<body><div><figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=0w9ALs_1GpPG3ly00" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=0w9ALs_1GpPG3ly00" width="1361" height="768" ><figcaption>ICE agents walk down an Oak Park ally in Nov. 2025.</figcaption></figure>Last year at this time, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were sweeping through Oak park in unmarked vehicles and imposing caravans of black SUVs, rolling down residential streets in a display of force that was impossible to ignore. Their presence spread fear throughout the community and made ordinary trips down the street feel dangerous. In a village known more for its progressive politics than its undocumented population, the presence of federal agents felt for some residents like a provocation more than an immigration enforcement operation.Operation Midway Blitz began Sept. 8 2025, as the Trump administration sent hundreds of federal immigration agents, including border “comander-at-large” Gregory Bovino, into the Chicago area to ramp up arrests and deportations. During its 68-day surge, agents detained 3,841 people, nearly double the number of people detained during the preceding nine months. Only 15% of those detained during the operation had a prior criminal conviction, compared to 35% during the months before, according to a Chicago Sun-Times analysis of data provided by the Deportation Data Project. The operation’s most visible phase ended Nov. 14, when Bovino left and the agency shifted its focus to Minneapolis. The spectacle faded. The crowds thinned, the cameras moved on and fewer volunteers went around blowing whistles trying to warn residents that ICE was near. It would be easy to think the operation had ended and the crisis with it.It hadn’t. Even though ICE agents are no longer rolling through neighborhoods like Oak Park and posing for photos in front of the Bean, Chicagoans are still being arrested, detained and deported, and migrants in the Chicago area are still scared to go outside. One of them is an undocumented man named Juan, who arrived in Chicago in January 2023 from Venezuela, during a period when thousands of migrants were arriving in the city after being bused from Texas by state officials.As the city struggled to respond to the influx, Juan was beginning the much more personal task of building a life here. He will be identified by the pseudonym “Juan” because he fears being targeted by ICE. A handyman in the Oak Park area, Juan lives with his wife and five children, including his newborn son born in the United States as a citizen. Whenever he leaves the house, Juan takes the baby’s passport with him. He also has two daughters from a previous marriage in Venezuela, who are stuck at the border in Mexico with their mother.Through a translator, Juan repeatedly described his journey on foot to the United States with his family as “harrowing.” <figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=0k0EZR_1GpPG3ly00" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=0k0EZR_1GpPG3ly00" width="1062" height="1596" ><figcaption>A Venezuelan flag hangs in the Migrant Ministry room. (Owen McCollough)</figcaption></figure>“I first left Venezuela for Curaçao and worked there for eight years,” he said, “but at a certain point I had to return home to see my children.” When he did so, he quickly realized how bad the economic situation had gotten. “The average monthly salary was about $7 [in U.S. dollars], but for some perspective a raw chicken cost $10.” He and his family left together within one month of being back. He went with a party and had a guide take him and his family through Venezuela and Columbia up until the Darién Gap, a lawless, roadless and highly dangerous stretch of dense jungle between Colombia and Panama that must be crossed on foot.“The cartels treat it like it’s like an amusement park,” said Juan. “Before you go in, they put like these little tags on you, as if you’re going to Disney World or something like that. And, depending on the color, they can tell which cartel you’re being monitored by.” He recalled an encounter in the Darién where a cartel member put a gun to his 8-year-old daughter’s head and asked for all of the money that they had. “There was a group of Asians next to us also crossing to get to the United States who refused to pay, and they separated them off to a different area and we heard lots of gunshots. Later down the road we saw their corpses, but it was too much to bear. I didn’t want to look.”Death was something that you had to become accustomed to on the journey to the United States. Juan described not being able to drink the water in the rivers because of how many dead bodies of starved migrants were floating in them, to being on a freight train through southern Mexico nicknamed “La Bestia” (“The Beast”) because of how many people freeze to death on it. That was not the only terrible experience Juan recalls. “We were climbing a tall wall of rocks in Panama, and there was a mother right next to me carrying her baby, and it slipped out and fell to its death, and the mother was so distraught that she threw herself off the wall to try to kill herself, all just a couple feet away from me.”The Darién Gap was only one part of the journey. After making it through the jungle, Juan and his family continued north through Central America and Mexico before eventually reaching the United