Description
In the middle of a September night last year, hundreds of agents stormed a Chicago apartment building, some rappelling down from a Black Hawk helicopter. They arrested 37 immigrants and claimed that two were confirmed members of the violent Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua — but then never identified any of them. Reporters Melissa Sanchez and Sebastian Rotella set out to track down the people arrested, and, along with a team of ProPublica reporters, they uncovered a very different story behind the raid.
Read the original reporting here and here.
Transcript
Editor’s Note: “Paper Trail” is produced as an audio series. If you are able, we encourage you to listen to the series. Transcripts are for reference only and may contain typos. Please confirm accuracy before quoting.
Jessica Lussenhop: ProPublica. Investigative journalism in the public interest.
On the very first day of his second administration, President Donald Trump signed an executive order. It declared that the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua was a “extraordinarily violent, vicious” organization. Trump vowed the “total elimination” of Tren de Aragua. And the new administration didn’t waste much time.
TV NEWS TAPE, NBC News: The White House releasing this dramatic video of the U.S. blowing up a boat in the southern Caribbean.
TV NEWS TAPE, KTLA News: Hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants in the U.S. deported to a megaprison in El Salvador.
TV NEWS TAPE, ABC 7 News: The Trump administration has deemed their targets narcoterrorists so dangerous the administration is attacking them like they would al-Qaida.
Lussenhop: The government says this is war. Not the kind of war we typically think of. But a war against men who are worse than criminals. Worse than gangsters. They’re terrorists.
WHITE HOUSE PRESS CONFERENCE, Karoline Leavitt: These are heinous monsters. Rapists, murderers, kidnappers, sexual assaulters, predators …
Lussenhop: The worst of the worst, infiltrating our waters, our borders and our cities. And then, in the early morning hours of Sept. 30, 2025, the government claimed a spectacular victory against the gang.
They said they had obtained intelligence that revealed that there was a Tren de Aragua stronghold in Chicago. An apartment building in the heart of the South Side that was totally overrun by gang members who had drugs and guns and explosives. And so the government struck.
Hundreds of agents from ICE, the FBI, Border Patrol — some descended from the sky, rappelling from a Black Hawk helicopter. They knocked down apartment doors and hauled men out at gunpoint.
TV NEWS TAPE, News Nation: ¿Tiene documentos?
Lussenhop: All of this was captured on camera by a cable TV news crew that was invited along for the ride. By the end of the night, they declared success: 37 immigrants were detained, including two confirmed Tren de Aragua members. Here’s White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller on Fox News the week after the raid.
NEWS TAPE, Fox News, Stephen Miller: The raid in Chicago was a brilliantly executed raid against a Tren de Aragua complex filled with TDA terrorists. It was one of the most successful law enforcement operations that we’ve seen in this country.
Melissa Sanchez: We heard the government’s claims right from the very start.
Lussenhop: My colleague, Melissa Sanchez, is an immigration reporter in Chicago. She got very interested in Tren de Aragua after the administration made them a focal point.
Our other colleague Sebastian Rotella was also following the group carefully.
Sebastian Rotella: I was very curious to see, OK, what was behind this? What did they get?
Sanchez: Like, who did they get? Like, for me, one of the basic questions is like, who did they get?
Lussenhop: But then something strange happened.
Sanchez: Usually, when law enforcement makes a big arrest like this or there’s some huge operation like this they will have a press conference.
Rotella: Or a press statement where you show what you found and you say, “Here’s the guns we found, and here’s the drugs.”
Sanchez: And they will lay out all of those guns and the drugs and the explosives on a big table so the media can come and take pictures.
Rotella: And “here are the three really dangerous people we found.”
Sanchez: “Look, we got this guy and this guy. Here’s big posters with their names. Like, we have made America safer.” That didn’t happen.
Lussenhop: After all the big noise of the raid itself and all the big, bold claims about what it had accomplished, the government went strangely quiet.
Rotella: Sometimes it’s because maybe there’s, you know, some intelligence where you’re looking for a high-level leader of Tren de Aragua and you didn’t catch him, and you don’t want them to know that you’re looking for him, so you hold that back.
Lussenhop: But days and then weeks passed, and still nothing.
