CHICAGO — In Albany Park, they fired pepper-spray balls to disperse an angry crowd and arrested two U.S. citizens. In Evanston, one repeatedly pointed his weapon at protesters while another knelt on a man’s back and punched him in the head.

They grabbed workers at an apartment complex in Hoffman Estates, landscapers, house painters and laborers in Edison Park, Skokie and Niles.

Despite pleas from Gov. JB Pritzker to pause federal immigration enforcement operations while children celebrate Halloween, teams of Border Patrol agents — including one led by Cmdr. Greg Bovino — tore through Chicago’s Northwest Side and nearby suburbs Friday, sparking violent clashes with community members throughout the day.

One of the first reported encounters took place around 9:30 a.m. in Albany Park. There, witnesses spotted three vehicles carrying federal agents along West Lawrence Avenue near North Kedzie Avenue.

Around 9:30 a.m., witnesses saw the vehicles heading along West Lawrence Avenue near North Kedzie Avenue in Albany Park. A crowd quickly gathered on the street, drawn by the sound of car horns and whistles — what’s now become a familiar soundtrack of public resistance in the Chicago area to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Operation Midway Blitz.

Neighborhood resident Olivia Dunn and Alivia Olson said they were walking back from a coffee shop when they saw three agents, two clad in camouflage, handcuffing their friend, a U.S. citizen who lives in the same building as them. Video from the scene shows their friend face down on the pavement in front of a business on Lawrence. One agent is heard in the video telling both women that their friend assaulted a federal agent.

The video goes on to show their friend being led into the back of a black truck with a Missouri license plate.

“It’s horrible,” a visibly shaken Dunn said of her friend’s arrest.

Moments after their friend was detained, federal agents arrested a second man, who witnesses said had tried to intervene as agents were trying to yank someone from a vehicle that pulled out of an alley and into their path.

Video from the scene shows a dark-colored Toyota Prius trying to turn onto Lawrence from an alley. The Prius appears to be unable to leave amid the crowd of people. An agent approaches and opens the driver’s side door. A woman in pink tries to step between the agent and the driver.

As an agent tries to move her, she leans down into the open driver’s seat while 33rd Ward Ald. Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez opens the passenger side door and, with a second person, pulls the woman free from the agent’s grasp.

The agents continue trying to grab someone from the Prius. One stops to shove Rodriguez-Sanchez as she approaches them, then a man steps in front of the driver’s open door. The agent turns back, grabs the man around his shoulders and slams him to the street.

Someone in the crowd screams: “Don’t (expletive) touch him!”

A masked agent is seen holding what looks to be a pepper ball gun. Multiple white chalk-like marks were visible on the street where witnesses said agents fired pepper balls toward the ground to disperse the crowd. Video shows the Toyota driving from the scene.

Chicago police arrived and helped clear a path for agents to leave, drawing sharp rebukes from those gathered on the sidewalk.

It’s unclear why agents were in the neighborhood. A Border Patrol spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

After agents and police left, Rodriguez-Sanchez talked about the arrests on social media, saying she understood both men arrested by agents were U.S. citizens.

“They came to terrorize our community,” she said of the federal agents, before thanking the community’s response.

Perhaps the most troubling clashes between federal agents and the public played out in Evanston.

A 54-year-old Evanston resident told The Chicago Tribune that she saw agents detain two of her neighbor’s landscapers Friday morning.

“That’s when I said to myself, ‘You know what, I should be recording this.’ And so I ran into my house to get my phone,” said the woman, who asked her name not be used.

The officers tried to grab a third landscaper, but they let him go after he insisted he was an American citizen, according to a video the woman shared with The Chicago Tribune. Her daughter’s middle school went on soft lockdown shortly after.

“It feels like state-sponsored terror,” the woman said. “The two men that they took today, they probably have children. Their kids were probably expecting them to come home and go trick-or-treating with them.”

The most chilling part, she added, was that an hour and a half later the landscaping company returned with a new set of workers to finish the project on her neighbor’s yard.

“Can you believe that? Like, that’s the people that they’re taking,” the woman said. “It is so upsetting to me. I just think that these are not hardened criminals. This is really intended to just scare people.”

In a separate Evanston incident, librarian Kerry Littel captured on video a federal agent kneeling on a man’s back and apparently punching him on the side of the head while residents shouted, “He can’t breathe!”

The man was apparently detained after a crash with officers. Littel said she did not see the crash but was told it was caused by federal agents.

