DHS launches immigration crackdowns in Chicago, Boston

The Department of Homeland Security announced it’s launching an immigration enforcement operation in Illinois in the latest escalation of federal action on U.S. cities and states led by Democrats.

The agency said in a post on X that the U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement’s “Operation Midway Blitz” is in honor of Katie Abraham, a 20-year-old woman it says was killed in January in a drunk-driving hit-and-run accident involving a man who is an undocumented immigrant in Illinois.

Officials identified him as Julio Cucul-Bol. NPR has not confirmed details about the incident. The DHS post featured an interview with the parents of the victim, Joe and Michelle Abraham, who said the incident took place in Urbana, Ill.

DHS says the ICE operation targets “criminal illegal aliens who flocked to Chicago and Illinois” because they knew Democratic Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker’s “sanctuary policies” would protect them.

This latest announcement about Illinois follows a summer in which the Trump administration has targeted Democratic-led cities for increased immigration enforcement and National Guard deployments.

It also follows an earlier announcement from DHS that said it was launching a new immigration enforcement effort in Massachusetts, according to reporting from NPR member station WBUR in Boston.

Meanwhile, National Guard troops — some of them armed — are still patrolling the streets of Washington, D.C., ostensibly to address the administration’s concerns about crime. This is despite the fact that the city is experiencing a 30-year low in crime, according to the U.S. Justice Department from earlier this year. And earlier Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with President Trump, allowing immigration raids in Los Angeles to continue. This allows immigration agents to conduct “roving patrols” and profile people based on their appearance in Los Angeles and Southern California.

Chicago intervention

The announcement that Illinois will be the target of increased immigration enforcement comes after a confusing weekend during which Trump escalated threats toward Chicago and then walked them back.

Throughout the weekend, Trump maintained that the National Guard would be sent to the city and to other major U.S. cities, all led by Democrats, to fight crime and to step up immigration arrests and deportations.

Like in Washington, D.C., where Trump sent National Guard troops last month, data shows that violent crime has gone down in Chicago in recent years.

Trump posted on social media that Chicago was about to find out why the Department of Defense is called the “Department of War.” (Last week, the president signed an executive order renaming the department, but it would take an act of Congress to make that official.)

In response to Trump’s post, Pritzker this weekend wrote on X that Trump was “threatening to go to war with an American city. This is not a joke. This is not normal.”

But then Trump later told reporters on Sunday as he left the White House, “We’re not going to war. We’re going to clean up our cities. We’re going to clean them up so they don’t kill five people every weekend. That’s not war, that’s common sense.”

Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat, on Monday said the federal operations in Chicago are “wasteful, ineffective, inhumane and makes Illinoisans less safe.”

“Deploying massive federal law enforcement resources to hunt down non-violent individuals for civil immigration violations doesn’t do a single thing to make our country safer,” she added.

Residents in Chicago expressed deep concern about what this threatened federal action would look like. It appears, for now, this federal presence will take the shape of an increase in ICE agents on the streets. As of Monday afternoon, there has been no indication there’s been an uptick in immigration enforcement.

Boston faces enforcement surge

Over the weekend, DHS confirmed to WBUR that it is launching a second immigration enforcement surge throughout Massachusetts, but didn’t specify how long there would be increased ICE activity.

This enforcement effort may be heavily focused on the city of Boston, according to WBUR which reported that the DHS specifically called out Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, claiming the city’s sanctuary laws “attract and harbor criminals.”

In May, federal immigration officials said they arrested nearly 1,500 people as part of a month-long crackdown called “Operation Patriot,” WBUR reported. DHS refers to this new surge as “Patriot 2.0.”

This kind of federal intervention in major U.S. cities and states is not likely to stop any time soon, as Trump has also threatened to send troops to Baltimore and New Orleans in recent days.

NPR’s Joe Hernandez and Kat Lonsdorf contributed to this story.