A Morning in Little Village – Gunfire, Pepper Spray, and a Child in the Brutality of Operation Midway Blitz

It was just past noon when the first sirens wailed through the streets of Little Village. People ran out of shops, doors slammed shut, and a tense silence settled over 26th Street – the kind of silence you feel when something intrusive, something unreal, begins. Minutes later, black vehicles sped through the intersection at Kedzie Avenue, and then gunfire erupted. No one knew who had fired first. The Department of Homeland Security later reported that a man in a black Jeep had fired at federal agents. He escaped without leaving a trace.

What followed was not an orderly police operation but a scene straight out of an internal state of emergency. Dozens of heavily armed Border Patrol agents jumped out of their vehicles, charging across parking lots and sidewalks. Neighbors raised their phones, shouting, honking, blowing whistles. Employees of a nearby pharmacy locked their doors and ducked behind shelves after hearing gunfire and the crash of an impact. The Chicago police arrived to “secure the situation.” But what was happening was no longer a situation – it was the collision of two realities: a community pleading for calm and a federal government turning that plea into the language of war. According to the police report, no civilians were hit by gunfire. One officer was struck by a pickup truck, slightly injured, and taken to the hospital. He was lucky.

The Border Patrol agents seemed less interested in safety than in control. In the narrow streets of Little Village, a neighborhood that has upheld its Latin American identity for generations, their presence felt like a hostile occupation. For weeks, a nationwide campaign has been underway – known in Washington by the euphemistic name “Operation Midway Blitz” – a crackdown on migrants that has long since become a symbol of Trump’s politics of intimidation. More than 3,000 people have been arrested in the Chicago metropolitan area over the past two months. On Saturday morning, the violence escalated. City Councilman Byron Sigcho-López rushed to the scene after residents reported that masked federal agents had tried to search a car containing a father and a child. “When we arrived,” he said later, “an eleven-year-old girl was being dragged away by these men, and the neighbors tried to form a shield around her to keep them from taking the child.” A sentence that will burn itself into the collective memory of this city. Sigcho-López also said witnesses saw agents smashing a car window. “Look at what they’re doing to our community. Since ten o’clock this morning, they’ve been terrorizing the streets. It’s sad. It’s outrageous.”

Agents get out, point weapons, shout. A girl stands on the sidewalk, hands over her head, while tear gas drifts behind her. A woman shouts in Spanish, telling the men to step back. In the distance, the whistling of residents can be heard – the improvised soundtrack of a city defending itself. DHS released a statement that evening so detached from reality it was almost mocking: “This incident is not isolated but reflects a dangerous trend of violence and obstruction.” The agency said there had been an increase in assaults on federal officers in recent weeks. The violence must stop. Yet who is committing the violence, who is provoking it, who is systematically bringing it into these neighborhoods – on that, the department remained silent. Little Village is not a “trouble spot.” It is a neighborhood where children in school uniforms walk to church, where men sell newspapers on the corner, and bakers pour the first coffee before sunrise. It is a part of Chicago that has learned to live with poverty, racism, and political neglect – but not with becoming the target of federal militarization. After the agents left the scene, the anger of the crowd turned toward the remaining CPD officers blocking the intersections. “Shame!” people shouted, and in their voices there was less rage than exhaustion – the feeling of running into the same wall again and again. A woman who identified herself as a resident said, “I’m asking them to finally de-escalate. I live here. My daughter goes to school here. We just wanted to go shopping. I was at Walgreens. It’s enough. This has to stop.”

These sentences are what remains when governments begin to treat their own people as the enemy. An eleven-year-old child crying. A neighborhood coughing its way out of clouds of tear gas. We’ve seen these operations often enough ourselves, live. Officers hiding behind legal paragraphs. And a country so deeply divided that even its borders now run through its own streets. The operation is called Midway Blitz – as if it were a game. But what is happening here is no game. It is a moral low point. And Chicago, the city of voices and scars, experienced it on Saturday in all its brutality.

In numbers: From this single case alone, we are currently handling four arrests for which there is no legal basis whatsoever. We are working to get these people out of jail. Their “crime”? They did nothing – and that is the truth..