Rotella: If you’re gonna tell people, “We used a Black Hawk helicopter and we rappelled in and we, we grabbed, kicked down all these doors, and we held all these U.S. citizens, and carted off all these migrants and paraded them in front of the cameras as if they were terrorists,” you should back that up with something.
Lussenhop: It also occurred to Melissa that, for all the attention and press the raid got, they couldn’t find any reporting on the actual identities of the Venezuelan men detained that night. Nobody knew who they were.
Sanchez: I thought from the very start, like, I can try to do that. I can try to find those people.
Lussenhop: Sebastian and Melissa teamed up to get to the bottom of what happened that night, along with ProPublica reporters Jodi Cohen, Mariam Elba and T. Christian Miller. Who was detained, and why? What was this big, incredible intelligence the government had gotten about the building, and were the people inside really the worst of the worst?
I’m Jessica Lussenhop. This is “Paper Trail.”
In order to try to figure out who’d been taken by federal agents the night of the raid, Melissa and Jodi decided the best thing to do was just go.
REPORTING TAPE, Sanchez: OK, so what street are we on?
REPORTING TAPE, Jodi Cohen: We are currently on South Shore Drive.
Lussenhop: Go to the building, see if anybody there can give them some names.
Sanchez: So I remember it was maybe a week and a half after the raid, when Jodi and I first drove down. And the raid took place in a neighborhood called South Shore, and it’s like a— it used to be much more of a middle-class African American neighborhood. And it’s one of these parts of the city where a lot of immigrants who entered the country during the Biden years, a lot of people from Venezuela could afford to rent an apartment. And so it was a neighborhood that had been under transformation.
REPORTING TAPE, Sanchez: One-, two-, three-, four-, five-floor building.
Sanchez: It’s a pretty massive building. It’s like a U-shaped five-story building. I think it has 130 units. It was pretty run-down looking, like boarded up.
REPORTING TAPE, Sanchez: OK so, the metal black fence is broken in some places.
Sanchez: There was garbage everywhere.
REPORTING TAPE, Sanchez: What does it smell like to you?
REPORTING TAPE, Cohen: Mold?
Sanchez: We were told there were rodents and other, other things in the building. The city had sued the property owner some time earlier for the conditions. They were not safe conditions. One thing that stuck out to me and Jodi: On the third floor we met a woman who doesn’t have any legs, and she was stuck in her unit because the elevator often didn’t work.
We went into many of these vacant units, and some of them were clearly lived in by families. I remember there was, like, a refrigerator full of food. A bag of, like, the cornmeal to make Venezuelan arepas. There was evidence of life, of children, of families, and that really wasn’t something that was being reported on.
Lussenhop: Residents told Melissa and Jodi that there was a lot of crime in the building. Some residents had guns. It was a place where drug deals and prostitution happened. The previous summer, a Venezuelan immigrant was charged with murdering someone in the building. Some people living there were squatting — not paying rent.
Sanchez: It was known to be a place where you could come and just move in and nobody would do anything to you.
Lussenhop: But everyone that Jodi and Melissa spoke with at the building was a U.S. citizen. They were the only ones left after the raid. And they didn’t actually know the names of any of their Venezuelan neighbors who’d been detained. It was like they had vanished.
So when Melissa got home, she turned to a reporting tool that had served her well in other immigration stories.
Sanchez: I have a TikTok account. It’s not that I love TikTok, but I love talking to people, and a lot of the people I wanna talk to are on TikTok.
Lussenhop: Specifically, she’d learned that sometimes, the families of detained immigrants would post comments on stories about major ICE arrests or raids.
Sanchez: And after work, after I put my kids down, like, in the comfort of my bed, I remember, like, just scanning on my phone at TikTok and looking up every story I could find in Spanish about the raid.
Lussenhop: Melissa watched a ton of videos, read through hundreds of comments.
Sanchez: A lot of the comments were like: “Oh, these are awful people. They need to, like, leave the country. They’re terrible. Venezuelans are the worst.” It was— there was a lot of hate.
Lussenhop: But eventually she came across one that was different.
Sanchez: One of the comments was like: “Not everybody is like that. Not everybody in that building is like that. A lot of these people are, like, hardworking, decent people.” And I’m like, “Ooh, it sounds like this person knows somebody.” And so I reached out to her on TikTok, and it turned out she was the aunt of a woman named Norelly who had been detained that night.
