After the Storm - South Shore and the Traces of an ICE Raid

What remains when a building is stormed in the middle of the night by hundreds of heavily armed federal agents? In Chicago’s South Shore the answer shows itself in shards, smashed doors, blood stains on the floor and residents who no longer recognize their home. At around two o’clock Tuesday morning the raid broke over the 130-unit house at 7500 South Shore Drive - with helicopters, U-Haul trucks, masks and automatic rifles. What was left behind was chaos, open doors, missing valuables and an atmosphere that residents described with only one word: hell.

An Army veteran, three decades in the service of the Postal Service, blind and dependent on a cane, heard his apartment door being rammed. “I told them they must be mistaken,” he says. But the agents did not listen. A few meters away, in the apartment of Rodrick Johnson, a U.S. citizen, FBI men crashed through the door after neighbors had heard “people on the roof.” Johnson was shoved into a van with neighbors, held for hours without explanation. “They didn’t say why I was arrested. They left doors open, money and guns lying in the hall.”

According to DHS at least 37 people were arrested, including women and children according to eyewitnesses. Officially it is said the house was a retreat for Venezuelan migrants, allegedly with connections to the Tren de Aragua gang. But neither search warrants nor names were shown, and the staging had the character of a PR operation: NewsNation was invited from the beginning, the cameras were rolling. “These were families with children who were taken away in the middle of the night,” says Brandon Lee of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. “The government wants to produce images that turn neighborhoods against each other.”

The reality on the ground tells another story. Doors are broken out, apartments ransacked. Residents found their mattresses, iPads, even kitchen appliances stolen. Left behind were trash, foreign clothes and blood next to baby shoes. Flies circle open refrigerators, ceilings have collapsed from water damage, elevators broken. “It looks like hell,” says Dan Jones, whose apartment is uninhabitable after the raid. “ICE is nothing but a gang.”

But the trail of neglect did not begin with the federal agents. Even before the raid the building was a ruin - 14 years in a row it failed city inspections. Fire extinguishers were missing, stairways stank of urine, security guards had been removed. Owner Trinity Flood, an investor from Wisconsin, had overreached: she bought three South Shore properties in 2020 for 18 million dollars, today she faces 27 million dollars in foreclosure. The city is suing for more than 15 code violations. After the raid the building looks abandoned. Moving companies are clearing apartments, no one knows on whose behalf. Doors are hastily boarded up, walls smeared, “Venezuela” written on one floor. Some neighbors who were not affected received emails from management saying they would soon receive new keys. Others returned and found nothing the same: torn furniture, zip ties on the floor, an aura of violence.

South Shore has long been an arrival point for Venezuelan migrants sent by bus from Texas and Arizona to Chicago. Many found accommodation in houses like this through state aid programs. But when the subsidies ran out they were left alone - in buildings gutted by investors and marked by authorities as potential scenes for the next “operation.” For the residents the result is the same: a home that is no longer one. A veteran who no longer knows how to get his mail safely. Families taken away in the night. And tenants like Dan Jones, who stood in tears before his destroyed apartment while rent was due. “My apartment used to be nice,” he says quietly. On his way out he still tried to close the smashed door once more.

What remains is an image that tells more than any government message: a house in South Shore where people were not victims of gangs, but of a government that wages war on its own streets - and in the process targets those who have the least.