CHICAGO — A third grader who stopped eating lunch at school because he feared typing in his lunch code would help immigration enforcement agents target his family. A mother who considered granting guardianship of her daughter to a healthcare provider so she could get the care she needed if her parents had to leave the country without her. A vibrant economic corridor turned into a ghost town.
The state commission that has been investigating actions by federal immigration agents heard these stories and more from health, education and community safety advocates at its third public meeting Tuesday.
“Midway Blitz was not a crackdown or a sweep or a sting,” elementary school Principal Seth Lavin testified. “You can’t call an operation ‘targeted’ or ‘a sting’ when it blankets a city in fear.”
Lavin, principal of the Brentano Math & Science Academy in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood, was one of a dozen experts who testified in front of the Illinois Accountability Commission about the impact of the federal immigration campaign that dominated Chicago last fall.
The commission, tasked by Gov. JB Pritzker to investigate alleged misconduct by federal agents amid the Trump administration’s ‘Operation Midway Blitz’ campaign, used the meeting to focus on four key domains: health, mental health and social well-being; education and youth stability; public safety and economic vitality; and household stability.
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“The question before us is straightforward,” Commissioner Ricardo ‘Ric’ Estrada said as he opened the meeting. “Did these enforcement actions produce measurable improvements in community stability and trust, or did they generate instability, distrust and lasting harm?”
By looking at disruptions in the four areas, Estrada said, the commission could evaluate the Trump administration’s claims that Operation Midway Blitz has brought law and order to Chicago.
If it were to observe major disruptions to daily life — families withdrawing from institutions they once trusted, drops in educational engagement, people too afraid to call 911 — that would contradict the safety narrative, he concluded.
The meeting heard nearly four hours of testimony from experts, advocates and private citizens who testified about the short and long-term consequences of federal immigration enforcement.
Avoidance of institutions
Health care providers and educators testified that immigrant communities began to avoid hospitals, doctors’ offices and schools out of fear of immigration enforcement activities targeting those institutions.
That fear can keep students from attending school or from engaging fully in it, testified Lavin, principal of the Logan Square school. It was one of his students who stopped eating at school because, in his third-grade mind, it might alert ICE to his location.
In families with mixed documentation statuses, parents who fear going even to the grocery store began to rely significantly on their children, added community organizer Juliet de Jesus Alejandre, executive director of Palenque LSNA, which advocates for equitable education access across the state.
De Jesus Alejandre told of high school students giving each other shopping tips, pulling up pictures on their phones to teach other students how to differentiate between parsley and cilantro when shopping.
“While these young people demonstrate enormous strength and courage, ‘parentification’ of children is also associated with higher levels of risky behaviors as young people seek less-than-healthy coping mechanisms to deal with the enormous pressure to take care of their families,” de Jesus Alejandre said.
Their parents, she added, often grappled with guilt over burdening their children with these responsibilities.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement practice of conducting enforcement actions at or near health care facilities creates a chilling effect that deters immigrant patients from seeking care, testified Minal Giri, pediatrician and executive director of the Midwest Human Rights Consortium.
She testified that she had witnessed children’s medical treatment, sometimes in the middle of chemotherapy, disrupted because their parents had been detained or deported by ICE. Suddenly, Giri explained, there is no insurance plan, no transportation to the hospital, no one to pick up prescriptions.
Treatment delays generally can exacerbate conditions, but with infants especially, it can be deadly, Giri said.
Health, psychological damage
Apart from direct interruption of care, the health experts testified about the physical and psychological consequences to children from stress and fear caused by immigration enforcement activity.
“When helicopters circle over neighborhoods, when flash bangs explode before dawn, when armed agents enter residential buildings, children are watching. Their nervous systems absorb that fear,” Giri said.
Clinical child psychologist Rebecca Ford-Paz told the commissioners that parents leaving their children alone in medical settings can also have major health and psychological impacts on already sick kids. Children whose parents leave them alone at the hospital sometimes misinterpret their caregivers’ absence as an indication that their parents don’t love them, Ford-Paz said.
Parents holding their newborns improve not only infants’ social and emotional development, but also their medical progress, according to research cited by Ford-Paz.
“We’re doing everything we can as a medical and psychosocial team, but nothing can replace parents being able to be with their babies,” Ford-Paz said.
Pediatrician Karen Susan Haverkamp shared stories from her patients with details modified to assure privacy and confidentiality out of fear for retaliation, but said “the events, timelines and suffering are real.”
She told of a cheerful second grader with a congenital heart condition who had survived multiple open-heart surgeries and required advanced medical care. The girl’s father was considering moving the family back to his country of origin out of fear of ICE activity, a country where she could not get the care she needed.
The family had to weigh whether to leave her behind in the care of a stranger or move the family together, putting the girl’s survival at risk.
Three children of a man detained for months without a warrant developed or relapsed into serious mental health conditions including an eating disorder, suicidal ideation and self-harm, and anxious refusal to leave the home. The impacts on each person in the household, Haverkamp said, are “profound and ongoing.”
“Providers throughout Illinois are now treating trauma layered onto medical issues in some of our most vulnerable populations,” Haverkamp said.
Those same clinicians, the doctors testified, are not often comfortable speaking out for fear that drawing attention to their institutions would make them targets for federal funding cuts.
Safety, economic vitality
Last November, Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin cited lower crime numbers in Chicago, implying that Operation Midway Blitz was responsible for enforcing law and order in the city. The Trump administration had claimed it was targeting “the worst of the worst,” immigrants with serious violent criminal histories.
However, data at the time showed those trends pre-dated the federal presence in Illinois. Chicago’s Deputy Mayor for Community Safety Garien Gatewood reiterated the same in Tuesday’s hearing.
In fact, the experts testified, the campaign made people afraid to go to work, including U.S. citizens who feared being profiled based on the color of their skin or the sound of their accent.
And when employees are afraid to go to work, and customers afraid to shop, it affects the economy.
Marcela Rodriguez, executive director of community organization Enlace, surveyed about 130 businesses in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood about their revenues. Most, she said, reported significant revenue loss, with many still facing deficits months later.
Economic activity in Little Village is driven in large part by the usually bustling 26th Street commercial corridor. According to Chicago City Clerk Anna Valencia, the corridor generates the second-highest tax revenues in the city outside of the Magnificent Mile, a high-end business corridor.
On an unseasonably warm day last November, Valencia recalled walking through the normally vibrant area and finding it resembling more of a ghost town than a busy economic hub of activity.
Business owners told Valencia of low foot traffic and slow sales forcing them to cut back on work hours. Some stores were operating with locked doors, checking for ICE agents before opening. Some said sales were worse than during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“This is about something much deeper than economic issues,” Valencia said. “This is an attempt to break the spirit of people who build lives here in spite of language barriers, racist policies and hate.”
Looking forward
Commission Chair Judge Rubén Castillo urged the public to continue submitting information and providing feedback on the commission’s initial report in order to make the final version more robust. That final version is due by April 30.
Those wishing to provide information with the commission can do so on its website at https://ilac.illinois.gov/interest-form.html.
Castillo said he hopes to have Marimar Martinez, the Chicago teacher’s aide shot five times by a Border Patrol agent in October, testify at the next hearing in March.
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