CHICAGO — The music begins low and ominous, with the video showing searchlights skimming along a Chicago apartment building and heavily armed immigration agents storming inside. Guns are drawn. Unmarked cars fill the streets. Agents rappel from a Black Hawk helicopter.
But quickly the soundtrack grows more stirring and the video — edited into a series of dramatic shots and released by the Department of Homeland Security days after the Sept. 30 raid — shows agents leading away shirtless men, their hands zip-tied behind their backs.
Authorities said they were targeting the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, though they also said only two of the 27 immigrants arrested were gang members. They gave few details on the arrests.
But the apartments of dozens of U.S. citizens were targeted, residents said, and at least a half-dozen Americans were held for hours.
The immense show of force signaled a sharp escalation in the White House’s immigration crackdown and amplified tensions in a city already on edge.
“To every criminal illegal alien: Darkness is no longer your ally,” Homeland Security said in a social media post accompanying the video, which racked up more than 6.4 million views. “We will find you.”
But Tony Wilson, a third-floor resident born and raised on Chicago’s South Side, sees only horror in what happened.
“It was like we were under attack,” Wilson said days after the raid, speaking through the hole where his door knob used to be. Agents had used a grinder to cut out the deadbolt, and he still couldn’t close the door properly, let alone lock it. So he had barricaded himself inside, blocking the door with furniture.
“I didn’t even hear them knock or nothing,” said Wilson, a 58-year-old U.S. citizen on disability.
Dreams and decay
The raid was executed in the heart of South Shore, an overwhelmingly Black neighborhood on Lake Michigan that has long been a tangle of middle-class dreams, urban decay and gentrification.
It’s a place where teams of drug dealers troll for customers outside ornate lakeside apartment buildings. It has some of the city’s best vegan restaurants but also takeout places where the catfish fillets are ordered through bullet-proof glass.
It has well-paid professors from the University of Chicago but is also where one-third of households scrape by on less than $25,000 a year.
The apartment building where the raid occurred has long been troubled. Five stories tall and built in the 1950s, residents said it was often strewn with garbage, the elevators rarely worked and crime was a constant worry. Things had grown more chaotic after dozens of Venezuelan migrants arrived in the past few years, residents said. While no residents said they felt threatened by the migrants, many described a rise in noise and hallway trash.
Owned by out-of-state investors, the building hasn’t passed an inspection in three years, with problems ranging from missing smoke detectors to the stench of urine to filthy stairways. Repeated calls to a lead investor in the limited liability company that owns the building, a Wisconsin resident named Trinity Flood, were not returned. Attempts to reach representatives through realtors and lawyers were also unsuccessful.
Crime fears spiked in June when a Venezuelan man was shot in the head “execution-style,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement. Another Venezuelan was charged in the death.
Days after the raid, the doors to dozens of the building’s 130 apartments hung open. Nearly all those apartments had been ransacked. Windows were broken, doors smashed, and clothes and diapers littered the floors. In one apartment, a white tuxedo jacket hung in the closet next to a room knee-deep in broken furniture, piles of clothing and plastic bags. In another, water dripping from the ceiling puddled next to a refrigerator lying on its side. Some kitchens swarmed with insects.
Wilson said a trio of men in body armor had zip-tied his hands and forced him outside with dozens of other people, most Latino. After being held for two hours he was told he could leave.
“It was terrible, man,” he said. He’d barely left the apartment in days.
A city under siege?
Chicago, the White House says, is under siege.
Gang members and immigrants in the U.S. illegally swarm the city and crime is rampant, President Trump insists. National Guard soldiers are needed to protect government facilities from raging left-wing protesters.
“Chicago is the worst and most dangerous city in the World,” he posted on Truth Social.
The reality is far less dramatic. Violence is rare at protests, though angry confrontations are increasingly common, particularly outside a federal immigration center in suburban Broadview. And while crime is a serious problem, the city’s murder rate has dropped by roughly half since the 1990s.
Those realities have not stopped the Trump administration.
What started in early September with some arrests in Latino neighborhoods, part of a crackdown dubbed “Operation Midway Blitz,” has surged across Chicago. There are increasing patrols by masked, armed agents; detentions of U.S. citizens and immigrants with legal status; a fatal shooting; a protesting pastor shot in the head with a pepper ball outside the Broadview facility, his arms raised in supplication.
By early October, authorities said more than 1,000 immigrants had been arrested across the area.
The raids have shaken Chicago.
