Miguel Alvelo Rivera, the executive director of Latino Union Chicago, said Thursday he believes about five day laborers were detained in the past two days, including three people at a Home Depot in the Montclare neighborhood. He said activists are still working to learn who the workers are and exactly where they were taken. Others reported heightened patrols at home improvement stores in Cicero and Berwyn.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are still not 100% sure who exactly was taken,\u201d he said. \u201cA lot of the calls are coming from other workers who are at those corners letting us know what happened.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
He also criticized companies like Home Depot, which he said \u201cbenefit from the undervalued and often unpaid labor of our working neighbors\u201d and \u201ckidnapping of our people.\u201d Supporters carried signs that said \u201cICE out of the Home Depot\u201d during the news conference, which was held across the street from the Montclare store.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A spokesperson for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment. The Wall Street Journal has previously reported<\/a>, however, that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller mentioned targeting Home Depot, and the day laborers that wait for work outside its stores, for immigration enforcement. The administration contends it is detaining the \u201cworst of the worst\u201d in its latest immigration crackdown.\u00a0<\/p>\n Home Depot spokesperson George Lane said in a statement that the company isn\u2019t \u201cnotified that ICE activities are going to happen, and we aren\u2019t involved in the operations.\u201d Employees at Menards declined to comment Wednesday night and an email to the corporate office was not immediately returned.\u00a0<\/p>\n Beltran said a Menards employee told the sisters that he saw \u201cmen with masks and rifles\u201d come up to her dad\u2019s van and talk to him. They then left. Her father went inside the store, but as he was returning to his vehicle, the agents pulled him and his workers out and handcuffed them, Beltran said of the account she received.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI was pulling up to buy some stuff and, you know, to have it happen here in your neighborhood, it really brings it home,\u201d said a Warrenville resident, who declined to give his name, after the arrest Wednesday. \u201cThey were putting people in the cars, handcuffed. I really couldn\u2019t figure out who was doing what but it did say federal agents.\u201d<\/p>\n The 60-year-old was left in shock.<\/p>\n \u201cI can\u2019t believe here in Naperville, well, the United States in particular, but here in Naperville that they\u2019d be so callous as to just pick people off the street just for being a different color and nationality,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s unconscionable.\u201d<\/p>\n Beltran, a green card holder, said her father came to the United States from Mexico 40 years ago and was in the process of obtaining legal residency. He owns Martin Morales Wood Flooring Inc., and the other two men detained at the Menards Wednesday were his employees, she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n She said Wednesday night that the family still hadn\u2019t heard from her father, and that they were trying to determine where he had been working so they could pick up his tools.\u00a0<\/p>\n Naperville police Cmdr. Rick Krakow said the police department was not contacted by federal authorities in advance of Wednesday\u2019s immigration enforcement in Naperville. Naperville police officers were not involved in any of the arrests, he said.<\/p>\n A press statement later put out by Naperville police further clarified that, by law, the department cannot assist with immigration enforcement activity.<\/p>\n U.S. Rep. Lauren Underwood, a Naperville Democrat, said in a news release that she had been briefed Monday on ICE\u2019s actions in the Chicago area as a ranking member of the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Appropriations and was disturbed by what was happening. She said detainees who have been arrested and processed are being taken to locations in Indiana and Wisconsin.<\/p>\n Geovanni Celaya, an organizer with Latino Union Chicago who works with day laborers and migrant workers, said it previously appeared that federal immigration agents weren\u2019t targeting day laborers, but that it changed about two days ago, although he isn\u2019t surprised based on enforcement in other states. He said many of the workers he\u2019s talked to are afraid.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cAt the end of the day, these folks don\u2019t have the privilege to not go out and look for work,\u201d Celaya said. \u201cThey\u2019re dependent on looking for work at these corners, because that\u2019s all that\u2019s accessible based on this immigration system.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThey have to bring food to the table, have to provide for a family member,\u201d he added. \u201cI see my family in day laborers. I see my friends in day laborers. I see myself in day labor, because we\u2019re all at risk.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Also in Naperville Wednesday, ICE officers detained roofers working at a home in the Cress Creek subdivision, in what neighbors described as a chaotic and \u201cirresponsible\u201d situation, as reported in WGN-TV<\/a>. One roofer, who did not want to reveal his identity, told WGN-TV that the agents were violent in their efforts to take several of his coworkers into custody.<\/p>\n \u201cThey commenced to attack us, to throw us onto the ground,\u201d the roofer said. \u201cSome of them are fathers. It\u2019s very hard what is happening. It\u2019s a lot of harm that they\u2019re doing to us.\u201d<\/p>\n Willian Alberto Gim\u00e9nez Gonz\u00e1lez, a prominent<\/a> Chicago day laborer, was arrested<\/a> last Friday when he went to a barbershop in the Little Village neighborhood. He filed a petition<\/a> in federal court Sunday asking a judge to bar his deportation and release him on bond. Federal authorities said in this case that there is \u201cnothing unjust about enforcing the law and ensuring this illegal alien adheres to the laws of the United States.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n State Sen. Graciela Guzm\u00e1n, a Chicago Democrat whose nearby Northwest Side district covers Latino communities in Logan Square, Kelvyn Park and Belmont Cragin, said at the news conference that she has seen federal immigration agents \u201ctry to rip apart families as they seek to take their children to school, as people seek to go to work, as they seek to be beloved community members.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cBelmont Cragin is a unique community in Chicago. It literally will not allow itself to bend at the knee of anyone,\u201d she said. \u201cThis is a community that is resilient, that organizes in the face of anything and everything.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As soon as Veronica Beltran heard from her mom that federal immigration agents had detained her father at…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":237248,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5124],"tags":[960,127269,2321,5410,5386,1818,409,61790,121074,277,2065],"class_list":{"0":"post-237247","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-chicago","8":"tag-chicago","9":"tag-day-laborers","10":"tag-home-depot","11":"tag-ice","12":"tag-il","13":"tag-illinois","14":"tag-immigration","15":"tag-menards","16":"tag-operation-midway-blitz","17":"tag-trump","18":"tag-u-s-immigration-and-customs-enforcement"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115227325242246873","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237247"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237247\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/237248"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Protesters](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/CTC-L-Melrose-Park-ICE-rally-8_237244970-e1758227832751.jpg\")
Protesters march, play music and chant on Sept. 16, 2025, during a walk along North Avenue in Melrose Park against recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement tactics. (Dominic Di Palermo\/Chicago Tribune)<\/p>\n