Lussenhop: According to her family, Norelly was a mom who’d been detained along with her 6-year-old son. They said she was applying for asylum, and that she was not a Tren de Aragua member, though that was hard to confirm right away.
Melissa kept digging and found other comments on Facebook.
Sanchez: And then I found one that looked like it belonged to the mother of somebody who was detained. And I reached out to her, and she responded immediately. She was desperate for information about her son, Gabriel. I ended up getting his full name and typing it into Google. Gabriel Enrique Gamarra Pérez. And one of the first things that comes up is his mug shot. And I look at his mug shot, and it says that he was booked on Sept. 30 at the jail in Clay County, Indiana.
Lussenhop: Woah.
Sanchez: And I’m like, “OK, this is our guy, probably.” There isn’t a whole lot of information in the mug shot, but at the very bottom of the mug shot page, there’s, like, a little arrow pointing to the right and a little arrow pointing to the left that says, like, next and previous. And so I click next. And, you know, he was also booked, like, a minute after Gabriel at the same jail, you know. And I click next. And then as I’m clicking next and looking at these men whose names look kind of Venezuelan, I start recognizing them from those videos that DHS had put out.
Lussenhop: Whoa.
Sanchez: I was like, “Holy shit.” And I remember sitting up in bed and being like: “Oh my God. Oh my God, they were all booked together, and—”
Lussenhop: It’s them!
Sanchez: It’s them. I found them! And I kept clicking.
Lussenhop: So Melissa started making a spreadsheet with their names and any other information she could find.
Sanchez: By the end of that weekend, I had a list of, like, 20-some names that I thought these might be our guys.
Lussenhop: The website didn’t have much information other than their names and pictures. Nothing about any kind of Tren de Aragua connection.
Sanchez: Now that we had names and often, like, very long names with a first name and a middle name and a last name and a second last name, we could start doing background searches on them. We would look for them on social media. Jean Carlos, for example.
Lussenhop: Jean Carlos had also been taken that night.
Sanchez: Jean Carlos is, like, a former paratrooper in Venezuela, and he was a very prolific TikToker. He worked a lot of jobs in Chicago in carpentry and as an Uber driver. But whenever he’d get home, he would make these videos of himself, like, looking at himself in the camera and, like, smiling.
TIKTOK VIDEO, Jean Carlos Antonio Colmenares Pérez: Quédate, quédate.
Sanchez: And, like, he had a kitten, and the kitten was often in his video, which was very cute because he’s, like, a big, strong, muscular guy with a kitten.
TIKTOK VIDEO, Colmenares: Muah muah muah. Me presenta mi tóxica!
Sanchez: And there would be, like, really good music in the background. And he had done a video just a few hours before the raid of him and his kitten.
Colmenares: Este que está aquí a ti no te quiere dejar. Este que está aquí también se deja llevar.
Sanchez: In the comments of that video, there were comments from women in his life who were wondering where he was. And one of them was like, “Are you OK?” Like, “Please,” like, “Are you OK?”
Lussenhop: Melissa got in touch with that commenter. And that person shared an audio message that they’d received from Jean Carlos on the night of the raid.
VOICE MEMO, Colmenares: Se metió el gobierno pa’ acá, se metieron, Elly.
Sanchez: “They’re here. The government got in here.” And then her response.
VOICE MEMO, Elly: ¿Qué pasa, Jean? No me hagas tener miedo. ¿Qué pasa?
Sanchez: Saying, like, “Jean Carlos, what’s going on? Tell me. You’re scaring me.”
Lussenhop: Oh my God.
Sanchez: That’s it. But it, it kind of was the first little, like, taste of what it was, like, inside of that building. These little bits of audio we started getting kind of helped us understand the terror that these people were going through.
Lussenhop: Melissa and her colleagues wanted to talk directly to people who’d been detained, to ask them what had happened that night. Some of them were still at the Clay County jail. Some had already been deported. Some were at other detention facilities.
Sanchez: We sent batches of letters, and we put my phone number in there, and within a few days, like, I started getting calls from these men at these different facilities.
REPORTING CALL, Sanchez: ¿Y tú ya firmaste la orden de deportación o la estás esperando?