“We have a rogue, reckless group of heavily armed, masked individuals roaming throughout our city,” Mayor Brandon Johnson said after the Sept. 30 raid. “The Trump administration is seeking to destabilize our city and promote chaos.”
To Trump’s critics, the crackdown is a calculated effort to stir anger in a city and state run by some of his most outspoken Democratic opponents. Out-of-control protests would reinforce Trump’s tough-on-crime image, they say, while embarrassing Johnson and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, seen as a possible Democratic presidential contender.
So the South Shore raid, ready-made for social media with its displays of military hardware and agents armed for combat, was seen as wildly out of proportion.
“This was a crazy-looking military response they put together for their reality show,” said LaVonte Stewart, who runs a South Shore sports program to steer young people away from violence. “It’s not like there are roving bands of Venezuelan teenagers out there.”
Officials insist it was no reality show.
The operation, led by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, was based on months of intelligence gathering, according to a U.S. official who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. The building’s landlord told authorities that Venezuelans in about 30 units were squatters and had threatened other tenants, the official said, adding that the building’s size necessitated the show of force. Immigration agencies declined further comment.
Even before the “Midway Blitz,” Trump’s election had whipsawed through Chicago’s Latino communities.
Stewart said Venezuelan children began disappearing from his programs months ago, though it’s often unclear if they moved, returned to Venezuela or are just staying home.
“I had 35 kids in my program from Venezuela,” he said. “Now there’s none.”
A wave of migrant newcomers
The raid echoed through South Shore, pinballing through memories of the surge in violence during the 1990s drug wars as well as economic divides and the sometimes uncomfortable relations between Black residents and the wave of more than 50,000 immigrants, most Latino, who began arriving in 2022, often bused from southern border states.
Chicago spent more than $300 million on housing and other services for the immigrants, fueling widespread resentment in South Shore and other Black neighborhoods where the newcomers were settled.
“They felt like these new arrivals received better treatment than people who were already part of the community,” said Kenneth Phelps, pastor at the Concord Missionary Baptist Church in Woodlawn, a largely Black neighborhood.
It didn’t matter that many migrants were crowded into small apartments, and most simply wanted to work. The message to residents, he said, was that the newcomers mattered more than they did.
Phelps tried to fight that perception, creating programs to help new arrivals and inviting them to his church. But that stirred more anger, including in his own congregation.
“I even had people leave the church,” he said.
In South Shore it’s easy to hear the bitterness, even though the neighborhood’s remaining migrants are a nearly invisible presence.
“They took everyone’s jobs!” said Rita Lopez, who manages neighborhood apartment buildings and recently stopped by the scene of the raid.
“The government gave all the money to them — and not to the Chicagoans,” she said.
Changing demographics and generations of suspicion
Over more than a century, South Shore has drawn waves of Irish, Jewish and then Black arrivals for its lakeside location, affordable bungalows and early 20th-century apartment buildings.
Each wave viewed the next with suspicion, in many ways mirroring how Black South Shore residents saw the migrant influx.
Former first lady Michelle Obama’s parents moved to South Shore when it was still mostly white, and she watched it change. A neighborhood that was 96% white in 1950 was 96% Black by 1980.
“We were doing everything we were supposed to do — and better,” she said in 2019. “But when we moved in, white families moved out.”
But suspicion also came from South Shore’s Black middle-class, which watched nervously as many housing projects began closing in the 1990s, creating an influx of poorer residents.
“This has always been a complex community,” Stewart said of those years.
“You can live on a block here that’s super-clean, with really nice houses, then go one block away and there’s broken glass, trash everywhere and shootings,” he said. “It’s the weirdest thing and it’s been this way for 30 years.”
Sullivan writes for the Associated Press. AP reporters Aisha I. Jefferson in Chicago, Elliot Spagat in San Diego and Claudia Lauer in Philadelphia contributed to this report.
Commentary: Bodies are stacking up in Trump’s deportation deluge. It’s going to get worse
Like a teenager armed with their first smartphone, President Trump’s masked immigration enforcers love nothing more than to mug for friendly cameras.
They gladly invite pseudo-filmmakers — some federal government workers, others conservative influencers or pro-Trump reporters — to embed during raids so they can capture every tamale lady agents slam onto the sidewalk, every protester they pelt with pepper balls, every tear gas canister used to clear away pesky activists. From that mayhem comes slickly produced videos that buttress the Trump administration’s claim that everyone involved in the push to boot illegal immigrants from the U.S. is a hero worthy of cinematic love.
But not everything that Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Border Patrol and its sister agencies do shows up in their approved rivers of reels.
