The Raid
At 12:55 a.m. on Sept. 30, Parra was exchanging audio messages with an old friend from Caracas about a construction job. Parra’s 5-month-old daughter had been sick with a fever, and the friend planned to drop by with diapers.
Suddenly Parra’s girlfriend started shouting in the other room. An audio message to the friend recorded the couple’s frantic conversation.
“Immigration got in here,” she told Parra.
“Where?” he asked.
“Here, inside,” she said, as the noise of a helicopter crescendoed.
Before they knew it, masked agents had knocked down the door of their second-floor apartment, according to Parra, his girlfriend and a friend who was spending the night there with her son.
“Hands up,” the agents yelled, grabbing Parra in the kitchen and zip-tying his hands behind his back.
“It was like the military hunting for Pablo,” said Parra, referring to the Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar.
The overwhelming force of the raid shocked the building’s residents.
Yelianny Nicoll Primera Herreras, 20, awoke to the booming sound of doors being broken down across the hall. She looked out the window of the apartment her family had moved into just two days earlier and saw drones and armored vehicles. Then her apartment door came down. Agents swarmed in, grabbed her husband and pushed him against a wall.
“I was screaming,” Primera said. “I was so scared.” All she could think about, she said, was whether the agents would take away her three daughters — all under 4 — and deport her without them.
Colmenares said he tried to film the agents when they burst into his unit. They snatched his phone, threw it to the floor and hit him across the head with the butt of a rifle, he said. He dropped to his knees, he said, and raised his hands to his neck. His cousin’s wife, Norelly Eugenia Mejías Cáceres, fainted and agents carried her down the stairs.
When she came to, she was disoriented, barefoot and unable to answer agents’ questions. “Where is my son?” she asked again and again, until they took her to a small bus in a nearby parking lot where he was being held with his father and uncle.
Nathan Howard, a U.S. citizen, was asleep in a fifth-floor apartment when the raid began. He saw the helicopter and the agents storming into the building from a stairwell on the roof. He was temporarily blinded by bright white lights as agents threw a flash-bang inside the apartment.
“It’s 20,000 of them running through my house like we got Saddam Hussein in the closet,” he said.
Howard said that he was zip-tied to his brother, Cameo Polk, and later taken to the adjacent parking lot of a school he had attended as a child. Howard was turned over to Chicago police on an outstanding warrant for failure to appear in court. Of the many U.S. citizens who agents detained temporarily, Howard was the only one arrested. He is pleading not guilty, according to the Cook County public defender’s office.
Yelianny Nicoll Primera Herreras said she was screaming when agents burst into her apartment, terrified that she might be deported without her three daughters. She is now living at a homeless shelter in Chicago with her children.
Agents scrawled the Venezuelans’ apartment numbers on their arms, bare chests and foreheads with black marker. Then they marched the detainees outside, lined them against a wall and questioned them, a scene filmed by a NewsNation camera crew that accompanied agents.
Parra’s girlfriend said she tucked their cellphones under her shirt and between her breasts and walked out of the building. She carried her sick daughter, who was dressed in a onesie. She saw other mothers with half-naked children — some were barefoot, others wore only diapers.
“They didn’t give them a chance to even put clothes on their kids,” she said.
Agents questioned Leonardo José Paredes Varela, Gabriel Enrique Gamarra Pérez and Jonahyker Francisco López Manzano about Tren de Aragua, the three men said. Paredes has convictions for domestic battery and shoplifting, and a pending gun possession charge. He is pleading not guilty in the pending case, according to the Cook County public defender’s office. Gamarra has a conviction for marijuana possession and another pending marijuana possession charge. It is unclear whether he has entered a plea in the pending case. We did not find any convictions for López. All three men denied knowing anything about the gang, and authorities have not publicly accused them of being members.
Paredes, Gamarra and two others said agents showed them photos of about a half dozen men and asked if they knew them.
The photos gave them the impression that the agents were looking for people who didn’t live in the building. Gamarra said one agent said about him and the others, “These aren’t the guys.”
Parra said agents did not ask him about Tren de Aragua.
