Archie Collins went to sleep the night of the raid like he often does: on the floor and hungry. He was up on the fifth floor of the five-story brick building at 7500 S. South Shore Drive, in Apartment 502. He had no gas for his stove. No electricity, except for that provided by an extension cord from a neighboring unit. The U.S. Postal Service stopped delivering mail long ago. He didn’t hear the approaching helicopters. He didn’t see their spotlights shining through the windows, or hear the snipers land atop the roof, ready to take aim. He didn’t feel the presence of the federal agents, from ICE and the FBI, until they were at his door. He awoke only when they kicked it down. When they were upon him. What happened in his building in the early-morning hours of Sept. 30 has become perhaps the most astonishing moment in a month of astonishing moments surrounding Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in and around Chicago since the start of the Department of Homeland Security’s so-called Operation Midway Blitz. A military-style deportation crackdown made for cameras and funded by taxpayers, the mission was announced on Sept. 8 with promises to “target the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens” in the city. In the five weeks since, more than 1,500 people have been arrested, according to an ICE spokesperson. Protesters and agents have clashed outside an ICE detention facility in Broadview, where residents have become familiar with the burning sensation of tear gas on their skin. A single father with no known history of violence was fatally shot by an ICE agent who said the man was trying to run him over. The sight of agents chasing people and loading them into unmarked vehicles has become common throughout Chicago. With no immediate regard for citizenship or legal status, the agents have repeatedly detained people first and sought information about them later. It’s a scene that has played out repeatedly since early September in small-scale street stops, on courthouse steps, outside hardware stores and, infamously, inside a neglected apartment building at 7500 S. South Shore Drive. Inside the 130-unit mid-rise, hastily nailed wooden boards now cover entrances where those who were detained used to live. During the raid, agents broke down doors and smashed windows. They forced residents outside and bound some of their hands with zip-ties. They corralled them into rented box trucks, while ignoring their cries of being fellow Americans. In what appears to have been a warrantless operation in a largely Black community, the federal government has provided no public accounting of how many people were detained, who remains in custody and what happened to the children who were living in the building before the blitz but haven’t been seen by residents since that night. As a result, the distrust and anger has only deepened in a neighborhood already living with the generational trauma inflicted by police brutality. An apartment door at 7500 S. South Shore Drive is left open and damaged on Oct. 2, 2025, with clothing and other items on the floor inside, days after federal agents descended on the apartments in an early-morning raid. (Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune) Paul Gowder, a Northwestern University professor with expertise in constitutional law, described the raid as a “mind-blowing violation of the Fourth Amendment.” He considered the military-style siege of the building to be likely “one of the most unconstitutional things the federal government has ever done.” “The whole point of our system of warrants for searches, due process rights to defend yourself in court, and so forth, is that we don’t actually know that somebody’s a criminal,” Gowder said. “We don’t actually know that somebody’s apartment building or somebody’s individual apartment is a crime area, unless a court has said so. “You can’t just start with, ‘Oh, you know there’s crime, therefore we can do whatever we want.’” No public criminal charges have been filed against anyone in connection with the raid as of Friday, either in U.S. District Court or in Cook County. A federal law enforcement source said no cases had even been sent for referral by the agencies involved, which would be the first step in pursuing a federal criminal charge. The Tribune has been able to confirm the identity of only one immigrant taken into custody by federal agents that night: a 41-year-old pizza delivery man whose family said he first came to the United States from Mexico when he was 10 years old. Currently in a Kentucky jail, he has no apparent criminal history. While DHS has said the raid was the result of federal criminal warrants, none have been made publicly available. In fact, in a video released by the Chicago Police Department on Friday, a federal agent confirmed he didn’t know about a warrant involving one U.S. citizen until after the man had been detained. By the time Midway Blitz arrived at his door, Collins had already had enough. He’d grown tired of living without