Their propagandists aren’t highlighting the story of Jaime Alanís García, a Mexican farmworker who fell 30 feet to his death in Camarillo this summer while trying to escape one of the largest immigration raids in Southern California in decades.
They’re not making videos about 39-year-old Ismael Ayala-Uribe, an Orange County resident who moved to this country from Mexico as a 4-year-old and died in a Victorville hospital in September after spending weeks in ICE custody complaining about his health.
They’re not addressing how ICE raids led to the deaths of Josué Castro Rivera and Carlos Roberto Montoya, Central American nationals run over and killed by highway traffic in Virginia and Monrovia while fleeing in terror. Or what happened to Silverio Villegas González, shot dead in his car as he tried to speed away from two ICE agents in suburban Chicago.
Those men are just some of the 20-plus people who have died in 2025 while caught up in ICE’s machine — the deadliest year for the agency in two decades, per NPR.
Publicly, the Department of Homeland Security has described those incidents as “tragic” while assigning blame to everything but itself. For instance, a Homeland Security official told the Associated Press that Castro Rivera’s death was “a direct result of every politician, activist and reporter who continue to spread propaganda and misinformation about ICE’s mission and ways to avoid detention” — whatever the hell that means.
An ICE spokesperson asked for more time to respond to my request for comment, said “Thank you Sir” when I extended my deadline, then never got back to me. Whatever the response would’ve been, Trump’s deportation Leviathan looks like it’s about to get deadlier.
As reported by my colleagues Andrea Castillo and Rachel Uranga, his administration plans to get rid of more than half of ICE’s field office directors due to grumblings from the White House that the deportations that have swamped large swaths of the United States all year haven’t happened faster and in larger numbers.
Asked for comment, Tricia McLaughlin, Homeland Security assistant secretary for public affairs, described The Times’ questions as “sensationalism” and added “only the media would describe standard agency personnel changes as a ‘massive shakeup.’”
Agents are becoming more brazen as more of them get hired thanks to billions of dollars in new funds. In Oakland, one fired a chemical round into the face of a Christian pastor from just feet away. In Santa Ana, another pulled a gun from his waistband and pointed it at activists who had been trailing him from a distance in their car. In the Chicago area, a woman claimed a group of them fired pepper balls at her car even though her two young children were inside.
La migra knows they can act with impunity because they have the full-throated backing of the White House. Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller crowed on Fox News recently, “To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties.”
That’s not actually true, but when have facts mattered to this presidency if it gets in the way of its apocalyptic goals?
Greg Bovino, El Centro Border Patrol sector chief, center, walks with federal agents near an ICE detention facility in Broadview, Ill.
(Erin Hooley / Associated Press)
Tasked with turning up the terror dial to 11 is Gregory Bovino, a longtime Border Patrol sector chief based out of El Centro, Calif., who started the year with a raid in Kern County so egregious that a federal judge slammed it as agents “walk[ing] up to people with brown skin and say[ing], ‘Give me your papers.’” A federal judge ordered him to check in with her every day for the foreseeable future after the Border Patrol tear-gassed a neighborhood in a Chicago suburb that was about to host its annual Halloween children’s parade (an appeals court has temporarily blocked the move).
Bovino now reports directly to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and is expected to pick most of the ICE field office directors from Customs and Border Protection, the arm of the federal government that the Border Patrol belongs to. It logged 180 immigrant deaths under its purview for the 2023 fiscal year, the last year for which stats are publicly available and the third straight year that the number had increased.
To put someone like Bovino in charge of executing Trump’s deportation plans is like gifting a gas refinery to an arsonist.
He’s constantly trying to channel the conquering ethos of Wild West, complete with a strutting posse of agents — some with cowboy hats — following him everywhere, white horses trailed by American flags for photo ops and constant shout-outs to “Ma and Pa America” when speaking to the media. When asked by a CBS News reporter recently when his self-titled “Mean Green Machine” would end its Chicago campaign — one that has seen armed troops march through downtown and man boats on the Chicago River like they were patrolling Baghdad — Bovino replied, “When all the illegal aliens [self-deport] and/or we arrest ‘em all.”
Such scorched-earth jibber-jabber underlines a deportation policy under which the possibility of death for those it pursues is baked into its foundation. ICE plans to hire dozens of healthcare workers — doctors, nurses, psychiatrists — in anticipation of Trump’s plans to build more detention camps, many slated for inhospitable locations like the so-called Alligator Alcatraz camp in the Florida Everglades. That was announced to the world on social media with an AI-generated image of grinning alligators wearing MAGA caps — as if the White House was salivating at the prospect of desperate people trying to escape only to find certain carnage.