REPORTING CALL, Leonardo José Paredes Varela: La estoy esperando. Yo tengo corte ahorita el diez.
Sanchez: And the conversations were, were really intense. They were sick, that they, uh, they couldn’t sleep, that the jail was too cold, they were being mistreated, that, like, “When am I gonna get out of here?” They had all these, like, immediate pressing concerns and so the, the conversations were, like, frantic and stressed out.
REPORTING CALL, Paredes: Pero no sé, yo no quiero ir para corte.Yo lo que quiero es que me manden para mi país, porque aquí lo tratan a uno como un animal.
Sanchez: Crying on the calls.
REPORTING CALL, Paredes: Aquí lo tratan a uno por, como, por humillación, como de racismo y entonces, para qué me estén tratando así aquí, prefiero que me manden para mi país.
Sanchez: And there was a lot of despair. But luckily with some of these men, like Jean Carlos, we were able to figure out how to put money in his account so he could call my phone.
REPORTING CALL, Sanchez: Mira. Está bien si yo grabo esta llamada para tomar notas?
REPORTING CALL, Colmenares: Grábela.
REPORTING CALL, Sanchez: OK. Quiero reportar sobre lo que pasó.
Sanchez: And so he could call me, and he called me lots of times over many weeks at all hours. He got to know my kids.
Colmenares: ¡Oye!
REPORTING CALL, Sanchez: Dile, “Buenas tardes.”
REPORTING CALL, Lucia: Buenas tardes.
REPORTING CALL, Colmenares: Hola, buenas tardes.
Sanchez: And he was eager to talk. He was desperate to talk. He wanted everybody to know what happened to him that night.
REPORTING CALL, Colmenares: Escuchábamos: ¡Bum, bum!
Sanchez: He described agents banging on the door, breaking it down, coming in, grabbing him, throwing him on the floor.
REPORTING CALL, Colmenares: Más bien nos sacaron a, a puñetes.
Sanchez: He’s one of a number of men who said that he was physically assaulted by the agents. Hit in the head with, like, the butt of a rifle.
REPORTING CALL, Colmenares: Yo salgo con Danielito.
Sanchez: In front of his little nephew, who’s 6 or 7. He tried to tell them, my papers are right there, like on top of the, of the television. And like nobody seemed to care. People like him had some sort of legal status in this country. They had come in seeking asylum. Their asylum cases were open. They had pending court dates. They were not, like, absconding from the law. And he kept saying to me.
REPORTING CALL, Colmenares: Nos sacaron como unos criminales.
Sanchez: “They treated us like criminals. They treated us like criminals.”
REPORTING CALL, Colmenares: Como unos criminales, así como cuando la gente roba, así que te, con patadas, coñazo.
Sanchez: “I’m not a criminal.” He understood that this was a country of like laws, of justice, and it was not that night to him. And I was able to later confirm what he told me because I talked to other people who were there in that moment who weren’t able to talk to each other because they were all in jails in different places. And it was just over and over the same story. Agents broke down the door, didn’t ask any questions, very aggressively grabbed the men, zip-tied their hands behind their backs and took ’em out. There was no explanation.
Lussenhop: I have to assume that you asked them about the Tren de Aragua, like, the specifically, like, what is up with this gang? Is this gang in this building? Like, are you in this gang? Like, what did people say in response?
Sanchez: I mean, every single one said that they weren’t members. They didn’t know any members. They were just living their lives, and it’s hard to know whether that’s true. Like, how do you know?
Lussenhop: Melissa had tracked down the majority of the adults who’d been detained that night. They told her — and the team — no warrants had been shown. Forced entry, like knocking down an apartment door, requires a warrant in an immigration raid.
Melissa also found that about a dozen kids had been detained with their parents — even a couple of babies. And she heard story after story about agents using violence. Five people separately told her about a K-9 unit dog mauling the leg of a Nigerian man who lived there. A lot of them told Melissa the same thing she heard from Jean Carlos — they had come seeking asylum. They were not hiding from the government.
Sanchez: They thought they had done things the right way, and suddenly they were taken in the middle of the night and nobody explained anything to them.
Lussenhop: The government had claimed that two of the immigrants detained that night were confirmed Tren de Aragua members, but they hadn’t said which people exactly.