reliable power and without gas, tired of living in a place he described as “infested, man” with “rats and roaches, termites.” “Everything, you understand?” And then came the influx of migrants, he said, and the further neglect of a building already in disrepair and, eventually, the sound of helicopters he didn’t register until the agents were already inside, yelling. Even before the night they came through his door, “we were already living (expletive) up,” Collins said. “Now, when those people came,” he said of the federal agents, “they made it even worse.” The apartment building at 7500 S. South Shore Drive, pictured on Oct. 8, 2025, lost many of its former tenants following the recent raid by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. (Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune) Two days after the raid, DHS featured it in a slickly produced video on social media. The clip begins with the sound of the helicopters. The spotlights dance on the side of the building. Instrumental music — a song titled “Elysia” and described as “serious, tense, uplifting” in an online catalog — begins to play. The agents hold guns and wear tactical gear while they climb a ladder into the building. It looks like a scene from a movie as they apprehend people and lead some into vans. Along with the video is a message from DHS: “Darkness is no longer your ally.” it says. “We will find you.” In the video, the building at 7500 S. South Shore Drive appears as though it’s part of a set. In reality it’s a place of despair and neglect, one the Postal Service has deemed too “hazardous or unsafe” to provide service, according to a spokesperson. One that has failed city inspections seven times in the past year, and where a legal fight has led to its foreclosure. Now Collins and his neighbors, the ones left, are trying to make sense of what happened — how migrants, many of them Venezuelan, could’ve been placed there only to be targeted. “What was the purpose of having them here, just to come and take them back?” Collins asked. ‘A prisoner housing area’ It was a little after 2 a.m. on Sept. 30 when agents crashed through Collins’ door, he said. They led him outside and placed his hands in zip ties. He turned to notice the sidewalks full of people, some only partially clothed. He waited for a while on a bus, which the federal agents referred to as “a prisoner housing area.” He kept saying, “I’m a citizen of the United States.” He kept saying, “I’m not who you’re looking for.” “They was really trying to come and get the Venezuelans,” Collins said, referencing the migrants who had moved into the building, many of them fleeing whatever terrors they faced in their homeland only to end up in another untenable situation in Chicago. “But I don’t understand this. … They don’t know the difference between American citizens and Venezuelans?” Archie Collins, 59, talks on Oct. 6, 2025, about the recent large-scale raid by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at the building where he lives at 7500 S. South Shore Drive in Chicago. (Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune) Authorities have disclosed the name of only one person taken into custody that night. Records show Nathan Howard, 47, was handed over to Chicago police after federal agents discovered he had an outstanding warrant for missing a court date in a drug-related criminal case. In a video recording released by the Chicago Police Department on Friday, a Chicago police officer asked about the circumstances surrounding Howard’s apprehension. A board patrol agent — identified as the arresting officer — acknowledges that no one knew about the warrant until after Howard was detained. “Just tell me who handcuffed ’em and what time frame,” the Chicago police officer says in the video. “Everybody was detained by the special ops guys and brought here to a prisoner housing area,” the agent replies. “I took his information, I determined he was a U.S. citizen, I ran his info, and he has a bench warrant.” As he pleaded his case in the so-called “prisoner housing area,” Collins said, the agents “hear you, but they don’t hear you.” His account is typical among those who experienced the raid or witnessed it. Across the street, Tyrone Billups, who had come to the neighborhood to visit family, heard the helicopters and then watched while federal agents descended on ropes, as if something from “video games or movies,” he said. Then he heard the unmistakable boom of the flash-bangs. Dewayne Jackson, who has lived in the building for two years, could still see the rush of the “army people,” as he put it, a week later. He vividly recalled the agents forcing everyone out of the building in the dark of night, refusing to give them time to gather their things or even get dressed. “All the males … and then the females and the kids,” he said. “A lot of people ain’t have no clothes on.” It was, he said, like something from TV, the agents with “glow sticks, and all type of (expletive).” Dewayne Jackson, left, and Milwaukee