In his CBS News interview, Bovino described the force his team has used in Chicago — where someone was shot and killed, a pastors got hit with pepper balls from high above and the sound of windshields broken by immigration agents looking to snatch someone from their cars is now part of the Windy City’s soundtrack — as “exemplary.” The Border Patrol’s peewee Patton added he felt his guys used “the least amount of force necessary to accomplish the mission. If someone strays into a pepper ball, then that’s on them.”
One shudders to think what Bovino thinks is excessive for la migra. With his powers now radically expanded, we’re about to find out.
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Feds charge 12 in alleged arson, attacks during immigration protests
Federal prosecutors announced charges Wednesday against 12 people who allegedly engaged in violence during demonstrations against the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
The charges, part of an effort dubbed “Operation Bridge Too Far” by federal authorities, largely centered on demonstrations that erupted on a freeway overpass near an immigration detention center in downtown Los Angeles on June 8, the first day the National Guard was deployed to the city.
What started as a small, peaceful protest on Alameda Street exploded into a series of tense clashes between demonstrators and law enforcement. After National Guard members and U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials used tear gas and smoke bombs to try and disperse a crowd outside the detention center, more protesters flooded the area.
A number of Waymo self-driving vehicles were set on fire near Olivera Street, and a group of California Highway Patrol officers on the 101 Freeway were pelted with items from protesters on the overpass above. At times, they returned fire with less-lethal rounds and tear gas. At least one protester had previously been charged in state court with throwing a flaming item at a CHP vehicle from the overpass.
Authorities announced that 10 defendants charged in connection with the incident were in federal custody this week. Another is in state custody and expected to be handed over to federal authorities, and one remains a fugitive.
Among those charged tied to the June 8 protest are Ronald Alexis Coreas, 23, of Westlake; Junior Roldan, 27, of Hollywood; Elmore Sylvester Cage, 34, of downtown Los Angeles; Balto Montion, 24, of Watsonville; Jesus Gonzalez Hernandez Jr., 22, of Las Vegas; Hector Daniel Ramos, 66, of Alhambra; Stefano Deong Green, 34, of Westmont; Yachua Mauricio Flores, 23, of Lincoln Heights; and Ismael Vega, 41, of Westlake.
Prosecutors also charged Virginia Reyes, 32, and Isai Carrillo, 31, who they say are members of “VC Defensa,” an immigrant rights group that has been documenting raids in the region.
Yovany Marcario Canil, 22, of Boyle Heights, was charged with assault on a federal officer for pepper-spraying members of an FBI S.W.A.T. team who were inside a government vehicle leaving the site of a raid in the downtown L.A. Fashion District on June 6.
A protester lobs a large rock at CHP officers stationed on the 101 Freeway below.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
“Acts of violence against the brave law enforcement officers who protect us are an attack on civilized society itself,” Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi said in a news release. “Anyone who engages in such disgusting conduct will face severe consequences from this Department of Justice.”
The FBI offered up to $10,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of 10 other unknown individuals accused of engaging in similar attacks from the overpass.
“A group of violent protesters threw rocks, pieces of concrete, electric scooters, and fireworks at officers and patrol cars” on the 101 Freeway, the FBI said.
Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor for the Central District of California, has aggressively pursued charges against those who clashed with law enforcement during protests against the Trump administration’s immigration raids over the last few months. On Wednesday, Essayli said that his office has charged 97 people with assaulting or impeding officers.
Of those, Essayli said, 18 have pleaded guilty and 44 are set to go to trial. His office has taken two defendants in misdemeanor assault cases to trial, but both ended in acquittals.
Earlier this year, a Times investigation found Essayli’s prosecutors have failed to convince grand juries to secure indictments in a number of protest-related cases.
Prosecutors face a much lower legal bar before a grand jury than they do in a criminal trial, and experts say it is rare for federal prosecutors to lose at that preliminary stage. Prosecutors in Chicago and Washington have faced similar struggles, court records show.
The defendants who have pleaded guilty in L.A. include a 23-year-old undocumented immigrant who hurled a molotov cocktail at L.A. County sheriff’s deputies during a June rally against immigration enforcement.