A few days after the raid, Melissa discovered a pretty big clue. DHS had been sending out press releases about some of the “worst of the worst” immigrants they’d detained around the country.
In one of these press releases, Melissa recognized a name. It was the name of someone she’d identified who had been detained during the raid.
Sanchez: He was known in the building as Cuchufletas, but his, his name was Jeanpier.
Lussenhop: The press release said he was “a criminal illegal alien and a confirmed member of the Tren de Aragua gang.”
Sanchez: And so it’s like, OK, here’s one of our guys, and here’s the only indication we have that he is one of the two people the government claims is a Tren de Aragua member. You know, we wrote him a letter in jail at Clay County. When he called me, that might have been the most emotional call that I received from these men because he called me, and he’s like, “madre.” He kept calling me madre like I was his mother.
Lussenhop: Oh my God.
Sanchez: It was — he’s, like, a 20-something, he’s like, “Madre, I got your letter. Like, they’re accusing me of something. Like you said, you said they’re saying that I’m Tren de Aragua. Nobody told me I’m Tren de Aragua. Like, nobody has said that to me. Like, please, like, I’m not Tren de Aragua. Why are they saying I’m Tren de Aragua?” He was so scared. Like, what does it mean that this reporter for this organization I’ve never heard of wrote me a letter saying that the government accuses me of being Tren de Aragua? All that we found for him, like, is that he had a baby girl born in the U.S. and he had been arrested once by Chicago police on some traffic stop, and they found like a small amount of drugs. But he didn’t have any record that indicated he was a member of Tren de Aragua.
Lussenhop: And those charges for the traffic stop and drug possession? Those were dropped. The team had to do a deep background check on every name on Melissa’s list. So research reporter Mariam Elba focused on pulling their criminal records.
Sanchez: We found no criminal convictions in the U.S.for all but three of the men, and those three who did have convictions, they ranged from domestic battery and shoplifting to marijuana possession.
Lussenhop: One had been convicted of battery against an officer and had a pending theft charge. Another had been charged with illegal gun possession. Jean Carlos — who told Melissa he’d been treated like a criminal by the agents — he had basically no criminal record. Just a traffic ticket.
Sanchez: But the gang membership part was really hard to confirm because a lot of people own guns. A lot of people own illegal guns. Does that make them a gang member? No. Does that make them a member of the Tren de Aragua? No.
Lussenhop: Melissa had one other avenue to try to find out whether these guys were gang members. She knew of an independent journalist from Venezuela who had a spreadsheet of confirmed Tren de Aragua members.
It pulled from Venezuelan law enforcement and Interpol data.
Sanchez: And so we were able to, like, give her the names, and she ran them against those lists, and they weren’t on those lists. The absence of they’re appearing on that list doesn’t necessarily mean they’re not gang members, it’s just that they’re not on those lists of gang members. So we can’t say with, like, absolute certainty that none of those guys were members of Tren de Aragua. Like, we don’t know that. The problem with all this reporting is, like, we didn’t know what we didn’t know because the government didn’t tell us anything.
Lussenhop: But our colleague Sebastian Rotella had also been looking into the raid — and he knew a bunch of current and former officials at the very agencies who’d participated in it. So he picked up the phone.
Rotella: One of my big questions is, like, what conceivably had been going on in that building that would justify the raid? And when I started calling my sources, they were asking the same question.
Lussenhop: That’s next.
Sebastian Rotella has covered law enforcement and organized crime for decades. And, fun fact about Sebastian: Bruce Springsteen was so inspired by his reporting on migrant experiences and life at the U.S.-Mexico border that he wrote two songs based on Sebastian’s stories in the ’90s.This one is written from the perspective of a Border Patrol agent.
“THE LINE,” Bruce Springsteen: Well, I was good at doing what I was told. I kept my uniform pressed and clean.
Rotella: Afterward, I was told, “You know, you might as well just quit or shoot yourself because nothing better will ever happen.”
Lussenhop: Sebastian tries to capture the perspective of law enforcement in his work, even when he’s investigated suspected misconduct or corruption.
Rotella: I tend not to automatically assume that the authorities are lying about everything.
Lussenhop: When this raid happened, he was confused. He’d covered a lot of large law enforcement operations. The tactics used were not ones that he’d typically seen going down in a major American city like Chicago.
