This is part of our series of daily recaps of ICE activity in the Chicago region. Have a tip we should check out? Email [email protected].
LAKEVIEW — Masked federal agents were seen detaining people across Lakeview and Lincoln Park on Friday — and they tear-gassed a residential street after neighbors confronted them for taking a man from private property.
Federal immigration agents have been taking people off the streets for more than a month as part of Operations Midway Blitz and At Large. Lakeview and Lincoln Park, with predominantly white populations, had been spared significant activity until recent weeks as agents seemingly focused more on Latino-majority areas of Chicago.
Earlier Friday, agents also carried out random stops, detaining at least two people, while wandering the streets of West Town and Wicker Park. The random nature of the stops were at odds with the mission of Operation Midway Blitz, which federal officials previously said would “target the worst of the worst criminal” undocumented immigrants.
Friday’s detentions and standoff marked the most high-profile federal activity in Lakeview and Lincoln Park yet, leaving some neighbors shaken.
“It hit home more today than it has recently,” Ald. Bennett Lawson (44th) said Friday. “Other areas have been a bigger target, but I think our community has been watching this and have been preparing.
About noon Friday, federal agents jumped over a fence to get into the yard of a home and detained one of three men who had been doing construction work on the building, witnesses said.
“I heard yelling and the construction workers running on the scaffolding. I was like, what is happening?” said Marissa Vivoda, who lives in the 3300 block of North Lakewood Avenue. “I looked outside and it’s [Border Patrol].”
Two other men who had been working on the building ran and hid, witnesses said.
The agents struggled to open the building’s locked gate from the inside and instead attempted to wrangle the detained worker over its spiked fence, said Shannon Sudberry, a neighbor who rushed over when she heard a whistle from outside.
“They handcuffed him and were gonna throw him over the gate,” Sudberry said. “But Marissa said, ‘No, no, I’ll open the gate.’”
More than 50 neighbors followed the agents’ two unmarked cars down the block, heckling them for trespassing on private property and taking a worker, witnesses said. Two agents hung off the sides of a silver-colored SUV, and one of the agents tossed a canister of tear gas at the residents, said Bruce Turner, who recorded video of the tense standoff.
“I had to run inside after they threw out the tear gas; the stuff f—ing hurts,” said Turner, who lives down the block. “This isn’t even a citywide problem; it’s a problem with our country. Everyone’s under threat.”
Lawson said the owner of the building where the man was detained reported that federal agents had seemingly been watching the building for weeks.
“I’m proud of the neighbors who stood up for our community member here, and the outrage that they feel is showed by everyone in the community,” Lawson said. “We have to build a case to show all of the constitutional violations that are happening in every neighborhood of our city.”
Courtney Conway, who lives nearby, said she arrived at the corner of Henderson and Lakewood just as the agents were pulling away in several SUVs.
“They had gotten the workers they’d kidnapped inside, and the community came out — yelling, filming, blowing whistles, giving them a piece of their mind,” Conway said. “No one was being aggressive whatsoever, and they just started deploying tear gas.”
Conway said she saw four tear gas canisters deployed on the street.
Agents detained people elsewhere in the neighborhoods, according to video and witnesses.
About 9 a.m., Charlie Gers saw drivers in two or three unmarked SUVs pull up near a bus stop on Belmont Avenue near Broadway, and several agents jumped out, he said. They surrounded a man standing on the corner and tackled him to the ground, he said.
“It was the most chaotic, violent, disturbing thing,” Gers said. “They pulled up, jumped out yelling, and within seconds had him on the ground. It was like watching a war zone in the middle of the neighborhood.”
The agents shouted, “Are you a U.S. citizen?” as they restrained the man over construction barriers outside the Laugh Factory comedy club, Gers said.
“There were five or six of them on him — full military gear, huge rifles,” he said. “People started honking, filming, yelling at them to stop. It was terrifying.”
