Immigration agents raid daycare center in Chicago

The officers grabbed the teacher in front of the children, Rep. Mike Quigley, an Illinois Democrat, said in a statement. Shocked parents, who said they had received information from the school that all teachers were legally authorized to work, were left in the Rayito de Sol parking lot after the immigration raid.

“The kids were crying, the parents were crying,” said Tara Goodarzi, a lawyer who was dropping off her 3-year-old son at Rayito de Sol when three officers entered the building. “That’s a scene we won’t forget,” he said.

Laura Tober, mother of a child in Santillana’s class, described her as kind and caring. “On Monday, my daughter walked for the first time and she couldn’t wait to tell me,” she reported.

The daycare raid marked a turnaround in US President Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration crackdown in Chicago, which began in September with the stated aim of going after dangerous criminals without the legal right to reside in the US, which has resulted in more than 3,000 arrests, according to the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), including US citizens and people with no criminal record.

In a statement to Reuters, DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents pursued a Colombian woman and a man into the daycare’s entrance area after they fled a “targeted traffic stop.”

Last week, federal immigration agents targeted Evanston, Illinois, a suburb north of Chicago that is home to Northwestern University, in a sweep that included a raid on a retirement community.