And this raid was even more striking because it happened in a neighborhood Sebastian knew really well — he’d grown up there.
Rotella: I had a friend who lived next door to that building. I played soccer in front of that building.
Lussenhop: He wanted to know: What was really behind this unusual show of force? He reached out to his vast network of sources, both current and former law enforcement officials.
Rotella: These are not people who think the mere existence of law enforcement or prison or the border is an abuse of human rights. These are hardened —
Lussenhop: OK, understood.
Rotella: Law enforcement veterans who are still looking at this critically, right? So that, to me, gives them a lot of credibility, from all the agencies, you know, Border Patrol, HSI, FBI, DEA, Chicago Police, ATF. I talked to everyone I could talk to, I talked to, to try to find out what had really gone on. And especially the, the question of the tactics.
Lussenhop: One of those tactics — the fact that there’d been hundreds of agents on the site — didn’t really surprise Sebastian.
Rotella: It’s a tough neighborhood. It’s a tough city. You usually, when you go into a place like that, you do it with an overwhelming show of force so you don’t need to use force.
Lussenhop: But he was surprised by who worked the raid. And some of his sources were surprised too. They said the border agency tactical teams that went in typically don’t do operations in cities like Chicago.
Rotella: BORTAC, which is a very elite, well-trained, Border Patrol SWAT team. I’ve seen them in operation at the border and occasionally near the border, but bringing them into a city is, is extraordinary. You know, what was the reason for it?
Lussenhop: The more Sebastian asked his law enforcement sources, the less it seemed like there had been a good reason. Some sources had knowledge of what happened in the raid. Others didn’t but were gang experts who kept close tabs on Tren de Aragua intelligence. And none of them had heard anything that confirmed that the gang had been in the building, or that its members had been arrested. In fact, they explained that some of the agencies involved in the raid are made up of highly specialized investigators who typically work on complex cases. And now, they’d been pulled into something way more basic. An immigration raid.
Rotella: The FBI agents and the HSI agents and the others who are, you know, veteran investigators who might have been doing something else were pulled into these things, right, and there was a lot of resistance to that and a lot — I was talking to people who were also talking about the morale was very low. You know, I’m a seasoned investigator at HSI or FBI, and I’ve been working organized crime or the Mexican cartels, and now I’m on this task force going into these buildings with a list of people I need to catch or a quota of illegal immigrants I need to catch.
Lussenhop: And then there was the way they caught them — from the sky? It’s not unusual to use helicopters in cities during raids. You might’ve seen one of them hovering in the sky, trying to find a suspect on the run. But typically agents don’t drop out of them.
Rotella: This use of the helicopters, the rappelling, the fast roping. Fast roping is when you’re just holding onto the rope and you go down, like, without being attached at all, and that’s dangerous.
Lussenhop: Law enforcement officials told Sebastian that over the years there have been situations where federal agents wanted to use these tactics. But when they’d gone to Washington for approval, they were told it was far too dangerous to do in a city.
Rotella: And it’s always rejected in an urban setting. It’s something you do where you know there’s hostages on the top floor of a building and so you have to go after them as quickly and aggressively as possible.
Lussenhop: The government’s justification for all of this was that the people occupying the building were incredibly dangerous. They claimed they had intelligence that there were guns and drugs and explosives there.
When Melissa and Jodi visited the building, the residents said, yeah, totally, people had guns and drugs. But they had no idea about explosives.
And again, after the raid the government had never shown any proof of recovering any of those things.
Rotella: Every law enforcement official I talked to said, I mean, it’s extremely unusual, even among established street gangs in the United States, to have explosives. And for Tren de Aragua guys haven’t been here that long and aren’t that structured yet in this country, you know, but again, that was just something that was put out there, but we never … there was nothing, uh, further on it. So what was going on in Chicago that could conceivably justify this expensive, dangerous, spectacular use of these kinds of tactics? And the answer was increasingly there doesn’t seem to be anything.
Lussenhop: Still, Sebastian, Melissa and the team worried they might be missing something. Maybe there was some piece of information that the government had to justify all of this and they just hadn’t made it public yet?
One of the places they could reveal new information on the record is at immigration court. So Melissa and Jodi went there, to attend the hearings of some of the men detained during the raid. If the government had evidence that showed these guys were too dangerous to remain in the U.S., you’d expect them to present that to a judge.
