CHICAGO – Inside a modest second-floor apartment on Chicago’s Southwest Side, three children went without sleep waiting for their mom to finally come home.

Their dad, with a family friend, had driven through the night to get her. More than five hours in the dark to pick her up from the dingy jail in rural Indiana, five hours more on the way back. They arrived home just as the sky began to lighten that early Tuesday morning.

When Patricia Quishpe stepped out, her kids rushed into the cold morning air to wrap her in their arms. Her hijos. The word she had cried when the Ecuadorian mother of three was arrested by Border Patrol agents at the Swap-O-Rama flea market in mid-October, during President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown dubbed Operation Midway Blitz.

“I feel blessed,” Quishpe told the Tribune last week about her release. Quishpe, her husband and their children all have pending asylum cases, and she has a work permit. The experience of her arrest is too painful to talk about, she said.

As U.S. Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino and his agents move on to other cities, most recently sweeping through North Carolina, those affected by the blitz across Chicago and its suburbs are facing a new normal in its aftermath. Thousands of families are now living with trauma and disruption, whether they’ve been reunited like Quishpe, have loved ones still detained or feel their loss from deportation. Throughout the Latino communities of Pilsen and Little Village, neighborhood restaurants and bars that generations of immigrants have filled daily are cautiously coming back to life after weeks of fear and empty streets.

While the subsequent end of Operation Midway Blitz has drawn a sense of relief for some, the reality facing the city and its suburbs is far more complicated. A federal appeals court Thursday temporarily halted the release on bond of hundreds of immigrants arrested during the two-month operation, dashing the hopes of families who had looked forward to possibly having their loved ones home for Thanksgiving.

Also Thursday, a federal judge issued a scathing opinion on the use of force by immigration agents during the crackdown, revealing new information gleaned from body cameras and other evidence showing how agents used tear gas and flash-bang grenades during high-profile melees between immigration agents and protesters during confrontations in Albany Park, Old Irving Park, East Side and Evanston.

“It’s a distressing or disturbing experience that can cause significant mental, emotional and physical harm,” said Chicago therapist Lu Rocha. “PTSD. That’s what I’m seeing now with clients. That’s what I’m witnessing in the community.”

Activists are urging the immigrant community to keep its guard up. Chicago experienced a spike in immigration operations beginning with Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration, and that fear continues even if masked Border Patrol agents aren’t roaming the streets. The White House continues to prioritize a mass deportation strategy that calls for the removal of as many people without immigration documents as possible.

“It’s really tempting to think, ‘Oh, they’re gone.’ They’re not gone,” said Gabe González, one of the founders of Protect Rogers Park, a community group mobilized to resist the crackdown. “This is breathing room for us to get better prepared.”

Countless groups have mobilized to support the community and prepare for more raids. The Cook County public defender’s office announced that it will be doubling the number of attorneys on staff next year to help support community members who have been detained and are facing deportation. Activists continue packing whistles with “Know Your Rights” kits to share throughout the region. Two Chicago Democrats, state Reps. Ann Williams, 11th District, and Jaime Andrade, 40th District, scheduled a panel with Chicago school board member Ellen Rosenfeld about how to talk with children during turbulent times.

Rey Wences, senior director of deportation defense at the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, noted that “abductions” continue happening “every day in both the city and the suburbs.”

“We ask that community members remain vigilant, and continue to exercise your right to record immigration enforcement activity in public and to call the Family Support Hotline,” Wences said.

A legacy

At the start of the blitz in early September, Margarita García and her brother planned to keep their family’s food stand open in the Little Village neighborhood, convinced that immigration agents would only target people with warrants or criminal histories. Selling tamales was a long family tradition.

Their mother, María Trochez, died earlier this year after nearly two decades spent at the same corner with her food cart. Originally from Honduras, Trochez was a leader in the effort to license street vendors but had passed away suddenly.

Trochez was never able to fix her immigration status due to the lack of a sponsor, a challenge her two children now face.

But as the blitz expanded from a targeted operation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to the dragnet approach by Border Patrol, “we decided to stop selling until it was safe again,” García said.

They did not leave their house for more than a month.

“They were taking people based on how we look and the type of work that we did. It didn’t matter if they were criminals or not,” García said. They relied on neighbors and friends to run errands, buy groceries and even handle their laundry.

Their landlord installed cameras outside the property to monitor activity and locked all the gates around the house to ensure agents could not enter.

“Thankfully,” García added, the family had enough savings to cover their bills while they stayed inside.

Her 19-year-old daughter, a U.S citizen and an architecture student at the Illinois Institute of Technology, called before and after class every day to make sure her mother was safe and to plead with her not to go outside.

“This has really affected all of our lives. We are anxious and worried. Even though the Border Patrol appears to be gone, ICE is still around. They are still taking people,” García said.

The siblings have now returned to the same corner where their late mother sold tamales for over 20 years. But with precautions.

“What hurts me the most, it’s the way my children have been carrying this fear on their shoulders,” García said.

No choice

Arturo Rodríguez Bellos was arrested by federal agents while working near 26th Street and Spaulding Avenue on Oct. 22. His wife collapsed when she heard the news.

“I felt a level of desperation that is hard to put into words,” said Adriana, who asked that her last name not be used out of concern for her safety. “It was what we feared the most since rumors of ICE agents in the neighborhood started.”

The couple, both 44 and facing ongoing health issues, had been saving money in hopes of returning to Michoacán, Mexico, soon. Rodríguez Bellos lived in the United States for 25 years, and his wife for 14 years. They had come to the U.S. to earn money to pay for their kids’ school in Mexico.

