Operation Midway Blitz: One Year Later

The military-style nighttime raids, flashy neighborhood patrols and multiagency cooperation may have ended when the surge known as Operation Midway Blitz ended in mid-November, but in Chicago, the fear remains.  

Augusta Orozco, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Ecuador, continues to wear a whistle at her job at a school on the northwest side of the city. On the day she spoke to Truthdig, she had just learned that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had entered a restaurant two blocks from her home and began shouting at staff. Though she doesn’t believe anyone was detained, the incident reminded her of ICE’s continued presence in Chicago. “Nothing has changed,” she said. “The situation is the same.”

Indeed, it remains the same across most of the country, even as ICE avoids noisy, headline-making operations like Midway Blitz. In July, ICE arrested 49,571 people, the most in any month since the beginning of the second Trump administration. Though roughly two-fifths of arrests took place in Texas and Florida, organizers in Chicago nonetheless worry that the numbers augur another burst of ICE activity in their communities. “We might be looking at another surge here in Chicago,” said Antonio Gutierrez of Organized Communities Against Deportations, speaking at the Socialism 2026 conference in early September. 

Gutierrez said calls to his group’s hotline rose in August — echoing the rise in the run-up to Operation Midway Blitz — and that increased activity usually shows up in the data before operations are publicly announced.  

But this time around, flashy displays of force have been replaced by the “quiet, mundane, everyday work of apprehending, detaining and deporting people,” said Adam Goodman, a professor at the University of Illinois Chicago and author of “The Deportation Machine.” “The ICE presence has shifted. It’s not as concentrated or as public in terms of the display.” 

“That’s harder to detect and harder to organize around,” he said. “And yet the need remains.” 

Coming between the summer surge in Los Angeles and the winter one in Minneapolis, the autumnal Operation Midway Blitz Chicago was one of several high-profile operations to hit U.S. so-called sanctuary cities in 2025. All three were part of President Donald Trump’s detain-and-deport policy that aims to see more than 10 million undocumented immigrants rounded up in his second term. Block Club Chicago, a local media outlet, estimates that 300 Border Patrol agents were sent to Chicago, where they patrolled predominantly Latino neighborhoods and conducted raids on local businesses and apartment buildings. According to the Block Club investigation, federal agents deployed tear gas nearly 50 times and shot two people, killing one, a Mexican immigrant named Silverio Villegas González. Of nearly 4,000 people detained in Illinois and northern Indiana between Sept. 8 and Nov. 14, only 15% had a criminal conviction, according to a Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ-FM analysis of Deportation Data Project records. About 71%, or 2,732 people, have since been deported or “self-deported.”

Announced on Sept. 8, Operation Midway Blitz came months after a series of executive orders signed by Trump in April targeting sanctuary cities for immigration enforcement. Illinois, with its vibrant Latino community and progressive leadership of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Gov. JB Pritzker, who has butted heads with Trump on several occasions, was a natural target. “President Trump has long been obsessed with demonizing Chicago and using it as a kind of red meat to dangle out to his base,” said Goodman, of the University of Illinois Chicago. “It’s not coincidental that they chose to carry out Operation Midway Blitz here.” 

Juliet DeJesus, the director of a neighborhood association in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood, adds that Chicago’s segregated neighborhoods made it an easy target. Immigration agents’ presence was particularly aggressive in areas like Logan Square, Pilsen and Franklin Park, home to long-established immigrant communities. “In Chicago, you just need a map to know where Latinos are,” she told Truthdig. 

The Trump administration touted the operation as if it were a foreign invasion. Promotional videos featured then-secretary of homeland security Kristi Noem riding on the back of a motorcycle during an operation in Elgin, a suburb of Chicago, with the ensuing arrests of four Latino men set to rock music. Toward the end of September, agents carried out a nighttime raid at a public housing complex in a South Shore neighborhood — which the administration claimed was a haven for gang members from the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua — breaking down doors and rounding up terrified families on the pavement. In November, Border Patrol agents, including chief Gregory Bovino, patrolled downtown Chicago in military fatigues, taking pictures in front of the famous landmark “The Bean.” 

As the surge went on, federal agents expanded beyond the dense inner city to outer “Chicagoland,” including the commuter suburbs of Broadview, Cicero and Elgin. 