Sanchez: I remember the first hearing I went to was for this kid named Johnny Caicedo. And in this immigration court hearing, you know, there’s no mention of the raid. There’s no mention of the Tren de Aragua. There’s no mention of any crimes. And it was a complete contrast to what had happened that night a few weeks earlier. He just quietly gets sent home. When I talked to him like a week or so later. He was so angry. He was so mad. He’s like: “What happened? Why did they do this?” We went to a bunch of court hearings. And over and over, like, the government had opportunities at these hearings to say: “This guy’s a criminal. This guy’s a gang member. This guy,” whatever. Zero times did we hear them say that. Zero. Like, the prosecutors were asked, like, like, “Is this guy a criminal?” No. The answer was no. And it’s like, what’s going on?
Lussenhop: Remember the raid was supposedly a counterterrorism operation. But of all the people they arrested, there was not a single criminal charge filed. Not one. Against anybody.
In court, Melissa and Jodi witnessed another thing that just didn’t add up. At least two of the men detained in the raid were allowed to leave the country under something called voluntary departure. That’s different from being deported. It allows for someone to apply to reenter the U.S. in the future.
Sanchez: Like, if the government says this dude’s a gang member, they probably wouldn’t have gotten it. And, you know, it’s not just any gang. This is Tren de Aragua, a gang that the Trump administration has designated a foreign terrorist organization. That’s, like, a big deal. But we did not hear them say that once, and maybe they said it in a court hearing we didn’t get to attend. I don’t know what I don’t know. But it was stunning.
Lussenhop: At this point, Melissa and the rest of the team had kind of run out of road. Leads were running dry. And they still didn’t have an explanation for why this raid, at this building. Maybe they’d never know.
Then Melissa and Jodi got a tip that buried in a court filing challenging ICE arrests in Chicago was a crucial piece of the puzzle.
Sanchez: We were able to get arrest records for a couple of the men detained that night.
Lussenhop: An immigration arrest record can often contain a lot of important information. Sometimes they read like a little story all about what the person did and why the government decided they had to arrest them. But these ones revealed more by what they did not say.
Sanchez: The government, interestingly, doesn’t say the words Tren de Aragua anywhere. It doesn’t say gang member anywhere. Instead, it says that the agents had gotten information that there were illegal immigrants living in this building, and that they were, like, illegally occupying some of the units, and that they had the written and verbal consent of the owner and property manager to go into the building. What these records showed in the government’s own words was that they had permission, they had the blessing of the landlord to enter this building to look for squatters.
Lussenhop: When you see in writing that the landlord has blessed this raid and said, “Yep, go ahead. Go into my building,” what, what’s your reaction and, like, what’s your question after that?
Sanchez: I mean, it’s outrageous. It’s outrageous. Did they use the federal government to do their dirty work of getting rid of tenants? It just seems so out of proportion.
Lussenhop: The team reached out to the property manager and the landlord of the building multiple times. They called, they emailed, they tried to visit them in person to see if they had any explanation or defense. But neither of them would talk. Which means Melissa was just left to wonder.
Sanchez: Like, just, just … Like, I’ve never heard of anything like that. Like, I’ve never heard … I mean, I’ve heard of, like, a landlord threatening to get rid of their tenant by calling ICE, but I have never heard of the federal government saying, “OK, and I’m gonna bring in helicopters, and I’m gonna bring in Border Patrol, and I’m gonna bring in the FBI, and I’m gonna bring in ATF, and I’m gonna bring in I don’t know how many other acronyms of agencies.” Like, heavily armed dudes, like, rappelling from helicopters in the middle of the night. Like, you did that?
Lussenhop: In response to this reporting, a DHS spokesperson sent a statement saying the operation was “performed in full compliance of the law.” It doubled down on the claim that two Tren de Aragua members were arrested during the raid.
But Sebastian’s conversations with veteran gang investigators had left him wondering about the whole narrative that the government had used to justify their tactics. Not just in Chicago, but nationwide. How many arrests, how many raids, how many deportations were being justified with little evidence — just a story about Tren de Aragua?
Rotella: Several federal agents said to me that the numbers were also massively exaggerated, that basically, yes, it’s in the United States, yes, it’s a problem, but a terrorist designation — it’s being used basically as an excuse, to basically round up as many Venezuelans as, as possible and kick them out.
