Dasha Ramirez, 8, and her little brother were playing with the water at the Crown Fountain in Chicago’s Millennium Park when federal agents approached their parents on a sunny Sunday afternoon.
She ran toward her father, Jaime Ramirez, who was suddenly surrounded by a group of heavily armed agents in full camouflage. A second group encircled her mother, Noemi Chavez, who had been sitting quietly on a nearby bench, helping her 3-year-old son put on his shoes.
“They approached me and asked me if I had my documents,” said Noemi Chavez during a phone call to the Tribune Sunday night following their detention. “I told them I was not going to answer any questions and demanded a warrant.”
Her request, she said, was ignored.
Cradling her son in her arms, Chavez was escorted toward her husband, who remained surrounded by agents. Dasha clutched her doll, crying at the sight of her parents under arrest. Bystanders watched silently. No one intervened, Chavez recalled.
Despite the couple’s repeated demands to see a warrant, agents loaded the entire family into a U.S. Border Patrol vehicle parked along Michigan Avenue without much resistance — a scene captured on cellphones as tourists and residents strolled past the arrest in one of the city’s most popular destinations.
Their arrest came as dozens of federal immigration agents — most wearing camouflage uniforms marked with Border Patrol patches — patrolled downtown Chicago on Sunday unannounced, surprising onlookers and detaining construction workers near Tribune Tower, a street vendor and a passerby along with the Ramirez family.
Chavez and her two children are now confined to a room at O’Hare International Airport, awaiting transfer to a detention facility in Texas before deportation to Guatemala, she said.
There are no detention centers in Illinois, which has forbidden local jails from holding ICE detainees under the state’s Way Forward Act. Neither ICE or the U.S. Department of Homeland Security could immediately be reached for comment.
After the family, which is in the country without legal permission, was taken into custody, they were brought to the ICE processing center in west suburban Broadview where officials demanded they sign a voluntary departure document, Chavez said. But she and her husband refused to sign anything. She and her children were then taken to O’Hare; her husband remains in Broadview.
Two other mothers — one with a 5-year-old child and another with a 10-year-old — joined Chavez and her children in the immigration customs enforcement area of Terminal 5.
All three families were detained in the Chicago area over the weekend as part of an intensified immigration crackdown aimed at capturing the “worst of the worst,” according to the Department of Homeland Security and Border Patrol’s “Operation at Large.”
Yet, the women detained alongside their children insisted their husbands are no criminals.
“My husband is a good father,” Chavez said in Spanish. Aware of the enforcement surge and tactics, the family still dared to go out because Dasha “really wanted to visit Millennium Park.”
“We had just cashed my husband’s check and figured we could afford to take them,” Chavez said. “We never imagined our Sunday would end this way.”
The family had been in the Chicago area for about three years. Prior to that, they spent some time in Mexico, where the kids were born. Like many, they migrated to the United States fleeing violence and extreme poverty in their native Guatemala.
Chavez said she felt her family was targeted because of their appearance.
“There were a lot more people there, but the agents came directly to us because of how we look,” Chavez said. “It’s not fair.”
Gregory Bovino, commander at large of the Border Patrol who participated in the downtown operation, told a WBEZ reporter that agents rely on a person’s appearance before detaining them.
“It would be agent experience, intelligence that indicates there’s illegal aliens in a particular place or location,” Bovino said. “Then, obviously, the particular characteristics of an individual, how they look. How do they look compared to, say, you?” he said to the reporter — a tall, middle-aged man of Anglo descent.
Earlier this month, the Supreme Court said federal agents could continue stopping people based on factors including race, language and type of work.
Nancy Guamangate and her 5-year-old Eli Valentina Vaca, left their hometown in Ecuador because of violence and poverty, she said. They were apprehended, along with Guamangate’s husband, in the parking lot of a shopping center near Chicago and Kedzie avenues on Saturday afternoon.
The family had just finished laundry and grocery shopping when agents questioned their legal status. When they failed to respond, agents proceeded to arrest them.
The 5-year-old, wearing a dress and a bow in her hair, cried hysterically as agents forced her father, Milton Javier Otto into handcuffs. They too have been in the country for about three years, Guamangate said.
Angelis Castillo, along with her 10-year-old daughter Aranza Paris and husband, was shopping at Walmart on Friday when federal agents confronted them. The agents detained her husband at Broadview and later took her and her daughter to the room at O’Hare, where they have now been for three days, she said.
Until Sunday night, they had no beds, sleeping instead on a few hard gray plastic benches and covering themselves with yellow plastic sheets.
“But they don’t yell at us or treat us badly,” Castillo said. Her family is from Venezuela, and like the other mothers, she has been told that they would be transferred to a detention center in Texas “but they don’t tell us when. They won’t tell us what will happen with us or our children.”
Advocacy groups and local elected officials said that Sunday’s Border Patrol operation in downtown Chicago was largely “a performative photo-op that escalated into real harm for immigrant families in our city.”
“We observed federal agents engaging in explicit racial profiling to spread fear as part of a larger campaign to separate families, instill fear in our communities, and disrupt daily life for all Chicagoans, citizens and non-citizens alike,” said Brandon Lee of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.
Lee said that ICIRR and their legal partners are engaging with some of the families who have been taken and separated in the Chicago area over the last few weeks.
As Bovino promised “much more to come” to the Chicago area, advocates are asking communities to “remain vigilant, look out for your neighbors, and remember that all people have rights under the Constitution,” Lee said. “These include the right to remain silent, the right to ask for an attorney, and the right to speak with your consulate of the country where you have citizenship.”
Chicago Tribune’s Adriana Perez contributed.