Because of the lack of information provided by DHS, it is difficult to assess the accusations that Parra and another Venezuelan, who has not been named, belong to Tren de Aragua. A DHS spokesperson said one of the two men “was a positive match” on a watch list for terrorists. We checked several lists of alleged gang members that are kept by Venezuelan law enforcement officials and the international law enforcement agency Interpol; Parra’s name was not on those lists.
Gang experts warn about the challenges of correctly identifying members of Tren de Aragua. The gang has a short history in this country and has less power here than in Latin American countries such as Chile and Peru, where Tren de Aragua and its offshoots are major players in the underworld.
Battered doorways and signs of dilapidation were visible inside the apartment building in the weeks after the raid.
ProPublica, in collaboration with Venezuelan journalists from Alianza Rebelde Investiga (Rebel Alliance Investigates) and Cazadores de Fake News (Fake News Hunters), previously reported on how the Trump administration rounded up more than 230 Venezuelans and called them gang members without providing evidence. The men were sent to El Salvador, where they were imprisoned for four months. DHS and the White House have previously defended the deportations, saying that “America is safer with them out of our country.”
Edwin Santana, a longtime New Jersey gang investigator, said federal agents are struggling with political pressure and lack of expertise as they try to identify members of the gang.
“There’s a fixation with Tren de Aragua,” he said. “It’s like the flavor of the month.”
Overkill?
The high-profile raid escalated the political debate over how the Trump administration is carrying out its immigration campaign. In interviews with ProPublica, eight current and former law enforcement officials, including veterans of SWAT teams, expressed concern about some of the methods used in South Shore.
The deployment featured two tactical units that, until recently, would have been a strange sight on the streets of U.S. cities. One is a special response team of Customs and Border Protection officers who normally work at ports of entry. The other is the Border Patrol Tactical Unit, the agency’s elite SWAT division. Although the unit does occasional inland missions, current and former law enforcement officials said it rarely conducts urban raids like the one in Chicago.
“BORTAC is highly trained and proficient, but it’s not clear that this type of operation is one they are best suited to conduct,” said John Cohen, a former senior DHS official.
Cohen, a 40-year law enforcement veteran and former SWAT team member, questioned the decision to have agents descend from helicopters on ropes. Helicopters are routinely used for observation and support during raids. But in cities, the tactics known as rappelling, in which agents are attached to the ropes, and fast-roping, in which they are not attached, are typically reserved for extreme scenarios such as hostage rescues because of the risks of injury to agents and of a helicopter mishap to the public, experts said.
Cohen said he has done hundreds of searches, including in gang-controlled buildings, but “I have never rappelled out of helicopters in those operations.”
DHS officials have not explained the nature of the threat motivating extraordinary tactics that generally require high-level approval in Washington, D.C., according to interviews.
It’s also not clear how authorities chose the target for the raid. The building has a troubled history that has drawn the attention of police and city inspectors for years. Last year the city sued the owner, Trinity Flood, a Wisconsin real estate investor, for failing to keep the building safe. The property is in foreclosure. In court filings, Flood has said her companies “have invested hundreds of hours working with law enforcement in an attempt to prevent illegal squatters and criminal elements in the area from entering the building.” Flood did not return requests for comment.
Chicago city employees and the building’s property manager, Corey Oliver, second from left, during an inspection of the apartment complex on Nov. 6.
The area’s alderman, Greg Mitchell, has said that he responded to the many complaints about the building by seeking help from police and other agencies, including the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, according to a Block Club Chicago report. Mitchell did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for the ATF, whose agents participated in the raid, declined to comment.
Two weeks before the raid, Cook County sheriff’s deputies went through the building to carry out evictions in a dozen apartments, records show. Federal agents developed a target list of suspects and apartments based partly on information from Flood, according to interviews and statements by officials.
The agents focused mainly on apartments occupied by immigrants, or by U.S. citizens who weren’t paying rent, and bypassed a number of units whose tenants were older U.S. citizens, according to interviews.
Close to two dozen residents said agents entered their apartments without providing a warrant. Many said agents had knocked down their doors. Such a forced entry would require a judicial warrant signed by a federal judge. No such warrants have been filed publicly, though they can be kept under seal as the investigative process unfolds.
