CHICAGO — Three decades after she came to the U.S., on Tuesday 53-year-old Maricela Rosales Castillo put her hair in a ponytail, grabbed her favorite blue sweater and backpack, and left her home in Berwyn, Illinois, to head to a market for groceries. She was planning to make albóndigas, a meatball stew, for her children that day.
She didn’t make it far.
Just steps away from her house, she was intercepted by a group of Border Patrol agents armed and wearing dark masks. These agents, whose primary mandate is to secure the national borders, are now patrolling Chicago suburbs.
It’s part of Operation Midway Blitz, a campaign the U.S. Department of Homeland Security launched Sept. 8 saying it would target “the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens” in the area.
But the government’s own data and detentions like that of Rosales — a mother of three who has no apparent criminal record — cast serious doubt on whether that’s really the mission.
On Oct. 3, DHS announced that since the operation began in September, more than 1,000 undocumented migrants had been arrested across Chicago and its suburbs — “including the worst of the worst pedophiles, child abusers, kidnappers, gang members, and armed robbers.” However, the agency provided detailed information for only 10 men with a criminal background, about 1% of those detained, making independent verification difficult.
In one particularly jarring raid, on Sept. 30 federal agents with Black Hawk helicopters and military-type vehicles descended on an apartment complex in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood. DHS said the location was “known to be frequented by Tren de Aragua members,” a Venezuelan criminal gang targeted by the Trump administration.
According to DHS, 37 people were arrested during the operation; however, only eight of them were confirmed to have a criminal record — and that includes crimes ranging from aggravated battery to retail theft. The agency did not say whether any of those cases resulted in convictions.
Just one “verified” Tren de Aragua member and one U.S. citizen with an active warrant were among the 37, DHS said, without saying how it had verified that gang affiliation. Others taken that day, the agency said, were “illegal aliens.”
In other words, while the administration says it is disrupting transnational gang activity, the bulk of those detained seem to have no serious record. In fact, federal data shows that over 70% of detainees who were being held as of last month by Immigration and Customs Enforcement nationally had no criminal convictions.
One of Rosales’ daughters, Samantha Rojas Rosales, only learned about her mother’s detention after watching a video obtained by MSNBC. “That’s her,” she said. “She always wears that blue sweater.”
In tears, Rojas said these immigration operations ostensibly aimed at gangsters are tearing families apart. Her mother came to the U.S. from Mexico in 1995, she said.
“She has worked hard. She has paid her taxes. She’s done everything possible to make sure she isn’t a problem here,” the 21-year-old daughter said. “And she has raised me here my entire life.”
Asked about the arrest, a Homeland Security official focused on what Rosales did 30 years ago: “Rosales Castillo admitted to being illegally present in the U.S. to Border Patrol officers which is a crime,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told MSNBC in an email.
Grabbed up while grabbing coffee
The same morning Rosales was arrested, just blocks away in Cicero — an area with the highest concentration of Latinos in the state — another immigration operation unfolded. Two mechanics, Mario Martínez Serrano and Daniel Cabrera García, were standing outside a bakery drinking coffee when unmarked vehicles and Border Patrol agents surrounded them.
Surveillance footage obtained by MSNBC shows Border Patrol agents chasing the men inside the bakery. Cabrera was violently thrown to the ground, three witnesses said. Both men were taken away in an unmarked vehicle.
Rosie Rodríguez, who has an insurance agency next door to the bakery and witnessed the arrests, told MSNBC that immigration agents are snatching away “good people.”
“They’re my clients. These are hardworking men. These are not criminals,” she said.
DHS disagrees.
Martínez is a “criminal illegal alien with an extensive criminal history, including arrests for battery, DUI, domestic abuse, possession of a controlled substance, and two prior removals from the U.S.,” McLaughlin told MSNBC.
Martínez’s wife, who did not want to be named for fear of immigration authorities, said he’s lived in Illinois for 30 years. She acknowledged he’s “made mistakes in the past, but in the 10 years we have been together he had no issues with the law. He’s a good husband, a father to two teenage U.S. citizens, and a hard worker.”
Cabrera’s cousin, David González, described him as a family provider. “He’s a good man. He had dreams. He was about to open his own car shop. He didn’t do anything wrong. Now everyone around here feels like a target, even U.S. citizens like me,” he said.
Asked about Cabrera’s case, McLaughlin only said he was “an illegal alien from Mexico who attempted to evade arrest.”
The scene in Chicago
Over a five-day span in greater Chicago, MSNBC received dozens of reports from families and neighbors alleging that their loved ones had been taken by immigration officials, seemingly without any reason other than being undocumented.
On Wednesday — the day after the detentions in Cicero and Berwyn — two sisters were stopped and dragged out of their vehicle in front of a school in Chicago’s Little Italy neighborhood by at least 10 agents, some of them wearing face coverings. Video obtained and verified by MSNBC shows one of the women pinned to the ground as she pleaded for help.
“They don’t have a warrant. They forcefully opened the door of the truck. It was locked, it was locked,” the woman repeated. MSNBC confirmed both women were later released.
“When Donald Trump campaigned, he said he was going after criminals, rapists and drug dealers,” said Humberto Fuentes, a resident who said he witnessed the women being detained. “Now, they’re assaulting women, deporting children, mothers and fathers — not criminals. And if they’re criminals, he needs to prove it. We haven’t seen that evidence yet.”
That’s the main argument being made by legal observers and state and local officials, including Gov. JB Pritzker.
“It’s not going after the worst of the worst when you’re just literally stopping people who happen to be brown and asking them for papers,” Pritzker told MSNBC. “We don’t want people picked up off the streets just because they happen to be undocumented and have committed no crime.”
President Trump insists Chicago is in crisis, that undocumented migrants are driving crime and that Democratic leaders including Pritzker aren’t doing anything about it.
A number of studies have found that immigrants — including undocumented ones — are less likely to commit crimes than Americans born in the U.S., and challenged claims that unauthorized immigration increases violence.
In Chicago, which has received over 50,000 asylum-seekers since 2022, “Violent crime is down,” Mayor Brandon Johnson told the U.S. House Oversight Committee in March, adding that “the city ended 2024 with its lowest homicide rate in five years.”
In the first six months of 2025, those numbers declined even further, with all major crime categories lower than during the same period in 2024.
“We are good people,” insisted Fuentes, who is from Mexico and has lived in Chicago for 22 years. “Immigrants can’t be the scapegoat for all the things that go wrong in this country. Sooner or later, someone will have to admit this is all for show.”
Jacob Soboroff is a senior political and national correspondent for MS NOW.
Kay Guerrero
Kay Guerrero is a senior producer of newsgathering for MS NOW.
Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW, with a focus on how global events and foreign policy shape U.S. politics. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.