Lussenhop: Sebastian’s sources told him this approach was part of a larger strategy. There was a rationale behind what happened in Chicago. It just wasn’t the one the government had claimed publicly.
Rotella: You know, I’m not, it wasn’t me saying it. It was these active and former law enforcement who were saying it seemed to have been done mainly for the spectacle, to send a message. One of the messages was that we’re getting tough. You’re trying to dissuade, you’re just trying to get people to leave the country, or not to come to the country with something like this. Because it strikes fear, right, this could happen to you. I mean, the picture that emerges of what was actually accomplished, that it seemed to be, and several of them said it, that it seemed to be mainly for show.
Lussenhop: As you’re hearing that, like, what’s your reaction?
Rotella: You know, my reaction is sadness. Because, I just felt that we were gonna find something more. I felt like we were — there was gonna be, oh, well, there was this really, you know, this really notorious Tren de Aragua guy who was in there and, you know, they didn’t get him, and he had a retinue of, of gunmen who were really dangerous and, and just none of that. You know, the more we looked, the more we didn’t find it. And frankly part of it, it was a little painful to me because it was like I have a great affection for this neighborhood. It’s a neighborhood that I kind of root for but that continues to struggle and has been neglected and abandoned in many ways. And there’s a lot of things the federal government could do that I would welcome, in terms of going after crime and using federal resources. But this seemed like a real misuse of energy and resources. I found that saddening and disappointing.
Lussenhop: Most of the people Melissa spoke with — like Jean Carlos and Gabriel and Norelly and Johnny — they aren’t in the U.S. anymore. Some were deported or got voluntary departure. Others went to Mexico. A few were released back into the U.S., typically the women with U.S.-born children. But still, none of them were charged with a crime, and now 15 of them have begun the process of suing the federal government for what happened that night.
Illinois officials announced they would be investigating the property manager and landlord for housing discrimination over allegations that they’d tipped off immigration enforcement in order to get rid of Venezuelan tenants. The investigation is still active and ongoing.
The city’s lawsuit against the property manager over conditions at the building is also still ongoing.
Lussenhop: What are you kinda coming away from this reporting understanding differently about what’s going on?
Sanchez: Over and over, this administration, they make these big allegations about people, sweeping allegations. They provide zero evidence. We’re just supposed to, like, take them at their word and, like, when you do the work, like case by case, is this true? And it’s a lot of work to do that. And we weren’t able to find out the entire truth because the government has refused to provide any evidence of why they did what they did. But I think it’s important. This was one of the most aggressive displays of force by these agencies in a U.S. city in, like, anybody’s recent memory. This is not normal. This is not normal. This is not something that happens in this country, and it did.
Lussenhop: And it keeps happening. One of the things the administration did soon after coming into office was send hundreds of Venezuelan men to a megaprison in El Salvador. The government never provided any proof they were gang members. And the men say they were beaten and tortured.
Melissa and another group of reporters actually tracked those men down too. And they found that most had no criminal record in the U.S.
Then there are those boats in the Caribbean Sea that our Navy blew up, supposedly for carrying Tren de Aragua narcotraffickers. Over 200 people on board were killed. And the government provided no proof about who they were.
In recent months, the government’s tactics have gotten less flashy. Now no more Black Hawk helicopters. No more operations with thousands of agents flooding a single city.
But agents are still killing people during enforcement actions, and they are ramping up arrests. And public outcry is often met with the same response: The government claims they are combating the worst of the worst.
Sanchez: And I think it’s worthwhile to, like, put in all of our efforts to assess every single claim. Because if this can happen to them, it can happen to anybody.
Sabby Robinson: This episode was produced by Emma Talkoff and me, Sabby Robinson. Editing by Katherine Wells. Sound design and mixing by David Herman. Fact-checking by Darya Marchenkova. Music by Julian Sartorius, Filippo Ansaldi and Simone Sims Longo, with additional music by Epidemic Sound. Our team also includes Gabrielle Berbey and Julia Longoria. Thanks to T. Christian Miller, Mariam Elba and Jodi Cohen for their contributions to this reporting.
To read the full statement from DHS about the raid, see the link to the story in our show notes.
