Lawless police-state raid of Chicago apartment building demands more attention

A massive civil rights violation right in front of our eyes -- if we don't avert them

Screengrab from DHS video.

More than 300 heavily armed federal agents, some of them rappelling onto the roof from Black Hawk helicopters, busted down doors throughout a five-story Chicago apartment complex in the early morning hours on Tuesday, dragging zip-tied residents including naked children our of their homes and holding U.S. citizens captive for hours.

They didn’t have warrants – just suspicions.

It was a massive violation of these residents’ civil rights, as well as a major escalation in the Trump administration’s jack-booted campaign against undocumented immigrants.

And it should have been top news on websites and broadcasts across America, with screaming headlines about police-state tactics. But instead, it’s been largely ignored.

The Associated Press and the Washington Post haven’t mentioned it at all, from what I can tell. The New York Times ran a timid article about immigration enforcement in Chicago generally.

Luckily, one journalist covered it perfectly: MSNBC’s Chris Hayes.

It’s worth watching the whole segment on the topic from his Thursday show.

“We’re getting new reports about a chilling and downright shocking escalation of ICE tactics against the residents of Chicago,” Hayes said. He continued:

In the middle of the night, hundreds of armed federal agents and police, backed up by riot trucks, smoke grenades and helicopters, breached fences and busted doors in an immigration raid on an entire apartment building on the city’s south side. They pulled dozens of residents from their homes in zip ties, including children, some of them without any clothes. They then held some outside for hours and dragged the others into rented vans.

Hayes provided the essential background: that the Supreme Court earlier this month gave federal agents the green light to stop people and question them about their immigration status based solely on factors like their ethnicity.

The consequence of all this is what we’re seeing now in the dead of night in Chicago: Dozens of federal agents raiding an entire apartment building with kids in it just to see what they can find. It’s the most egregious abuse of our basic rights as Americans I’ve seen in a long time. Maybe my lifetime.

He concluded:

Masked secret police profiling people and now targeting entire apartment buildings, making everyone prove they’re not guilty of something is the province of tyrants. It is the opposite of America and I don’t think Americans will stand for it. Nor should they.

Federal officials claimed that the neighborhood was “a location known to be frequented by Tren de Aragua members and their associates.”

U.S. Border Patrol commander-at-large Gregory Bovino told NewsNation -- a right-leaning television channel that got “exclusive” access to the raid -- that federal officers and agents trained for the targeted enforcement effort for days.

And yet it’s not clear if any of the 37 people that the Department of Homeland Security said they arrested were alleged gang members. All DHS would say afterward was that “some of the targeted subjects are believed to be involved in drug trafficking and distribution, weapons crimes, and immigration violators.”

“Some.” “Believed.”

Local news interviewed residents afterward.

Rodrick Johnson, 67, a U.S. citizen, told the Chicago Sun-Times that agents broke through his door and dragged him out in zip ties: The paper reported:

Johnson said he was left tied up outside the building for nearly three hours before agents finally let him go.

“I asked [agents] why they were holding me if I was an American citizen, and they said I had to wait until they looked me up,” Johnson said. “I asked if they had a warrant, and I asked for a lawyer. They never brought one.”

Ebony Sweets Watson, who lives across the street, told the Sun-Times that she saw agents dragging residents, including kids, out of the building without any clothes on and into U-Haul vans. Kids were separated from their mothers,

“It was heartbreaking to watch,” Watson said. “Even if you’re not a mother, seeing kids coming out buck naked and taken from their mothers, it was horrible.”

Far from being apologetic, the Department of Homeland Security on Thursday proudly posted footage of the raid on social media, with the message “To every criminal illegal alien: Darkness is no longer your ally. We will find you.”

Or, as the Daily Beast put it in its headline, DHS Uses ICE Raid Where Kids Were Dragged From Their Homes in Promo Video.

What DHS did was beyond shameful. It was heinous. When so many people’s rights are violated this egregiously, the people need to know about it. And it’s the job of journalists to tell them, not to pretend it didn’t happen.

Correction: A previous version of this post incorrectly referred to NewsNation as “far-right wing.” In fact, the network -- formerly known as WGN -- is right leaning.