States through Texas. In January 2023, they were among the thousands of migrants transported from Texas to Chicago by state officials. By then, Juan had already experienced a journey that he described as harrowing, but arriving in the United States brought its own challenges. He now had to find work, support his family and build the kind of life that had made the journey seem worth taking in the first place.The United States was not the only place Juan considered. Other Venezuelans he knew had gone to countries like Spain, the Netherlands and Aruba, but he ultimately decided to come here after encouragement from a cousin already living in the country. His cousin described the United States as a place where hard work could take someone far, regardless of where they came from or what their background was. Juan believed that if he could find steady work, he could give his children opportunities that had been unavailable to him.That belief has remained a major part of how he thinks about his decision to come here. Shortly after arriving in 2023, Juan obtained a work permit and began working as a handyman, allowing him to support his family while trying to build a more stable life. “I tell my kids all the time,” said Juan, “these are opportunities that God puts in front of you and that you need to take advantage of it. I would give anything to be able to have come to this country at your age and go to school.” Now, the Trump administration has made work permits increasingly hard to get by shortening validity periods on newly issued cards, eliminating automatic extensions, hiking the application fees and proposing rules to freeze authorizations for asylum seekers.Immigration enforcement has made Juan’s vision of a better life in America harder to reach. When ICE activity intensified last fall, the change in Juan’s daily life was immediate. “Stepping out of the house at all was absolutely terrifying,” he said. “I couldn’t even go to Walmart without worrying that every security guard was an ICE agent.”Since then, his family has learned to live cautiously. Juan tries to stay close to home and avoids taking jobs that require him to travel far. He no longer visits his father who came to Chicago after him on the same journey and now lives in Little Village. His brother, who came at the same time as his father, was detained by ICE while trying to pick up their father from his apartment. “They threw him on the floor, beat him up, and they hit him in the knees till he collapsed,” said Juan. “He’s now at a detention center in Wisconsin.”The uncertainty has also changed how Juan thinks of his future. “We have our hearing in February, and my wife and I sometimes talk about the possibility of self deporting and taking whatever money we’ve made back to Venezuela and buying a house, even though the situation back home has only gotten worse since we’ve left,” said Juan. “I still have hope though that this country will heal, and we’ll make it work.”For local activists who spent last fall watching ICE agents move through Chicago, the changes have been visible in a different way. Scott Sakiyama, an Oak Park activist who was detained outside Lincoln Elementary School after blowing whistles to warn residents about ICE agents, said he remains involved in rapid-response efforts, but the work looks different now. Instead of focusing primarily on immediate reposts of ICE sightings, he patrols the Cook County courthouses in Maywood and downtown, where immigration enforcement has increasingly become a concern.“There are folks that are still deeply active,” Sakiyama said. “If someone is taken there’s sort of an aftercare, and there’s a lot of neighborhood canvassing going on. Know-your-rights education is still a big component of the work that’s being done.”The crowds and confrontations that defined last fall have become less common, but Sakiyama said the enforcement itself has not disappeared. “The feds aren’t being as showy or in your face, but they are still very active.”That change has been felt by the people trying to help immigrant communities too. At the Migrant Ministry, an interfaith organization founded by members of Oak Park’s Catholic community in 2022, Celine Woznica and Margie Rudnik have watched their work shift from helping families settle into new lives to helping them prepare for the possibility that those lives could be interrupted overnight.When migrants first began arriving in large numbers from Texas in 2023, the ministry’s work was largely about making a new home possible. Volunteers helped families find apartments and furniture and enroll their children in school. They offered English language assistance and immigration support as well as providing food, clothes, blankets and shoes.<figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=1q0PQ1_1GpPG3ly00" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=1q0PQ1_1GpPG3ly00" width="1206" height="1596" ><figcaption>Celine Woznica in one of the Migrant Ministry’s free stores. (Owen McCollough)</figcaption></figure>They transformed old Catholic school classrooms into free stores and playhouses where children, many of whom went on the same journey as Juan, could dress up as Spider-Man or princesses and feel a sense of normalcy.