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Palestinian child killed in Israeli raid on West Bank as settlers rampage | Israel-Palestine conflict News
A Palestinian child has died of wounds sustained during an Israeli military raid in the Askar camp in Nablus, in the latest violence against civilians in the occupied West Bank, as a fragile ceasefire in Gaza brings little respite to Palestinians in the destroyed enclave.
Israeli forces on Friday also stormed the town of Aqaba, north of Tubas in the West Bank, and made a number of arrests earlier today in Hebron and Tal.
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The Israeli army said they arrested 44 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank over the past week. A military statement says operations were carried out in various parts of the territory and all people detained were wanted by Israel. It added that troops also confiscated weapons and conducted interrogations during the operations.
Last week, 10-year-old Mohammad al-Hallaq was shot dead by Israeli forces while playing football in ar-Rihiya, Hebron.
According to the United Nations, more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli army and settlers since October 7, 2023, in the West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem.
A fifth of the victims are children, including 206 boys and seven girls, the UN said. The number also includes 20 women and at least seven people with disabilities. This does not include Palestinians who died in Israeli detention during the same period, the UN added.
A United States-brokered Gaza ceasefire deal has seen nearly 2,000 Palestinian detainees released from Israeli jails, many bearing visible signs of abuse.
Dozens of Palestinian bodies returned have been badly mutilated and show signs of torture and execution.
Meanwhile, in tandem with the military’s sustained crackdown in the occupied territory, Israeli settlers have rampaged near Ramallah, destroying Palestinian property at an alarming rate daily with impunity, protected by the military.
Settlers set fire to several Palestinian vehicles in the hill area in Deir Dibwan, east of the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah, at dawn this morning, the Wafa news agency reported.
On Sunday, an Israeli settler brutally assaulted a Palestinian woman while she was harvesting olives in the West Bank town of Turmus Aya.
Afaf Abu Alia, 53, suffered a brain haemorrhage due to the attack.
“The attack started with around 10 settlers, but more kept joining,” one Palestinian witness told Al Jazeera. “I think by the end, there were 40, protected by the army. We were outnumbered; we couldn’t defend ourselves.”
According to data from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), settlers have attacked Palestinians nearly 3,000 times in the occupied West Bank over the past two years.
UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, said on Friday that since October 7, 2023, “the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, has also witnessed a sharp escalation in violence”.
“The increasing annexation of the West Bank is happening steadily in a gross violation of international law,” UNRWA said, referring to the expansion and recognition of illegal Israeli settlements.
US lays down law to Israel on annexation
After a vote in the Israeli parliament on Wednesday advancing a bill that would formalise the annexation of the occupied West Bank, senior US officials have been adamant it won’t happen under their watch.
US President Donald Trump said on Thursday, “Israel is not going to do anything with the West Bank” amid growing condemnation of an Israeli parliamentary motion that seeks to formally annex the occupied Palestinian territory.
Earlier in the day, in an interview with Time Magazine, Trump said that the US is firmly against Israeli annexation. “It won’t happen. It won’t happen. It won’t happen because I gave my word to the Arab countries. And you can’t do that now,” Trump told Time.
US Vice President JD Vance, meanwhile, while in Israel, also said that Trump’s policy remains that the occupied West Bank won’t be annexed by Israel, calling the parliamentary vote in favour of annexation a “very stupid political stunt” that he “personally” took some insult from.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in Israel to shore up the Gaza ceasefire and second-phase plans, has also lined up in the Trump’s administration’s firm opposition to Israeli annexation.
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In Chicago, an immense show of force signals a sharp escalation in White House immigration crackdown
CHICAGO — The music begins low and ominous, with the video showing searchlights skimming along a Chicago apartment building and heavily armed immigration agents storming inside. Guns are drawn. Unmarked cars fill the streets. Agents rappel from a Black Hawk helicopter.
But quickly the soundtrack grows more stirring and the video — edited into a series of dramatic shots and released by the Department of Homeland Security days after the Sept. 30 raid — shows agents leading away shirtless men, their hands zip-tied behind their backs.
Authorities said they were targeting the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, though they also said only two of the 27 immigrants arrested were gang members. They gave few details on the arrests.
But the apartments of dozens of U.S. citizens were targeted, residents said, and at least a half-dozen Americans were held for hours.
The immense show of force signaled a sharp escalation in the White House’s immigration crackdown and amplified tensions in a city already on edge.
“To every criminal illegal alien: Darkness is no longer your ally,” Homeland Security said in a social media post accompanying the video, which racked up more than 6.4 million views. “We will find you.”
But Tony Wilson, a third-floor resident born and raised on Chicago’s South Side, sees only horror in what happened.