Hannah Safter, who lives nearby on Melrose and Broadway, said she pulled over her car and began filming as six or seven agents surrounded the man.
“They pushed him into the corner of a doorway, and they were beating him,” Safter said. “His face was bleeding. It was really disturbing. We were screaming at them to stop, to show their faces, to say their names. They just kept recording us and flashing badges.”
Safter said after the first arrest, agents returned minutes later and detained a second man — a Laugh Factory employee who came outside with his mother and sister.
“They pushed him down and literally took him,” Safter said. “His mom put her body in between them, and one of the agents kicked her in the face. It was sick.”
Chicago police arrived after the arrests but did not intervene, witnesses said.
“They just stood there,” Safter said. “They didn’t try to calm the situation at all.”
A top Homeland Security official publicly accused a Chicago Tribune reporter of interfering with federal operations this week — a move media experts say reflects an increasingly hostile posture toward journalists covering immigration enforcement under President Donald Trump’s administration.
The exchange began when Tribune reporter Gregory Royal Pratt posted on X — formerly Twitter — Tuesday that ICE agents were operating on 26th Street in Little Village.
Within hours, Tricia McLaughlin, the Department of Homeland Security’s assistant secretary for public affairs and one of the agency’s top spokespeople, reposted the journalist’s message with her own caption, writing, “Why is a Chicago Tribune reporter telegraphing the location of federal law enforcement?”
Residents of a troubled South Shore apartment building made thousands of service and emergency calls to the city in the years before a massive federal immigration raid there made national headlines, according to records reviewed by Block Club.
The call logs, obtained through public records requests, detail issues from broken elevators and flooding to shootings and alleged drug activity that persisted at 7500 S. South Shore Drive, with residents at times saying their landlord was no help.
Overall, 500 calls to 311 were made about the building Oct. 1, 2021-Oct. 1, 2025, an average of about one complaint every three days, records show.
New video shows Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino tossing a tear gas canister toward people in Little Village Thursday in an apparent violation of a federal judge’s temporary restraining order.
Attorneys in the lawsuit over force against journalists and peaceful protesters filed a notice of the alleged violation, saying Bovino on Thursday deployed one or two tear-gas canisters over the heads of armed federal immigration agents in the direction of the crowd “without justification.”
“This action violates multiple paragraphs of this Court’s” temporary restraining order, attorneys said.
Bovino is considered the top immigration official overseeing Operation Midway Blitz.
Happening In Chicago
- Federal agents detained at least two people Friday morning while making random stops along the streets of West Town and Wicker Park, Block Club reported.
- ICE activity in Wicker Park, Bucktown, Lincoln Park and other neighborhoods led to a “soft” lockdown at A.N. Pritzker Elementary School in Wicker Park, where “all doors to the school remain locked and will not be opened to anyone until further notice,” the school’s principal told parents, CBS reported.
- Around 8:50 a.m. Friday, two people were detained by federal agents outside a shelter at 3040 W. Foster Ave., the Northwest Side Rapid Response team reported. Agents were seen driving a white Jeep with Illinois plates 685354.
- Around 9 a.m. Friday, agents detained multiple people at different locations in Humboldt Park and Ukrainian Village, including the Erie Family Center, 1701 W. Superior St.; 2233 W. Ohio St.; Damen and Division; and Chicago and Oakley, the Northwest Side Rapid Response team reported.
- Around 10:10 a.m. Friday, at least two day laborers were detained by agents at Sawyer and Wilson avenues in Albany Park, the Northwest Side Rapid Response team reported.
Happening In Suburbs
- Around 10 a.m. Friday, three members of a painting crew were detained in St. Charles, the Elgin Area Rapid Response team reported. Around 10:25 a.m., agents were also seen around Austin Avenue and Tulsa Avenue in Carpentersville.
- The PASO – West Suburban Action Project reported ICE activity around Grand Avenue and Northwest Highway by the I-294 bridge near Melrose Park.
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