CHICAGO (AP) — Storming an apartment complex by helicopter as families slept. Deploying chemical agents near a public school. Handcuffing a Chicago City Council member at a hospital.
Activists, residents and leaders say increasingly combative tactics used by federal immigration agents are sparking violence and fueling neighborhood tensions in the nation’s third-largest city.
“They are the ones that are making it a war zone,” Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker said Sunday on CNN. “They fire tear gas and smoke grenades, and they make it look like it’s a war zone.”
More than 1,000 immigrants have been arrested since an immigration crackdown started last month in the Chicago area. The Trump administration has also vowed to deploy National Guard troops in its agenda to boost deportations.
But U.S. citizens, immigrants with legal status and children have been among those detained in increasingly brazen and aggressive encounters which pop up daily across neighborhoods in the city of 2.7 million and its many suburbs.
Arriving by helicopter
Activists and residents were taking stock Sunday at an apartment building on Chicago’s South Side where the Department of Homeland Security said 37 immigrants were arrested recently in an operation that’s raised calls for investigation by Pritzker.
While federal agents have mostly focused on immigrant-heavy and Latino enclaves, the operation early Tuesday unfolded in the largely Black South Shore neighborhood that’s had a small influx of migrants resettled in Chicago while seeking asylum.
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