Their children are now teenagers.

In recent years, Rodríguez Bellos developed a liver condition, and despite attempting to seek medical care in Chicago, the family could not afford treatment. With his illness worsening, he chose to sign a voluntary departure after he was detained, even though he had no criminal background and might have had legal options to fight deportation.

“He couldn’t handle the pain and we didn’t know how long he would have been detained or how much money we needed for an attorney, so we decided that it was best for him to return to Mexico,” his wife said.

With her only companion in Chicago gone, she is now alone, trying to sell off her remaining inventory in the small shop she runs selling eggs, toys and personal hygiene products.

She must raise enough money to pay two months of overdue rent, send funds to her husband and two children in Mexico and eventually buy her own ticket home. Most nights she barely sleeps, waking every few hours as anxiety takes hold.

“My greatest fear is that they (ICE) detain me and I can’t sell my stuff to save that money at least,” she said. “We have lost so much already. My family is counting on me.”

She said her elderly neighbors have stepped in to help sell some of her merchandise. The couple even invited her to Thanksgiving dinner so she wouldn’t spend the holiday alone and crying, a small act of kindness that, she said, gave her a moment of warmth in a season filled with loss.

History

Rocha, the therapist, grew up in Chicago during the 1970s, at a time when people often carried their birth certificate just in case.

The past two months of Operation Midway Blitz follow a history of policies in the United States that welcomed Latinos “and then didn’t want us anymore,” she said.

“They would take us and send us away whenever it was convenient for the people in the power,” Rocha said. “We experienced this in the 1930s when … people who were of Mexican descent, citizens, residents, were detained and taken to Mexico by boat and by train.”

Then there’s President Dwight Eisenhower’s “Operation Wetback,” a racial epithet used at that time, where men who were here as braceros working on farms were sent back to Mexico. That is a historical trauma that passes through generations, she said.

Elisa Brennecke, founder and CEO of MARRA, a therapy group, said the immigration raids have created an existential fear for residents who ask, “What is happening in our country? What is happening in our communities?”

The immigration raids have created a response that people can be stopped “for no reason, at any time, with no legal basis,” creating a daily anxiety for people who wonder, “What if they mistake me for someone else? What if my parents don’t come home?”

“Even when someone (has) papers, has a status, this does not necessarily mean they feel safe. This awakens a lot of fear that we already had in our communities,” Brennecke said. “It brings up memories of being treated unfairly, being watched. For many years, we’ve also felt being othered.”

While there is little argument that there is trauma from the blitz, others have found signs of hope. From the rapid responders, the whistles, the fighting back.

“It’s a beautiful thing during a very dark time in our history. That’s what I tell people, to hold onto that,” Rocha, the therapist, said. “Hold onto the love you’re experiencing from people who don’t know you.”

González said Protect Rogers Park is “looking at this moment as a time to do some assessments of how we did as an organization, what we did well, how we can improve, how do we prepare for what happens next?”

“We have to learn to trust each other, we have to learn to work together, we have to learn that, these people said. They came here claiming they were agents of safety,” González said. “We think they actually made our city less safe by the things they were doing. If people care about collective safety, if people care about community safety, the way to do that is to get organized.”

In the Pilsen neighborhood, the familiar sight of a small lunchtime line has begun to reappear at Casa del Pueblo.

“Is not as busy as it used to be, but there are more people coming in,” said Agustín Pérez, a Pilsen resident who has lived in the neighborhood for more than 20 years. “I had never seen it so empty, other than during the pandemic. Not a single soul would be around when I dared to go out to get lunch while Border Patrol was here.”

A few blocks away, El Trebol, the 70-year-old bar that has long served as a gathering place for Mexican immigrants, is also showing signs of revival. In recent weeks, the bar had sat nearly empty most days, an unusual sight for a place where daytime regulars were once a constant presence. During the height of immigration enforcement activity, those loyal customers came only sparingly, often slipping in at night when the threat of ICE felt less immediate.

But on a recent Sunday afternoon, the mood had shifted. Conversations once again flowed from table to table, and norteño music blared through the speakers, a soundtrack of resilience filling the room after a long, uneasy silence.

The future

Quishpe arrived in Chicago with her family nearly two years ago, crossing several borders to request asylum in the United States.

In Chicago, they work long shifts, pay bills and have turned their small apartment into a home. The father, Faustino Panchi, works as a dishwasher. The oldest son stocks shelves at a grocery store.

They want to be hopeful. The family’s lawyer confirmed to the Tribune that a court date awaited her in the coming weeks.

“We still believe that this country provides opportunities,” Panchi said.

But the trauma of the past month tested their family.

They spoke to Quishpe daily while she was in detention. Their youngest slept with one of his mother’s purses tucked beside him. Their 17-year-old daughter cared for her little brother while their 20-year-old brother and their father worked long hours to keep the home together.

“Sometimes I wondered if I would ever see her again,” Panchi said, holding back tears.

Since coming back home, Quishpe is not the same. She is quiet. Sometimes she cries.

The financial strain of her detention has also taken a toll. They spent nearly $2,000 to make sure she could call home, buy food and purchase basic necessities inside the jail.

Friends, neighbors and community members stepped forward, donating food and creating a GoFundMe page to help them stay afloat.

“If it wasn’t for those people, I don’t know that this would have been possible,” Panchi said.

Now, the family is trying to regain their footing. They plan to enroll Quishpe and the children in therapy.

But the road ahead remains uncertain. As the holidays approach, so does the matriarch’s court hearing, a reminder that while she is home, their future in the United States is not yet secure.

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