Johnson talk on Oct. 6, 2025, about the raid by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on the apartment building where they live at 7500 S. South Shore Drive in Chicago. (Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune) Samantha Stamps, another resident, said she watched the raid from her fourth-floor window. She witnessed agents leading zip-tied people to separate buses: one for migrants and one for Black people. Cassandra Murray was not among those forced outside, but she watched everything “in disbelief,” she said, from the entryway of her fourth-floor apartment. Armed men told her to remain inside, so she looked on as they entered units that Murray said were occupied by squatters and forcibly removed them. “I felt sorry for them because they had absolutely nowhere else to go,” she said. When Venezuelans started moving into the building in 2023, she said they were normal neighbors but left garbage in the hallways and “didn’t clean up enough.” The building had become overrun with rodents. Murray’s complaints to building management went unanswered, she said, so she used a translator app on her phone to communicate with the migrants: “I love all of y’all, but if we live together we have to clean up after ourselves,” the message said. And things got a little better. For a while, at least. Since the raid more than two weeks ago, Murray has moved out. Others can’t. At least one of her former neighbors, a 45-year-old woman who asked to remain unidentified, said she’s close to leaving. She’d been out seeing friends when she returned home to the sights and sounds of the raid. She estimated that five children were among those zip-tied, alongside roughly 30 adults. Another witness, Ebony Sweets Watson, 31, said she watched while agents separated men from women and children, zip-tied their hands, and loaded them into Budget rental trucks. “Imagine somebody coming in the middle of the night, taking your kids away from you, zip-tying them, and you have no idea where they’re going, what’s going to happen to them, you don’t know if you’ll ever see them again —especially if those kids are U.S. citizens and you’re not,” said Watson, who volunteers with COFI, a Chicago-based organization that helps empower Black and Latina mothers. A pink bike, diapers, clothing and more are scattered throughout the second-floor hallway at the apartment complex at 7500 S. South Shore Drive in Chicago on Oct. 6, 2025. (Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune) The Tribune spoke with four South Shore residents who said they saw children zip-tied that night, but has not seen any pictures or videos to independently confirm those recollections. The Department of Homeland Security has denied on social media that it restrained children that night, but the agency did not respond to repeated requests for comment on this story. About a week after the raid, the halls and stairwells smelled like rotting garbage and urine. It’d been like that for a long time. What was new was that remnants of the 37 people ICE apprehended littered the halls. There were new diapers. An old pizza box. A hot pink Huffy bike with training wheels. Collins didn’t have much before that night, and now he doesn’t have a door, either. As a man who often never knows where his next meal will come from, he constantly worries someone might come in and steal the canned food he receives from a nearby church. ‘Hostile theater’ The building’s exterior tells a story of neglect and abuse, of a place that was forgotten — until the night the helicopters descended — in a neighborhood of contrasts. In the days after the raid, broken and twisted blinds lined open windows. Others had extension cords hanging out of them. Side doors hung open. Dirt and grime lined the hall just past the front entryway. Out front, a sign advertised “newly renovated apartments” for rent. Ones with “elevator access,” despite the broken elevators, and “stainless steel appliances,” despite the lack of working utilities and an “integrated security system,” despite the absence of any security. There was history here, at least, in South Shore. A strong sense of place and enduring community pride. Kanye West grew up just half a mile south. Michelle Obama’s childhood home stands about a mile away off of Euclid Avenue, where she and Barack Obama lived, briefly, after they were married. Jesse Jackson lived for a long time in South Shore’s Jackson Park Highlands, an enclave of stately residences also once home to Chicago Bears legend Gale Sayers. Decades ago, the Thunderbird Motel stood atop the land now occupied by the building at 7500 S. South Shore Drive, near the corner with East 75th Street. The motel lured visitors with an inviting roadside sign — the kind that would’ve been fitting on the old Route 66 — and its close proximity to Rainbow Beach. In time, though, 75th Street in South Shore morphed into a place to fear. Tyrone Billups, 47, looks out on Oct. 6, 2025, at the apartment complex where Billups recorded a federal raid on his cellpho