On September 14, Constantina Ramírez and Moisés Enciso, undocumented migrants residing in the metropolitan area of Chicago, Illinois, were detained by agents of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (ICE) while they were heading to a Home Depot store in Cicero County with their son Moisés, 22, to shop for the holiday. tenth anniversary of the couple’s youngest son.
In an interview for CNN, Moisés Enciso Jr. reported that immigration agents intercepted them for allegedly making an illegal return on a cruise ship. The ICE agents were in three vehicles and surrounded the Enciso family. They asked for identification and fear paralyzed the father who did not know what to respond. The 19-year-old daughter, named Yurithsi, arrived at the scene and refused to answer the ICE agents’ questions until she consulted her attorney. In the end, ICE agents took Constantina Ramírez and Moisés Enciso, who are now in detention centers outside of Illinois: she in Kentucky and he in Michigan. But they left the family devastated. The two oldest children were left in the care of a 12-year-old sister and another 10-year-old brother.
This is just one story of disrupted lives and broken families that the violent ICE operations are leaving in the Chicago area, which has become the center of the immigration operations of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service ordered by President Donald Trump and that seem to focus not only on cities with a large population of migrants, especially Latinos, but also on cities with Democratic governments, opponents of the republicans.
The Trump Administration named these operations the “Midway Blitz.” Blitz is a German word with which the Nazi army symbolically named several of its operations during World War II. Operation Midway Blitz has resulted in more than a thousand arrests of migrants throughout Illinois between September 8 and October 3, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), cited by CNN.
Many of the operations have been extremely violent, to the point of death, as happened with the migrant of Mexican origin Silverio Villegas-González, who was killed with a gunshot wound to the neck by an ICE agent after firing his gun at him inside the car. Silverio Villegas was detained in an ICE operation after dropping his minor daughters off at daycare and school on September 14. The ICE agents placed their vehicle in front of the migrant and when he tried to evade them, the immigration agents murdered him.
In addition to Silverio Villegas-González, at least two other people have died “after an encounter with ICE since Trump took office and began a broad national crackdown on immigration, and at least 15 people have died while in ICE custody,” according to a note from the New York Times (September 23, 2025).
The Trump Administration is turning the supposed operations against irregular migrants (“the worst of the worst,” according to ICE executives) into a war, and even Trump himself has paraphrased that it is a war. A few days ago he posted on his social network: “Chicago is about to discover why it is called the WAR Department.”
An example of this internal “war” that the Trump Government is carrying out in several cities in the United States is the operation that ICE carried out at the beginning of October in the South Side apartment complex where immigration agents deployed not only dozens of patrols but even a military helicopter from which several federal agents rappelled down. South Side Weeklya local Chicago media outlet chronicled the operation to detain migrants that resembles an assault operation in a war: “Residents of an apartment building on the South Shore woke up with a start when almost 300 federal agents, backed by helicopters and stun grenades, burst into their homes in a massive immigration raid. A video posted on social media by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) described the raid at 7500 S. South Shore as a military-style operation to capture brown youths. In fact, early Tuesday morning federal agents detained all residents of the 130-unit building, including babies and children, placing them on leashes and separating them by race in vans for more than two hours. Some officers pointed guns equipped with tactical flashlights; others carried long rifles and wore helmets equipped with cameras and flashlights. Helicopters flew overhead and agents on the ground lobbed stun grenades. The residents, who were suddenly awakened, had only seconds to open before officers kicked down the doors and forced their way in, according to recordings from residents who witnessed the raid.”
The chronicle is very detailed: “Masked agents had people line up in front of the building, where they asked each resident their name and country of origin before lifting their shirt to check if they had tattoos. They then proceeded to ask them if they had documents proving their legal residence in the United States. One by one, the residents of the building, including African-American American citizens, were loaded into vans where they were interrogated in more detail. Ultimately, DHS reported that 37 people were arrested, including four children.
Imagine the reader an operation of this magnitude in your cities to try to measure this strategy of fear that the Trump Government is instilling among its own citizens.
This violent incursion by federal immigration forces has raised a chain of protests, demonstrations and various forms of resistance to ICE, both from undocumented migrants and legal US citizens, Latinos and whites, who have come out to resist ICE operations.
Among other things, they have demonstrated daily in front of an ICE detention center in the town of Broadview; white citizens pick up Latino children from schools to take them to their parents; Facebook pages have been created where they warn of ICE operations; Legal young Latinos offer to do food for families who do not have papers.
And it is expected that all the fear and anger that the violent ICE operations have provoked in them (as expressed by a Latina woman) will translate into a massive participation in Chicago in the national day of protest called “No kings.” Neither in Chicago nor in the rest of the United States do they want their president to behave like a petty king who governs against his people.