By Mendy Kong
Sept. 11, 2025
President Donald Trump’s deportation campaign has garnered nationwide attention since his inauguration in January.
At the center of the president’s strategy: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency tasked with executing his plans.
ICE officers arrest hundreds of thousands of people every year, often with the help of U.S. Customs and Border Protection. That includes some in the Chicago area, even though local and state police are barred by laws here from helping with immigration enforcement.
Trump’s second term in office has brought new resources — and renewed scrutiny — to ICE.
Reinforcements include 17,000 employees of other federal agencies — such as the FBI, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, U.S. Marshals Service and Drug Enforcement Administration — and thousands more local officers in other states who have been given arresting powers, according to the Cato Institute. That quadruples the number of ICE’s own officers.
But where in the Chicago area do authorities arrest immigrants? What comes next for those people? Where do detained immigrants end up?
Here’s a look at immigration enforcement operations in Chicago.
Arrests, everywhere from courthouses to workplaces
Over the years, immigration authorities have made arrests during traffic stops and at people’s homes and workplaces. They’ve gone to schools and courthouses.
But it’s difficult to know the full breadth of places they’ve targeted because the data ICE releases doesn’t specify where people are arrested.
A small fraction of ICE arrests nationwide happen here: Only about 1% of more than 130,000 occurring between February and late July were in Illinois, according to ICE data obtained by the Deportation Data Project through a public records request and analyzed by WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times.
Still, monthly arrests of immigrants in Illinois more than doubled — from 152 in February to 343 in June, the data shows.
ICE sightings and arrests have been reported before in Chicago neighborhoods considered immigrant enclaves, such as Pilsen, Little Village, Archer Heights and Chinatown on the South and Southwest sides and Belmont Cragin, Albany Park and Hermosa on the North and Northwest sides.
Arrests have also been reported in the suburbs, including in Cicero, Berwyn, Elgin, Deer Park, Palatine, Mundelein, Round Lake and Waukegan.
In Highwood along the North Shore, federal immigration agents used “wellness checks” as a tactic to knock on people’s doors before taking them into custody.
Lawyers have alleged that many arrests have violated constitutional rights.
Immigration authorities primarily operate in three facilities in Chicago: one for court hearings, another for check-in appointments for those being monitored and a third that’s an administrative center.
Under the Trump administration, those places have served an additional purpose: to arrest people.
ICE has detained immigrants who show up for regularly scheduled appointments or hearings. Legal experts and advocates have worried this tactic has scared people out of going to their hearings or check-ins.
Someone with a case in immigration court is entitled to speak with and be represented by an attorney. But they have to find and pay for their own lawyer from a nonprofit organization or a private office. Immigration court is considered civil, not criminal, so there’s no right to court-appointed lawyers.
Authorities often take people to a fourth facility in the suburbs after they’re arrested.
For those who aren’t detained, ICE has increasingly used ankle monitors to track and surveil people while they wait for their immigration case to proceed.
When ICE arrests someone, officers take them for processing.
The procedure resembles booking someone in a county jail.
Officers confirm a person’s identity, take their photograph and fingerprints, assign a nine-digit identification number called an “A-Number” and collect other personal information.
Nearly all processing in the Chicago area currently happens at a federal facility in west suburban Broadview, although that could change, according to immigration advocates. Authorities also process some people at the downtown Chicago ICE field office.
The journey after an arrest can be lengthy and uncertain.
After processing, ICE looks for a detention facility with available bed space. The Illinois Way Forward Act prevents the use of state and local facilities for immigration detention, so authorities usually send people to a couple dozen jails in the five other states under the ICE Chicago “area of responsibility” across the Midwest and the South.
Members of the public can search for a detainee with a person’s unique nine-digit A-Number and country of birth, or their full name, date of birth and country of birth. But agency employees can mistype information, sometimes complicating the search.
And the increase in ICE detentions under Trump has dwindled capacity, leading to people being transferred more often.
That happened to a man who was arrested in Chicago and deported to Venezuela in June. He told WBEZ that law enforcement officials zigzagged him across the Midwest, the South and the Southwest, locking him up in 10 facilities in six states. ICE wouldn’t confirm information about his arrest or detention, but his lawyer said many immigrants are being sent to multiple facilities and that locating him between transfers and communicating with ICE was extremely hard.
People from Chicago have been sent away from the six-state region under the ICE Chicago office, including to Louisiana and Texas, without rhyme or reason, said Guadalupe Perez, interim president of the Midwest Bond Fund. The organization pays immigration bonds for residents of Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin and Kentucky.
“We have seen 10 times the local county jails that have popped up and which are now being used for immigration custody,” Perez said. “There are so many county jails in Kentucky right now that the ICE locator is no longer populating specific information for those jails. It’s up to you to do the legwork, to locate the local county jail of that area, to see where the person is being held.”
A-Numbers are becoming less reliable, too.
“There’s so many county jails popping up right now that I don’t think they have the infrastructure to input which county jail [people] are actually being sent to,” Perez said. “We are entering people’s A-Numbers, and they’re [not being] found in the system.”
To increase capacity, ICE has contracted with companies in the private prison industry, such as CoreCivic and The GEO Group, drawing criticism for attempting to bypass city laws, as well as allegations of poor treatment, deaths and sexual abuse of detainees within the jails.
Jails are often given advance notice of when ICE will come to inspect them, giving them time to improve conditions before deteriorating again.
“Ultimately, it’s a moneymaking business,” Perez said. “The reason why these county jails are incentivized to hold people under immigration custody is because they’re being paid. With the increased demand from the Trump administration to hold people at higher numbers, there simply isn’t the best space. [ICE] is going to look to cash-strapped county jails.
“But we’re already hearing about the conditions that are deteriorating in these county jails, severe overcrowding, lack of medical attention, inability to access counsel, lack of food,” Perez said. “It’ll come down a lot to folks to hold their local sheriffs and jails accountable.”
People who are detained either wait to be deported or for their immigration cases to proceed.
