CHICAGO — In a parking lot outside O’Hare International Airport Monday afternoon, a man prayed next to his car as a plane took off.
The parking lot, just east of the airport’s Terminal 5, is where Uber and Lyft drivers wait for ride-sharing apps to assign them passengers. There, drivers make phone calls and have lunch. Sometimes they pray.
Last Friday, Border Patrol agents arrested 18 people at O’Hare, the Department of Homeland Security confirmed. Labor groups said immigration agents targeted ride-share drivers’ parking.
Stacy McCloud, who works at a food truck in the lot, told the Tribune she saw it all.
Immigration agents came to the parking lot twice on Friday, once in the morning and once in the afternoon, McCloud said Monday. They surrounded the lot and blocked the entrance, he said.
When drivers realized there were immigration officials there, McCloud said, people started yelling “ICE, ICE” and “the whole parking lot started running.”
“People were crashing their cars,” he said. But they had nowhere to go.
Federal agents asked the drivers to provide their documents, McCloud said. “They didn’t target anyone who didn’t look Mexican,” he said. “Anyone who was Mexican seemed like they were going straight for it.”
For two years, McCloud has worked at a food truck on the lot. On Monday he spoke to the Tribune among customers buying tacos and energy drinks. He had time to talk because business was slower than usual.
Ricardo Velasquez, a rideshare driver who was eating lunch in the trunk of his car that afternoon, said he is a U.S. citizen, but his non-U.S. friends were avoiding the airport.
“I’m sorry to all my friends,” Velasquez said. “Everyone should have the right to work.”
Department of Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said Border Patrol agents conducted a “targeted” operation at O’Hare and that those arrested were “violating all of our nation’s immigration laws.”
“Under President (Donald) Trump and Secretary (Kristi) Noem, if you break the law, you will face consequences. Criminal illegal aliens are not welcome in the United States,” McLaughlin said in a statement.
McLaughlin named one person arrested Friday whom he described as an “illegal alien criminal from Venezuela” who had previously been arrested for “domestic assault causing great bodily harm.”
The Tribune reviewed court records showing that a man with the same name had been charged with domestic assault in Cook County last year, but that prosecutors later decided not to file charges against him. A police report places his birthplace in Mexico, not Venezuela. It is unclear if the man is the same person McLaughlin was referring to.
McLaughlin did not provide details about others arrested.
McCloud said officers in the parking lot Friday “did not show any sympathy.”
“They were pulling everyone out of the cars,” he said. “Those who demonstrated that they were not citizens were basically just pulling out of the cars.”
The Illinois Drivers Alliance, a labor coalition seeking to organize rideshare drivers across the state, condemned the raids and said it was “deeply concerned that drivers’ due process rights were violated at O’Hare.”
“This is part of a broader pattern of attacks on immigrant families by an administration that continues to use fear and division as weapons,” said the Drivers Alliance, made up of local members of the Service Employees International Union and the International Association of Machinists.
The O’Hare raid comes amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Chicago, which officials say has resulted in the arrests of more than 1,000 people so far. Over the course of the crackdown, advocates have raised concerns about attacks on low-wage workers, as reports have emerged of construction workers, street vendors, and day laborers being detained by the feds.
In a statement about the O’Hare immigration raid, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said his administration was working to ensure that city property “is never used to facilitate the unlawful enforcement of civil immigration law.”
Last week, Johnson signed an executive order prohibiting federal immigration authorities from organizing and conducting enforcement operations on city-owned land. The mayor called for criminal charges to be filed against officers who violate the order.
Johnson spokesman Cassio Mendoza said the administration believed that because signs displaying the ban on immigration enforcement had not yet been installed in the airport parking lot, the administration lacked a legal avenue to go after the feds for conducting a raid on the parking lot. Such signs should be posted on the lot soon, Mendoza said.
On Monday afternoon, many of the parking spaces were empty. Drivers who were there said that was unusual.
Uber driver Jim Weber was not in the parking lot during Friday’s raids, but said he disagreed with them.
Some of his ancestors came to the United States without legal permission more than a century ago, fleeing pogroms in Europe, he said.
“They snuck through Canada,” Weber said. His family settled in the Upper Midwest, where his great-grandfather met his great-grandmother, raised children and grandchildren, worked hard, and paid taxes.
“All I wanted was a better life,” Weber said. He believes that’s what his fellow rideshare drivers want, too.
“They want a better life,” Weber said. “Who doesn’t?”
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—Jonathan Bullington of the Chicago Tribune contributed.
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