“They had yanked his shoes off, they were shoving him on the ground multiple times. It got to the level where they punched him. They kicked him. They slammed his head on the ground,” Littel said. “I’m angry that I stopped the video. The community just started coming and trying to protect this kid. This kid needs help. He seriously was battered.”

Lindsey Rose, a school administrator at Evanston Township High School, also witnessed the scene at Oakton and Asbury and called the punches “violent and horrific.” She said it appeared like the man had a concussion after the incident because “his eyes were like gone.”

Rose said another agent, on the passenger side of their vehicle, repeatedly pointed a weapon at onlookers while attempting to restrain a woman. She said the agent started getting “frustrated” while trying to force the woman in the car, and then he “whipped out his gun.”

A video she took shows the agent at least twice pulling a weapon out of his holster while people shout “put the gun away.” Rose said other agents pointed to what appeared to be pepper spray at them.

“We were screaming and filming, and that’s when the officer pulled the gun out and pointed it at us and threatened to shoot us,” Rose said. “We were posing no immediate threat to him, and we were filming and making noise.”

She described the scene as something out of an “apocalypse movie,” and questioned how it could be real.

“It was terrifying,” Rose said. “I mean, they had the most soulless eyes, it was so horrific. How could you treat a human like this?”

The Evanston Police Department said its officers responded to the crash while paramedics gave medical care to those exposed to pepper spray. The enforcement actions drew a swift rebuke from local leaders, who held a news conference blasting the presence of federal agents on streets hours before children were expected to trick-or-treat for Halloween.

Littel, meanwhile, said she was “still shaking” well after recording the encounter.

“If they think this is creating safety by quote unquote removing criminals, this is creating a much more dangerous situation,” she said. “I’m blown away. I’m flabbergasted. I’m still trying to process what just happened and the aggression and the physical force that was used. It just doesn’t make sense to me. I can’t wrap my head around what I just saw.”

While agents were leaving Albany Park, 25 miles west in suburban Hoffman Estates, Efrain Cuevas said he saw eight vehicles with black-tinted windows surround 30 to 40 workers on a window improvement project at an apartment complex.

Everyone yelled “ICE” and scattered, Cuevas said. Agents gave chase, detaining three people. The agents asked for the workers’ wallets and documentation, he said, and searched through the vehicles of those who didn’t respond.

Cuevas, 24, said he trained with the U.S. Marine Corp for four months.

“I remember when I first went to boot camp I was proud to wear the uniform, proud to say I was a Marine,” Cuevas said. “Now it’s something I don’t share anymore, because I’m not proud. Now we live in a world that looks like the government is turning the military against the citizens.”

Around 11 a.m., a caravan of federal agents was spotted on Chicago’s Northwest side and nearby suburbs. Led by Border Patrol Cmdr. Greg Bovino, a dozen agents detained people in Edison Park, Skokie and Niles. They stopped landscapers, house painters and laborers to ask for proof of citizenship or legal residency, taking those who couldn’t immediately prove their status into custody.

A man was tackled on the sidewalk in front of Frederick Stock Public School while a resident watched and asked, “Are you proud of yourselves?”

The detainees were put into SUVs, then driven to an industrial area where they were loaded into passenger vans and spirited away.

One carpenter ran when he saw the patrol. When the agents caught the man, they seemed surprised that he was able to prove he was legally in the United States.

“Why did you run?” the agent asked.

The agents also confronted a man pouring concrete in Edison Park. When he showed them his proper paperwork, Bovino complimented the man on his concrete-pouring skills.

Skokie resident Morgan Krupinkski said two workers from an American company, The Scottish Plumber, were doing flood control work on his property when federal agents’ vehicles came down the residential street. The agents stopped and demanded documents from both workers, who were able to produce evidence they were U.S. citizens.

“I’m angry,” said Krupinski, who identified himself as a Republican and a conservative.. “As someone who believes in the Constitution, for someone to be stopped by federal agents because of the color of their skin and their appearance, and to be asked for papers is completely unimaginable and completely unconstitutional, because where is probable cause? Where is reasonable search and seizure? They’re working in a residential neighborhood.

“And as someone who voted for this president, I didn’t vote for this. I didn’t vote for people to be harassed, I didn’t vote for people to be brought out at gunpoint with machine guns, and to harass Americans.”

(Chicago Tribune’s Stacey Wescott and Pam DeFiglio contributed.)

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