For months, the Trump administration justified its dramatic midnight raid on a Chicago apartment complex by claiming it had information that the violent Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua had taken over the building. But authorities have not provided any evidence to support this claim.
Now, new documents confirm, in the government’s own words, that what motivated the raid was more mundane: allegations that immigrants were squatting at the compound. And the owner had given federal officials, who were already targeting immigrants in Chicago, the blessing to search the building.
Arrest records for two of the 37 immigrants detained that September night, included in a motion filed Tuesday and linked to a pending federal consent decree, provide the clearest picture yet of what led to the controversial and aggressive operation, in which agents descended from a Blackhawk helicopter, broke down the doors and tied up U.S. citizens and immigrants.
Records reveal that officers entered and searched the complex with “verbal and written consent of the owner/manager.” The agents wrote that they launched the operation “based on intelligence that illegal aliens were illegally occupying apartments.” They said they focused their search on units “that were not legally rented or leased at the time.” This account appears verbatim in both arrest reports – for a Venezuelan and a Mexican.
“It was a brutal lie against the American public,” said Mark Fleming, an attorney at the National Immigrant Justice Center and co-counsel in the lawsuit against the government that led to the consent decree. “These were actually immigrants allegedly occupying apartments illegally, which is radically different from the story they told. »
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security makes no mention of Tren de Aragua in records, although officials have repeatedly cited the gang’s presence in the building as motivation for the raid. Agents paraded the immigrants in front of cameras and called their arrests a victory against terrorism. The government also claimed that two of those arrested were gang members, but never provided proof.
ProPublica previously reportedbased on interviews and records, that there was little evidence to support the government’s claims. Even today, four months after the raid, federal prosecutors have not filed any criminal charges against those arrested.
Over the past few months, ProPublica has interviewed 15 of the immigrants detained that night; all denied gang membership. They and others living in the building acknowledged there was criminal activity there, including the murder of a Venezuelan man last summer, but no one knew the gang members there.
Both arrest records were filed in federal court as part of ongoing litigation over whether the government, during its months-long eviction campaign in Chicago, violated a 2022 consent decree that limits warrantless arrests. The consent decree is still in effect and the government continues to challenge it.
Government lawyers previously acknowledged in court that hundreds of immigrants detained last year may have been improperly arrested.
Following a court order, DHS provided administrative arrest records to attorneys who are now demanding the release of some of these immigrants or the removal of restrictions for those already at large. This includes the Venezuelan and Mexican captured in the raid.
In the motion filed Tuesday evening, immigrant rights attorneys said that to justify warrantless arrests in Chicago, the government portrayed immigrants as flight risks when they were not. Some of the factors DHS used in making this decision about the South Shore men — including their “willful disregard for the personal property of others” and their “attempt to flee law enforcement” — were baseless and contradicted by arrest accounts, the attorneys wrote.
More of the 37 arrests made that night may have violated the consent decree, the lawyers said, but the cases under consideration concern those who remain in the United States. As the weeks and months passed, most of the immigrants detained in the South Shore raid were deported or gave up their efforts to stay in the country.
The property owner, Trinity Flood, a Wisconsin-based real estate investor, and the management company at the time of the raid, Strength in Management, did not immediately respond to requests for comment Wednesday morning. Flood and Corey Oliver, the owner of the management company, repeatedly declined interview requests and did not acknowledge any involvement in the operation.
A DHS spokesperson did not respond to questions Wednesday morning but repeated prior statements that the raid was carried out legally. “Given that two individuals from a foreign terrorist organization were arrested in a building they frequent, we are limited in the additional information we can provide,” the spokesperson said.
From the beginning, there had been questions as to whether Flood and his property manager advised the government to get rid of squatters in his building, which had repeatedly failed municipal inspections in the two years before the raid.
Last month, state officials have opened an investigation into housing discrimination over allegations that Flood and Strength in Management used federal agents to illegally force Black and Hispanic tenants out of the 130-unit building in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood.
In their complaint, state officials wrote that “building management blamed Venezuelan tenants for their (management’s) own failure to provide necessary locks and security services, as well as other necessary maintenance and repairs, and perpetuated stereotypes about Venezuelan gang members to send the message that tenants born outside the United States were considered gang associates, even if they were law-abiding.
Hours after the search, employees of the management company were throwing tenants’ belongings in the trash and emptying the apartments, the complaint states.
State officials said they could not provide any additional information about an ongoing investigation, but looked forward to a response from Flood and Strength in Management.
Several Venezuelan immigrants arrested that night said they were furious to learn that the building’s owner and property manager had facilitated the entry of federal agents. “We were paying our rent, we were doing things the right way,” said Jean Carlos Antonio Colmenares Pérez, 39. “Then all of a sudden, boom, the government comes in and takes us out. I don’t understand.”
Colmenares spent more than two months in federal custody before being deported in December.
“They took us away like we were dogs. Like we were criminals,” said his cousin, Daniel José Henríquez Rojas, 43.
Henriquez was detained for approximately two months before being deported. Federal agents also took his wife and 6-year-old son that night and then transported them to a facility in Texas where they were held for about a month. The family is now reunited in Venezuela.
Johandry José Andrade Jiménez, 23, had moved into the South Shore complex with his wife and three young daughters just two days before the raid. Andrade was expelled in December. His wife was released with an ankle monitor in Chicago, where she now struggles to support her daughters on her own.
“They separated me from my family,” Andrade said. “I feel terrible.”
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The complex housed dozens of tenants, most of them African-American and Venezuelan. While some said they stopped paying rent because of the unsafe and dilapidated conditions, nearly a dozen Venezuelans, including Colmenares, Henríquez, and Andrade, told us they were paying rent to people they believed worked for the management company.
But in some cases, this money went to other tenants who claimed to be the managers. ProPublica interviewed a U.S. citizen who said he and others moved Venezuelan families into empty homes, charged the amount they deemed fair and pocketed the money. “We started charging them rent,” the man said.
Flood, who faces a foreclosure lawsuit, said in court records last fall that his company invested millions of dollars to repair and maintain the building as well as legal fees related to the evictions. Weeks before the raid, the company had obtained court orders to evict the squatters.
The building continued to deteriorate after the raid. Oliver testified in court that he briefly hired security guards, but then fired them because they didn’t do their jobs. In November, a county judge ordered another company to take over management of the building and demanded that the remaining residents move out.
