By Emily Schmall and Heather Schlitz
CHICAGO (Reuters) – A Spanish-language immersion daycare in a leafy residential neighborhood on the North Side of Chicago was raided by federal immigration agents on Wednesday and a teacher was taken away, panicking school administrators and parents of infants, toddlers and pre-kindergarten children at the center, a staff worker at the daycare told Reuters.
Footage obtained by local WGN-TV showed two men, one in a balaclava, dragging a woman out of the colorfully decorated front doors of Rayito de Sol daycare center as she screamed. The men wore vests that said “Police” but no other agency markings were visible.
The woman, who was identified in a parents’ text group shared with Reuters as Diana Santillana, a teacher in the infant classroom from Medellin, Colombia, could be heard saying in Spanish, “I have papers.”
The agents grabbed the teacher in front of children, U.S. Representative Mike Quigley, an Illinois Democrat, said in a statement. Shocked parents, who said the school had recently told them that all the teachers were legally authorized to work, stood in Rayito de Sol’s parking lot in the aftermath of the raid.
“The children were crying, the parents were crying,” said Tara Goodarzi, a lawyer who was dropping her 3-year-old off at Rayito de Sol when three agents entered the building. “This is a scene that we’re not going to forget,” she said.
The daycare raid marked a heightened turn in U.S. President Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration crackdown in Chicago, which began in September with the stated purpose of pursuing dangerous criminals without the legal right to reside in the U.S. It has resulted in more than 3,000 arrests, according to the Department of Homeland Security, including of U.S. citizens and people with no criminal record.
DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the raid.
Last week, federal immigration agents targeted Evanston, Illinois, a northern Chicago suburb that is home to Northwestern University, in a sweep that included a raid of a retirement community. On October 31, three U.S. citizens who were watching a woman’s violent arrest were shoved into an agent’s car and driven around for hours before they were released at an FBI field office without charges, according to a court filing in a federal case brought by journalists and protesters against immigration agents’ use of force.
Two days earlier, Don Rogan, a retired high school teacher, was leaving Westminster Place, a senior living complex in Evanston, when he found the private road blocked by an SUV parked next to a landscaping trailer. Armed men in camouflage emerged from the SUV, and one of them ran after one of the landscapers, who evaded capture by hiding in the bushes, Rogan said.
The episode reminded Rogan, 89, of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley’s crackdown on protesters around the Democratic National Convention in 1968.
“It brought back that flash of memory of, ‘Oh, my God. What are we doing and what’s going on and this isn’t the way it’s supposed to be,” he said.
The tactics of federal immigration agents also came under scrutiny in Los Angeles on Tuesday.
Border Patrol agents detained a U.S. citizen father in a Home Depot parking lot while his toddler sat in the vehicle strapped into a car seat, according to bystander video and a DHS spokesperson.
After the father was detained, two masked agents, including one holding an assault rifle, entered the car and drove away with the man’s daughter as people gathering nearby shouted at them to stop.
The DHS spokesperson said the father had exited his car, wielded a hammer and thrown rocks at agents. The spokesperson said he had a stolen gun in his car and an active warrant for property damage.
Reuters was not able to independently confirm the allegations.
The young girl was returned to her mother hours later, a spokesperson for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights said.
(Reporting by Emily Schmall and Heather Schlitz in Chicago; Additional reporting by Kristina Cooke in San Francisco and Ted Hesson in Washington; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
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