A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Chicago has been at the center of President Trump's immigration crackdown, and federal agents there have been taking aggressive actions. A federal judge in Chicago is overseeing a case about the agents' use of force. NPR's Sergio Martínez-Beltrán reports on a residential building raid that's become a symbol of these harsher tactics.
SERGIO MARTÍNEZ-BELTRÁN, BYLINE: The Border Patrol's Black Hawk helicopter hovered on top of a dilapidated building well after midnight in Chicago's South Shore neighborhood.
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MARTÍNEZ-BELTRÁN: It was September 30, and heavily armed and masked federal immigration agents rappelled from the helicopter a block away from Lake Michigan.
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MARTÍNEZ-BELTRÁN: Agents busted down doors.
ELEANOR MCMULLEN-WEBSTER: Boom, boom, boom, boom. That's the beating on the door.
MARTÍNEZ-BELTRÁN: Eleanor McMullen-Webster (ph) is a U.S. citizen who lives on the third floor.
MCMULLEN-WEBSTER: And they say, come out. Come out with your hands up. Come out with your hands up. I come out. I'm crying. I'm Black. I'm Black. I'm not Venezuelan. I'm not Mexican. I'm not none of that. I'm Black.
MARTÍNEZ-BELTRÁN: The 64-year-old is a retired caterer for a local university. On the day of the raid, she was zip-tied and brought to a filthy, unoccupied apartment. Later, she was held in an unmarked van for over an hour. With her were many others, including mothers with kids.
MCMULLEN-WEBSTER: I don't understand why they had to do it like that. Them people had little children. It was very, very scary.
MARTÍNEZ-BELTRÁN: Homeland Security, in a statement, says its agents were targeting the building they say was a gathering place for Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang. But only two of the 37 people arrested were gang members, the agency acknowledged in a statement. The 35 others had entered the country illegally. Some had a criminal record, DHS says. As a U.S. citizen, McMullen-Webster was released. She and other neighbors agree there was criminal activity in the 130-unit building, including drug-dealing and prostitution. But they say the response of federal law enforcement was not only excessive...
RODRICK JOHNSON: It was actually humiliating.
MARTÍNEZ-BELTRÁN: Rodrick Johnson was also detained by federal immigration officers despite being a U.S. citizen and an Air Force veteran. He says agents kicked his door in and pointed at him with automatic weapons, yelling at him to back up.
JOHNSON: So I'm backing up, and then they take my hands, zip-tie them behind my back. They take me from apartment to apartment until they got us downstairs.
MARTÍNEZ-BELTRÁN: DHS, in a statement, says detaining U.S. citizens in some raids is standard practice for their own safety and that of law enforcement. Since taking office, the Trump administration has been aggressively arresting and deporting migrants who are in the country illegally. But raiding a whole building in a military-style way in the middle of the night, that is new. And as the agency now does often, DHS turned the raid into a made-for-the-internet moment, quickly publishing a dramatic video of the operation on social media.
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MARTÍNEZ-BELTRÁN: The video shows dozens of agents with guns drawn running towards the building and agents leading shirtless men away with their hands zip-tied behind their backs.
SARAH SALDANA: I've not seen anything like that before.
MARTÍNEZ-BELTRÁN: Sarah Saldana served as director of ICE under President Obama.
SALDANA: That doesn't mean that if you're going after gang members, you gently ask them to come out the door. That's not the way you would do that either. But it sounds to me like this was way over the top and excessive.
MARTÍNEZ-BELTRÁN: Saldana says the theatrics and force used in Chicago sets a bad precedent.
SALDANA: That is where the emphasis is on instilling fear. As opposed to making the community safer, you tend not to get the cooperation. Quite frankly, it's the opposite. It's people rallying against law enforcement.
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MARTÍNEZ-BELTRÁN: Immigrant rights activists and civil liberties groups are questioning the constitutionality of this raid and others like it. Alexandra Block is a lawyer with the ACLU of Illinois. She says it is not clear the government had the proper warrants to go into each apartment unit.
ALEXANDRA BLOCK: The Fourth Amendment requires a warrant with particularized suspicion based on probable cause to believe that a crime was committed in a person's house before federal agents can enter.
MARTÍNEZ-BELTRÁN: DHS did not respond to questions from NPR about what warrants they had.
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MARTÍNEZ-BELTRÁN: We meet 22-year-old Shamyih Hill (ph) as she's moving out of the South Shore building. She's lived here for nearly three years with her 4-year-old son.
SHAMYIH HILL: I was planning on moving before the raid 'cause it was just problems with the building itself, and I just couldn't deal with this.
MARTÍNEZ-BELTRÁN: Water leaks, elevators not working, broken windows. The building and the neighborhood have problems with poverty and crime, she says, but many residents are still shocked and appalled by how they were treated by federal agents in their own community.
HILL: I feel like the whole situation, how they came in the middle of night, it was just - busting down doors. It was just wrong in every type of way.
MARTÍNEZ-BELTRÁN: Lawyers and immigrant rights activists worry this massive show of force has marked an unprecedented escalation in tactics and could be a model for other immigration operations across the country.
Sergio Martínez-Beltrán, NPR News, Chicago.
MARTÍNEZ: NPR senior producer Marisa Peñaloza produced this story.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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