“It was like we were under attack,” Wilson said days after the raid, speaking through the hole where his door knob used to be. Agents had used a grinder to cut out the deadbolt, and he still couldn’t close the door properly, let alone lock it. So he had barricaded himself inside, blocking the door with furniture.
“I didn’t even hear them knock or nothing,” said Wilson, a 58-year-old U.S. citizen on disability.
Dreams and decay
The raid was executed in the heart of South Shore, an overwhelmingly Black neighborhood on Lake Michigan that has long been a tangle of middle-class dreams, urban decay and gentrification.
It’s a place where teams of drug dealers troll for customers outside ornate lakeside apartment buildings. It has some of the city’s best vegan restaurants but also takeout places where the catfish fillets are ordered through bullet-proof glass.
It has well-paid professors from the University of Chicago but is also where one-third of households scrape by on less than $25,000 a year.
The apartment building where the raid occurred has long been troubled. Five stories tall and built in the 1950s, residents said it was often strewn with garbage, the elevators rarely worked and crime was a constant worry. Things had grown more chaotic after dozens of Venezuelan migrants arrived in the past few years, residents said. While no residents said they felt threatened by the migrants, many described a rise in noise and hallway trash.
Owned by out-of-state investors, the building hasn’t passed an inspection in three years, with problems ranging from missing smoke detectors to the stench of urine to filthy stairways. Repeated calls to a lead investor in the limited liability company that owns the building, a Wisconsin resident named Trinity Flood, were not returned. Attempts to reach representatives through realtors and lawyers were also unsuccessful.
Crime fears spiked in June when a Venezuelan man was shot in the head “execution-style,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement. Another Venezuelan was charged in the death.
Days after the raid, the doors to dozens of the building’s 130 apartments hung open. Nearly all those apartments had been ransacked. Windows were broken, doors smashed, and clothes and diapers littered the floors. In one apartment, a white tuxedo jacket hung in the closet next to a room knee-deep in broken furniture, piles of clothing and plastic bags. In another, water dripping from the ceiling puddled next to a refrigerator lying on its side. Some kitchens swarmed with insects.
Wilson said a trio of men in body armor had zip-tied his hands and forced him outside with dozens of other people, most Latino. After being held for two hours he was told he could leave.
“It was terrible, man,” he said. He’d barely left the apartment in days.
A city under siege?
Chicago, the White House says, is under siege.
Gang members and immigrants in the U.S. illegally swarm the city and crime is rampant, President Trump insists. National Guard soldiers are needed to protect government facilities from raging left-wing protesters.
“Chicago is the worst and most dangerous city in the World,” he posted on Truth Social.
The reality is far less dramatic. Violence is rare at protests, though angry confrontations are increasingly common, particularly outside a federal immigration center in suburban Broadview. And while crime is a serious problem, the city’s murder rate has dropped by roughly half since the 1990s.
Those realities have not stopped the Trump administration.
What started in early September with some arrests in Latino neighborhoods, part of a crackdown dubbed “Operation Midway Blitz,” has surged across Chicago. There are increasing patrols by masked, armed agents; detentions of U.S. citizens and immigrants with legal status; a fatal shooting; a protesting pastor shot in the head with a pepper ball outside the Broadview facility, his arms raised in supplication.
By early October, authorities said more than 1,000 immigrants had been arrested across the area.
The raids have shaken Chicago.
“We have a rogue, reckless group of heavily armed, masked individuals roaming throughout our city,” Mayor Brandon Johnson said after the Sept. 30 raid. “The Trump administration is seeking to destabilize our city and promote chaos.”
To Trump’s critics, the crackdown is a calculated effort to stir anger in a city and state run by some of his most outspoken Democratic opponents. Out-of-control protests would reinforce Trump’s tough-on-crime image, they say, while embarrassing Johnson and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, seen as a possible Democratic presidential contender.
So the South Shore raid, ready-made for social media with its displays of military hardware and agents armed for combat, was seen as wildly out of proportion.
“This was a crazy-looking military response they put together for their reality show,” said LaVonte Stewart, who runs a South Shore sports program to steer young people away from violence. “It’s not like there are roving bands of Venezuelan teenagers out there.”
Officials insist it was no reality show.
The operation, led by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, was based on months of intelligence gathering, according to a U.S. official who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. The building’s landlord told authorities that Venezuelans in about 30 units were squatters and had threatened other tenants, the official said, adding that the building’s size necessitated the show of force. Immigration agencies declined further comment.