Colmenares said he didn’t open the door to his apartment because he had seen on the news that agents were supposed to have warrants. Naudelys Yayes said that, as she and her 4-year-old son were taken out of another unit, she asked an agent if they were allowed to enter without a warrant. He told her they had a warrant because “in this building there’s a lot of weapons,” but he never showed it to her.
Immigration authorities can also use so-called administrative warrants, which do not allow a forced entry. Residents must give permission for officers to enter their apartment.
DHS officials have said warrants played a role in the raid but have not provided details.
“We’re not violating their rights,” Greg Bovino, the Border Patrol chief who led the raid, said in an interview with NewsNation. “We’re making it safe for them so they can live in a safe and secure neighborhood.”
If that was the goal, it hasn’t happened. At a Friday hearing, the day after a court-ordered inspection, five city inspectors described exposed wires, broken elevators, leaking pipes and other hazards. Six tenants told the judge about mice and gnats, flooded floors, broken doors, squatters and a lack of security guards.
The building’s property manager, Corey Oliver, said he hired armed security after the raid but fired them when they refused to patrol the building. Oliver did not respond to requests for comment.
“The safety of these tenants and the safety of this building is of paramount importance,” the judge said during the hearing. She appointed a new company to oversee the property and help the remaining three dozen tenants move elsewhere.
Leaving
After the raid, at least 17 Venezuelan men were bussed to the Clay County Jail near Terre Haute, Indiana. Colmenares said he wasn’t allowed to use the bathroom all morning and urinated on himself during the three-and-a-half hour drive to the jail.
The Venezuelan women and children detained at the building were taken to an immigration processing center. At least four of the mothers and their children — some U.S. citizens — were released later that day.
Parra’s girlfriend said she was put on an ankle monitor and told to get her daughter’s U.S. passport so they could be returned together to Venezuela. She went back to her apartment and was infuriated to discover that it had been ransacked by other tenants who could walk in because the door had been knocked down.
“I was left without clothes. Without a bed. Without my daughter’s crib,” she said. “And they took my partner away from me.”
About two weeks later, she returned to Venezuela with her daughter.
Other women and children were put on a plane to Texas the day after the raid. Mejías and her 6-year-old son spent close to a month at a family detention facility there before she gave up fighting for asylum and asked to be deported. Her son cried for his father and refused to eat the beans and rice served in jail. Sometimes other women would buy her son ramen noodles from the commissary.
Back in Venezuela, Mejías and her son are now staying at the home of one of her sisters about an hour from Caracas. Her husband, who had a job washing dishes at a restaurant in Chicago’s Chinatown, remains in detention at a jail in Kentucky.
“They said they were looking for criminals, but the boy and me, and my husband, we’re not criminals,” Mejías said in a phone interview. “I don’t know why they did that.”
In October, one of the Venezuelan men filed a habeas corpus petition in federal court seeking his release on bond. That petition — which was filed jointly with two other men detained at the building before the raid — remains pending.
As the weeks in detention have passed, several men said they feel sick, isolated and in despair. In immigration hearings, many have asked judges to send them to Venezuela as soon as possible.
Three weeks after the raid, Johan José Cordero Hernández appeared in Chicago immigration court via a video link from jail.
Cordero had arrived in the United States in early 2023 and worked as a welder. On the night of the raid, a masked agent marched him through a parking lot; he looked tired in a pink T-shirt, his hands zip-tied behind his back.
In court, Cordero sat alone in front of a camera and answered the judge’s questions politely in Spanish. He didn’t have an attorney. He told the judge he hadn’t been arrested before. A government attorney confirmed that Cordero was telling the truth. “Not in our records,” she said.
The judge then explained that Cordero was eligible to depart voluntarily to Venezuela, giving him the chance to return one day. Cordero accepted.
“I wish you much luck in the future,” the judge said. Cordero bowed his head. Two weeks later, he was gone.
Nick McMillan contributed data analysis. Kirsten Berg and Gabriel Sandoval contributed research. Ronna Rísquez of Alianza Rebelde Investiga and Andrea Morales of MLK50: Justice through Journalism contributed reporting.
