Amid the smoke bombs and screams that ricocheted throughout a South Shore building last month during a massive military-style immigration raid, one man heard a knock on his door.
On the other side was a mom and her 7-year-old daughter, pleading for his help.
“I wasn’t planning on letting her stay, but I didn’t know what the hell was going on,” the man said of his Venezuelan migrant neighbors. But he quickly relented. The little girl was inconsolable and hid under his bed.
“I didn’t want them to take her,” said the man, who didn’t want to be named because he fears he’ll be targeted by federal authorities for his actions.
“I gave her my bedroom, and I just told her, ‘Just stay there. Don’t open, don’t, shh, just stay quiet,’” he recalled telling the mom and daughter as he choked back tears.
At one point, he went outside to check on things. He said ICE shouted at him to “shut my door, get the f--k inside, and don’t open my door again.”
The man had befriended the mom and girl in the building’s laundry room. They are among a group of Venezuelan immigrants who moved in over the past year, some with state rental assistance for asylum seekers and others without a lease, according to one longtime resident.
During the Sept. 30 raid, residents, migrants, including the woman’s husband, and squatters alike were zip-tied in the middle of the night. Other residents — like the man who helped his neighbors hide — were left undisturbed by ICE agents, prompting questions about what federal authorities knew about the building’s occupants ahead of time and how they obtained that information.
Remnants of the raid and interviews with residents who lived through it reveal some hints, including a mysterious map of the building found in the complex and makeshift door stickers that took inventory of occupants in some units.
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chicago.suntimes.com