Even before the “Midway Blitz,” Trump’s election had whipsawed through Chicago’s Latino communities.
Stewart said Venezuelan children began disappearing from his programs months ago, though it’s often unclear if they moved, returned to Venezuela or are just staying home.
“I had 35 kids in my program from Venezuela,” he said. “Now there’s none.”
A wave of migrant newcomers
The raid echoed through South Shore, pinballing through memories of the surge in violence during the 1990s drug wars as well as economic divides and the sometimes uncomfortable relations between Black residents and the wave of more than 50,000 immigrants, most Latino, who began arriving in 2022, often bused from southern border states.
Chicago spent more than $300 million on housing and other services for the immigrants, fueling widespread resentment in South Shore and other Black neighborhoods where the newcomers were settled.
“They felt like these new arrivals received better treatment than people who were already part of the community,” said Kenneth Phelps, pastor at the Concord Missionary Baptist Church in Woodlawn, a largely Black neighborhood.
It didn’t matter that many migrants were crowded into small apartments, and most simply wanted to work. The message to residents, he said, was that the newcomers mattered more than they did.
Phelps tried to fight that perception, creating programs to help new arrivals and inviting them to his church. But that stirred more anger, including in his own congregation.
“I even had people leave the church,” he said.
In South Shore it’s easy to hear the bitterness, even though the neighborhood’s remaining migrants are a nearly invisible presence.
“They took everyone’s jobs!” said Rita Lopez, who manages neighborhood apartment buildings and recently stopped by the scene of the raid.
“The government gave all the money to them — and not to the Chicagoans,” she said.
Changing demographics and generations of suspicion
Over more than a century, South Shore has drawn waves of Irish, Jewish and then Black arrivals for its lakeside location, affordable bungalows and early 20th-century apartment buildings.
Each wave viewed the next with suspicion, in many ways mirroring how Black South Shore residents saw the migrant influx.
Former first lady Michelle Obama’s parents moved to South Shore when it was still mostly white, and she watched it change. A neighborhood that was 96% white in 1950 was 96% Black by 1980.
“We were doing everything we were supposed to do — and better,” she said in 2019. “But when we moved in, white families moved out.”
But suspicion also came from South Shore’s Black middle-class, which watched nervously as many housing projects began closing in the 1990s, creating an influx of poorer residents.
“This has always been a complex community,” Stewart said of those years.
“You can live on a block here that’s super-clean, with really nice houses, then go one block away and there’s broken glass, trash everywhere and shootings,” he said. “It’s the weirdest thing and it’s been this way for 30 years.”
Sullivan writes for the Associated Press. AP reporters Aisha I. Jefferson in Chicago, Elliot Spagat in San Diego and Claudia Lauer in Philadelphia contributed to this report.
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Secret prosecutor roster found in Unification Church raid
Unification Church leader Han Hak-ja arrives for an arrest warrant hearing on allegations of bribery and political funding at the Seoul Central District Court in Seoul on September 22. Photo by Jeon Heon-kyun/EPA
SEOUL, Oct. 20 (UPI) — South Korea’s special prosecutor has launched an internal probe after investigators found a confidential roster of law enforcement officers inside a Unification Church office during a recent raid — a discovery that has intensified a widening corruption case linking religion, politics and the state.
The list, first reported by The JoongAng Ilbo newspaper, contained the names and assignments of police officers temporarily working at the Special Prosecutor’s Office. Such documents are normally restricted even within the agency.
Officials said they are investigating whether a retired police officer, identified only by the initial A, leaked the file to church officials.
An special prosecutor’s spokesperson said the office is “verifying how the document was obtained and whether any ongoing investigations were affected.” If confirmed, prosecutors say, the breach would mark one of the most serious leaks of investigative information in years, potentially allowing suspects to anticipate raids or destroy evidence.
Indictments for embezzlement, political-fund violations
The leak inquiry comes just days after prosecutors indicted Unification Church leader Hak Ja Han and two senior aides, Jung Wonju and Yoon Young-ho, on charges of embezzlement and illegal political donations.
According to charging documents filed Oct. 10, Han and Jung allegedly diverted money from church accounts earmarked for missionary work to finance luxury purchases and covert political activity.
Between May and August 2022, about 500 million won (about $380,000) was allegedly used to buy designer jewelry and handbags for Han, disguised through falsified expense reports. One transaction dated May 9, 2022, shows Jung instructing a finance officer to spend 42 million won on jewelry “for Hak Ja Han.”
