the agency identified as “a criminal illegal alien from Poland.”
Darlak “attempted to evade arrest resulting in a collision with an ICE vehicle and eventually collided with a tree,” the spokesperson said. Darlak then fled on foot. The spokesperson said ICE officers “used the minimum amount of force to make the arrest.”
A doorbell camera image captures federal law enforcement vehicles pursuing a red sedan toward the 3800 block of North Olcott Avenue in Chicago’s Dunning neighborhood, June 9, 2026. A person was reportedly detained after the sedan struck a tree. (Edward Krueger)
DHS said Darlak had previously been arrested for possession of dangerous drugs, obstruction of justice, domestic battery and transport of dangerous materials, and convicted of retail theft, resisting a peace officer and domestic battery.
Cook County circuit court records show Darlak pleaded guilty to resisting a peace officer and domestic battery charges in 2011 and was sentenced to a year of community service. Court records also show Darlak had pleaded guilty to several retail theft charges around suburban Cook County, some of them more than a decade old.
In 2024, Darlak was sentenced to a year and a half of supervision after pleading guilty to a DUI charge, per court records. The Tribune left a message with the attorney’s office that Darlak had retained in the DUI case but did not immediately hear back Tuesday night.
The Tribune was unable to verify the arrest of the dangerous materials.
According to a police report obtained by the Tribune, two ICE agents pulled up alongside a man as he got into his car in the 3600 block of North Nottingham Avenue in an attempt to take the man into custody, an agent later related to responding officers. The man then reversed his car into one of the agent’s cars and sideswiped the other agent’s car several times as he tried to drive off, the report said.
After a short pursuit, all three cars ended up in the 3800 block of North Olcott where the man lost control. The man was transported to Loyola Hospital in Maywood by ICE agents for observation, the report said.
The pursuit comes after federal agents chased and detained a man in Albany Park last week, according to several published reports. A day after the arrest, dozens of community members gathered in Horner Park to protest the federal enforcement.
More than six months have passed since the Trump administration’s Operation Midway Blitz descended on the Chicago area. The 64-day local mass deportation campaign resulted in roughly 3,800 arrests of noncitizens and nearly 2,500 deportations — most of them with no criminal record.
Edward Krueger was at his home near Grace and Olcott on Tuesday when he heard the sirens and ran out to see what was going on. The 33-year-old saw two unmarked vehicles with blue and red lights, he told the Tribune. He then checked home surveillance footage on his phone and saw the car chase and subsequent collision unfolding.
Standing outside about a block away from the crash, Krueger said he watched as a person was placed into the back of one of the unmarked vehicles. He saw three people who appeared to be federal agents, one person wearing a vest that read “police,” another with a vest that also read “police” with “ICE” underneath and a third person with the words “customs enforcement.”
In other videos of the incident taken after the red car had apparently crashed into a street pole and a tree, two masked federal officers are seen standing near the wrecked vehicle as Chicago police officers put up red police tape around the scene.
By early afternoon Tuesday, the red car sat over the curb up against a tree near the intersection of Grace and Olcott. The front of the sedan was crumpled. At around 1:30 p.m., a tow truck arrived to remove the car. When the truck started to drag the car back, a pole that the car had evidently run over was uncovered. In a grassy area along the sidewalk, an apparent tire track could be seen etched out in mud. No federal agents could be seen.
Two CPD officers watched as the car was towed onto the flatbed truck. A few neighbors and bystanders lingered nearby, though the street had calmed by midday.
Several neighbors said their block is typically quiet and that it’s rare to see police activity of any kind.
Krueger, a lifelong Chicagoan, moved to the neighborhood in 2023 because it was a safe and quiet place to raise his young son.
“We don’t see that kind of commotion around here as much,” Krueger said.
Last fall, as the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign swept through the Chicago area, Krueger didn’t see much of the crackdown’s impact firsthand, he said. But he did recall his wife, a teacher with Chicago Public Schools, telling him about how the federal activity affected her students and their families.
Seeing that activity come to his doorstep months later is frustrating, Krueger said.
“I’m being more negatively impacted by the actions of these federal agencies than I am by the people they’re claiming to be catching,” he said. “I haven’t had any problem with an immigrant, but now I’ve watched an ICE agent ram a car right outside of my house.”
The Tribune’s Caroline Kubzansky and Armando Sanchez contributed.