On Halloween Day, 2025, Orozco’s 30-year-old nephew was driving a long-haul truck from Wisconsin to Chicago near the Illinois state line when traffic cops pulled him over. Though he had a driver’s license and his documents were in order, local police called ICE, which detained him in Chicago before deporting him to Ecuador. “It happened super fast,” his aunt said. “Without the chance to contact a lawyer, without any kind of recourse.” His wallet, with his documents and cash, a gold chain and a new iPhone were taken from him, she said, and none of it was recovered. “Everything was lost.”

Despite the speed and aggression of Operation Midway Blitz, Chicago communities fought back. “We were not born during this Trump administration,” Gutierrez, the OCAD organizer, said during a panel discussion at Socialism 2026. “We actually fought the first one.” 

In Logan Square, DeJesus said, resistance networks began forming well before the surge was launched. They often coalesced in and around public schools, with mothers of young children on the front lines. “After he won in 2016, our community, our moms and our young people took Trump very seriously,” she said. “He was very clear how he felt about immigrants.” 

When the surge began, DeJesus’ neighborhood association, Palenque LSNA, was ready. It immediately organized a press conference and urged the Chicago school system to declare all educational facilities sanctuary spaces. It began working with teachers and local unions to organize Know Your Rights seminars and artists to decorate schools and communities with colorful murals. Many featured the monarch butterfly, a symbol of resistance known for its annual migration between the United States and Mexico. 

Pushing back against the occupation involved both visible and invisible resistance work, said DeJesus. Community organizers mobilized visible rapid response techniques learned from Los Angeles contemporaries — including ICE Watch community patrols and food delivery — while other activities were more low-burn, such as expanding know-your-rights seminars in schools that predated Operation Midway Blitz. 

“Our undocumented mamas are some of the most courageous women doing so much work that no one sees,” said DeJesus. “They’re not going to wear a whistle because they can’t, but they’re doing the work.” 

One year later, many experts and organizers believe that the Trump administration’s tactics in Chicago and other sanctuary cities have backfired. 

In December, the federal government withdrew the majority of federal agents from Chicago and dispatched them to Minneapolis for Operation Metro Surge, which resulted in the killings of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti. “They ended up creating solidarity between very disparate communities that hadn’t necessarily been in solidarity before,” DeJesus said. 

Today’s fear, however, is fear without the spectacle and without media attention. As a result, ICE has more room to operate. “What happens when the media spotlight moves away?” Goodman asked. 

Immigrant rights activists worry that ICE has learned to camouflage itself. “It was an entity that was created after 9/11 to protect the homeland, and they were given power to do things in the shadows,” said Johannes Favi, an immigrants rights advocate in the Chicago area and director of “Caged Dreams,” a film about the mental health impacts of immigration detention. “The minute they decide to go back to their natural habitat, they will be operating without us knowing it.”

Favi was twice detained by ICE (under Democratic administrations) and knows how the agency operates away from the spotlight. He says detention conditions in places like the Kankakee, Illinois, facility where he was detained push immigrants to mental health crises that can lead them to self-deport. He believes this is the end goal of the revamped Trump administration strategy: painful, slow, administrative cruelty, not the shock and awe tactics of Operation Metro Blitz. 

To John Washington, author of “How to Close a Camp,” a book about immigration detention, ICE’s shift in tactics seems to be yielding better results than massive surges. “It’s actually not that efficient to just cruise around a city stopping people who are brown or non-English-speaking,” Washington told Truthdig. “They’ll pick up some people, but they’ll also face intense pushback, because people have mobilized and organized.” 

Instead, he said, ICE has focused on “re-detention” — a policy of seeking out, for example, individuals who had been given advanced parole by the Biden administration. “Through surveillance technology, analytics and shared resources with local law enforcement agencies, they can find out where people live, when they’re going to be in court, when they’re going to work, and quietly snag up a lot more people,” he said.  

This next frontier is exactly what DeJesus, Orozco and their fellow organizers fear. Orozco told Truthdig she had heard of cases of immigrants being summoned to court allegedly to have their ankle monitors removed, and then whisked away for deportation. 

“The snares,” Washington concluded, “have been laid.”