Another section of the indictment cites roughly 900 million won ($700,000) moved from the “2027 Project Support Fund” into accounts controlled by Jung without approval from the church’s finance board. Prosecutors believe the funds were used for non-religious or political purposes, violating internal rules.
Donations to ruling party before 2022 election
Investigators also allege that the Unification Church, directed by Yoon Young-ho, its former secretary-general, channeled money to all 17 provincial branches of the ruling People Power Party around the time of the 2022 presidential election.
According to the special prosecutor’s findings, Yoon called regional leaders to a meeting in early March 2022 and instructed them to distribute “missionary support funds.” Roughly 2.1 billion won ($1.5 million) was withdrawn from church accounts, and 144 million won (about $105,000) was later delivered through split donations made under individual members’ names.
Prosecutors say the arrangement violated the Political Funds Act, which bars corporate or religious entities from contributing to political organizations.
A special prosecutor’s official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the investigation is continuing, said the case “shows signs of coordinated funding activity at a national level.”
Church denial
In a written statement, the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification — the church’s official name — denied wrongdoing, asserting that “all expenditures were legitimate and related to global missionary work.” Han’s defense team said she would cooperate fully while seeking to have the charges dismissed as “politically motivated.”
Han was indicted under the Act on the Aggravated Punishment of Specific Economic Crimes and the Political Funds Act. Jung was indicted without detention. Their first hearings are expected later this month at the Seoul Central District Court.
Broader implications for institutions, trust
The twin controversies — alleged embezzlement and the suspected leak of a classified roster — have raised alarm over the integrity of state institutions, as well as the political reach of major religious movements.
Legal commentators in Korean media have warned that, if verified, the leak could amount to obstruction of justice or a violation of the Public Official Information Protection Act, both of which carry heavy prison terms.
Local editorial writers have described it as a test of transparency — whether the rule of law can withstand influence from powerful organizations that straddle the line between religious authority and political power.
The Special Prosecutor’s Office said it has strengthened internal data-security protocols and restricted access to sensitive records.
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Yemen’s Houthis detain 20 UN staff in latest raid | Conflict News
United Nations demands the release of its employees after Houthi forces raided a facility and detained staff in Sanaa.
Published On 19 Oct 202519 Oct 2025
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Yemen’s Houthi authorities have detained about two dozen United Nations employees after raiding another UN-run facility in the capital Sanaa, the UN has confirmed.
Jean Alam, spokesperson for the UN’s resident coordinator in Yemen, said staff were detained inside the compound in the city’s Hada district on Sunday.
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Those held include at least five Yemeni employees and 15 international personnel. A further 11 UN staff were briefly questioned and later released.
Alam said the UN is in direct contact with the Houthis and other relevant actors “to resolve this serious situation as swiftly as possible, end the detention of all personnel, and restore full control over its facilities in Sanaa”.
A separate UN official, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity, said Houthi forces confiscated all communication equipment inside the facility, including computers, phones and servers.
The staff reportedly belong to several UN agencies, among them the World Food Programme (WFP), the children’s agency UNICEF and the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
The incident follows a sustained crackdown by the Houthis on the UN and other international aid organisations operating in territory under their control, including Sanaa, the Red Sea port city of Hodeidah, and Saada province in the north.
According to UN figures, more than 50 staff members have now been detained.
Houthis claim UN staff are spying for Israel
The Houthis have repeatedly accused detained UN staff and employees of foreign NGOs and embassies of espionage on behalf of the United States and Israel, allegations that the UN has denied.
In reaction to previous detentions, the UN suspended operations in Saada earlier this year and relocated its top humanitarian coordinator in Yemen from Sanaa to Aden, the seat of the internationally recognised government.
In a statement on Saturday, UN Secretary-General spokesperson Stephane Dujarric warned: “We will continue to call for an end to the arbitrary detention of 53 of our colleagues.”
Dujarric was responding to a televised address by Houthi leader Abdelmalek al-Houthi, who claimed his group had dismantled “one of the most dangerous spy cells”, alleging it was “linked to humanitarian organisations such as the World Food Programme and UNICEF”. Dujarric said the accusations were “dangerous and unacceptable”.
Saturday’s raid comes amid a sharp escalation in detentions. Since August 31, 2025, alone, at least 21 UN personnel have been arrested, alongside 23 current and former employees of international NGOs, the UN said.
Ten years of conflict have left Yemen, already one of the poorest countries in the Arab world, facing what the UN describes as one of the gravest humanitarian crises globally, with millions reliant on aid for survival.
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