“It was wonderful and it was life-giving,” said Woznica. “It was looking forward. It felt extraordinarily hopeful.”That work has not disappeared. The ministry still provides clothing, breakfast, English-language help and immigration support from volunteer attorneys. But the fear surrounding its visitors has changed what that help looks like. Volunteers now have to be prepared for the possibility of ICE arriving at the building. The ministry closed briefly during the blitz due to an unrelated space issue, and attendance has not returned as families remain afraid to visitNow, some of the ministry’s most difficult work happens around the possibility of a parent being detained. Volunteers help families organize important documents, navigate immigration proceedings and prepare plans for who would care for their children if they were taken away. Rudnik has personally agreed to serve as temporary custodian for five children from two different families in the case that their parents were deported.The ministry has also helped families locate detained relatives, connect with lawyers and raise money for legal fees and other expenses. In some cases, volunteers have helped arrange transportation for people released from detention centers far from home, where they may have no money, phone and no easy way back to Chicago. “The change,” Rudnik said, “is not simply that families are more afraid. It is that the future they once helped build has to be balanced against the possibility of losing it.”Woznica said that “the fear has continued” even as the visible scenes of last fall have faded. “Too many people assume deportations have slowed because they no longer see arrests on neighborhood streets or articles in the news.”For Juan, though, the protests, the crowds outside Broadview and the arguments on Fox News and CNN surrounding Operation Midway Blitz have never been the main point. When asked about the demonstrations at Broadview, he said that he didn’t even know that the processing center was in Broadview, let alone that there were protests there. He explained that almost all of the attention and activism that he saw against ICE only worried him that it would bring more attention and another reason to crack down harder, and have done little tangible good for undocumented immigrants.While others have debated the operation, Juan has been trying to get through the workday, provide for his children, and make sure his family is together when he comes home. He carries on because he has to. His family still wants the future he came here to find, even as they talk about whether they have to give it up.When asked what he wanted people who were anti immigration to know about his experience, Juan said “simply that I, and every other immigrant I know, did not want to leave my country. I left because I wanted to work, to support my family and for them to have their basic human needs met, and this was the only choice.”For Woznica, the question of what happens next extends beyond the people directly affected by immigration enforcement. It is also a question for the communities watching it happen, especially young people who will remember this period long after the cameras have moved on.“After the Second World War,’ said Woznica, “the Germans were asked, ‘What did you do?’ And I think about that a lot in the context of living through the Trump administration, especially with high schoolers. You guys are living history, and these are vital times. You all need to leave your mark and engage in our democracy.”<figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=1gwv7p_1GpPG3ly00" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=1gwv7p_1GpPG3ly00" width="1066" height="1602" ><figcaption>Donald Woznica standing underneith the sign Migrant Ministry used for the 4th of July parade in the entrance of the Forest Park church the Ministry currently runs out of. The sign sports our nation’s de facto motto, E Pluribus Unum (Out of many, one.) (Owen McCollough)</figcaption></figure>——————–Trapeze rarely, if ever, uses anonymous sources. We didn’t review every past edition (they go back to 1912), but we know we haven’t used one in the last five years. We follow the Society of Professional Journalists code of ethics, which calls journalists to “seek truth and report it” and “be accountable and transparent,” which means that we aim to put sources on the record with their real names. However, our ethics code also guides journalists to “minimize harm,” which is why we allowed an anonymous source in this story. Revealing the identity of an undocumented migrant could lead to his arrest, detention or deportation. To verify his identity, the reporter conducted an extensive in-person interview, and the Trapeze faculty adviser went to the interview and met the source in person. </div></body>

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Last year at this time, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were sweeping through Oak park in unmarked vehicles and imposing caravans of black SUVs, rolling down residential streets in a display of force that was impossible to ignore. Their presence spread fear throughout the community and made ordinary trips...

Operation Midway Blitz: one year later

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Last year at this time, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were sweeping through Oak park in unmarked vehicles and imposing caravans of black

Operation Midway Blitz: one year later

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