CHICAGO — Several Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and other federal personnel waited in unmarked cars as they prepared to approach what they called their target.
According to ICE, Christopher Fragoso Lara, a 25-year-old from Mexico, had been convicted of crimes including home invasion, aggravated battery, domestic battery and possession of a weapon. A surveillance team had spotted him Monday morning at the Chicago tire shop where he worked.
Agents shut down the street outside the business and arrested Fragoso Lara as he spoke to a customer outside, in sub-freezing temperatures.
The arrest took place without incident when NBC News was embedded with the agents during operations throughout the Chicago area Monday morning. The group of enforcement agents departed downtown Chicago before sunrise and drove to Berwyn, a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city.
Three door-knocking operations did not result in arrests but demonstrated the time and manpower that goes into the operations. At each location there were at least seven officers, from ICE but also ATF, covering all the entrances and exits.
Ten separate teams of about 10 federal agents each fanned out across the city on Monday, a source familiar with the operations said. The operations came during a series of immigration enforcement operations in multiple cities around the country ordered by President Donald Trump.
The Trump administration in the past week has sought to publicly demonstrate that it is following through on the president’s promises to enact mass deportations immediately after taking office. Arrest numbers last week remained on par those in September 2024, the latest month for which figures were available, until Friday, when numbers doubled.
On Sunday, ICE arrested a total of 1,179 people, according to data first obtained by NBC News. That figure is larger than the 956 arrests that the agency announced on Sunday night and is the largest number under the new administration.
When Fragoso Lara was arrested, Chicago resident Peter Sodini was watching. He thanked the ICE agents.
“I don’t mind an immigrant, but if they’re breaking our laws, they don’t need to be here,” he said.
Afterward, Fragoso Lara was taken to an ICE processing facility on the outskirts of Chicago, where detainees are photographed, fingerprinted, and held until their deportation flights, which typically take place on Fridays.
He said he grew up in the U.S. and if he is deported, he will leave his 5-year-old daughter here in the United States so that she can have a better life.
“She’s without me. She grows up without a father,” Fragoso Lara said, adding that his message to Trump would be to ask for a second chance. “I’m still young. I did make poor decisions but since I grew up and I see how life is here.”
Twenty-five men and one woman were either being held or being processed at the facility on Monday afternoon. They are supposed to be there for no longer than 12 hours.
Frank Padula, assistant field office director in the processing center, said the facility has been particularly busy in the past week.
“We’re nonstop,” he said. “As you can see, we got a lot of guys here processing, guys in the holding cells waiting to be processed.”
While some operations, like the one to arrest Fragoso Lara, were successful, other times on Monday ICE was not able to identify and detain their targets.
Earlier in the day, ICE agents and others knocked on a door and found no one was home. Then, at a second stop, they spoke with the parents of their target, who said they had lost touch with their son. The officers appeared not to ask the couple about their immigration status and moved on to another location.
The Trump administration has said the crackdown is targeting criminals, but there has been concern over law-abiding migrants with varying forms of legal immigration status also being rounded up, otherwise known as “collateral arrests.”
When asked about collateral arrests, Sam Olson, the Enforcement and Removal Operations Chicago field office director, said they were a possibility. “We’re tasked to enforce the immigration laws,” he said. “If somebody is here illegally, whether or not they’ve committed crimes, there is that possibility that they could be arrested.”
Officials have not always disclosed the number of migrants with and without criminal histories who have been arrested.
However, of the 1,179 people arrested Sunday, just 613 of those arrests — nearly 52% — were considered “criminal arrests,” according to a senior Trump administration official. The rest appear to be nonviolent offenders or people who have not committed any criminal offense.
Being undocumented is not considered a crime, but a civil offense. But it’s considered a crime when an undocumented immigrant who was previously deported re-enters the U.S. without permission.
Since Trump took office, administration officials stressed that officers have arrested a slew of violent gang members, including dozens of suspected members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua in Colorado. Still, at least 566 people arrested Sunday had not committed any crimes and were only detained because they lacked legal authorization to remain in the United States.
Olson said that while ICE works to arrest criminals daily, Trump has taken a “whole of government approach” where “we’re really bringing many different agencies out together to do it.”
