Marcos Carbajal’s family restaurant, Carnitas Uruapan, was serving food at a professional soccer match in suburban Bridgeview on the first Sunday of last September. Families were out, and fans were celebrating.A few miles away that day, federal immigration agents were arresting a flower vendor in Chicago’s Archer Heights neighborhood. He was deported within days.That’s when things changed, Carbajal said, as the Trump administration’s Operation Midway Blitz kicked off. Customers started calling to ask if workers could bring food to their cars. Families who came by every Sunday stopped coming. Staff and neighbors checked social media for immigration enforcement activity before their commutes.At the peak of the deportation campaign, revenue fell dramatically at the restaurant’s Little Village, Gage Park and Pilsen locations, Carbajal said.“The numbers told the same story: When people are afraid, they stay home,” he said.Carbajal was among several Chicago-area residents, lawyers and advocates who told a federal commission at a hearing Wednesday about the fear and trauma caused by the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement, which at times put neighborhoods “under siege,” one speaker said. Marcos Carbajal tells a federal commission that the effects of the federal deportation campaign were clear after a drastic decline in business at his family’s restaurant.Giacomo Cain/Sun-Times The forum, dubbed the “People’s Hearing on Immigration Enforcement,” was held by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights at the University of Illinois Chicago’s downtown law school. It was meant to build a public record and aid the push for investigations, policy changes and possible criminal charges against federal agents, organizers said.Rochelle Garza, the commission’s chair, helped facilitate the hearing and said the testimony could bring “transparency and accountability — and hopefully justice.”But Garza said the hearing was not an official proceeding of the commission, an independent, bipartisan federal agency that advises the president and Congress on civil rights issues. The commission does not prosecute cases, but it can investigate civil rights concerns and produce reports and recommendations. Given that the aggressive immigration enforcement tactics deployed by President Donald Trump’s administration were at the heart of the hearing, it was unlikely to lead to federal action by his administration or the Republican majority in Congress.The commission published a report this week following a similar people’s hearing held in March in Minnesota. State prosecutors there filed charges Monday against an U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in the January shooting of a Venezuelan immigrant in Minneapolis. The commission is set to hold another people’s hearing in June in Los Angeles.Speakers said Operation Midway Blitz hit Chicago hard, from the fatal shooting of Silverio Villegas González in Franklin Park, to the shooting of Marimar Martinez in Brighton Park, the use of tear gas during enforcement actions and reports of people being detained at courthouses.A man who spoke anonymously said he was leaving work for lunch in September when three vehicles with emergency lights but no clear agency markings pulled him over.Within seconds, he said, agents were at his window asking for his identification. He showed them his driver’s license, but they opened his door, put him in handcuffs and placed him in one of the vehicles.“I thought I was being careful,” he said.The man said he was detained at the immigration processing center in west suburban Broadview for 24 hours before being held for four months at a detention center in Baldwin, Mich.He said he had no chance to seek bail and little opportunity to make his case despite having lived in the United States for 26 years, paying taxes for two decades, having a U.S. citizen son and having no criminal record.“All the people that I was able to meet during these four months, were hard-working people,” he said. “I don’t really understand what is the reason for the government to keep us locked up.”Chicago-area immigration arrests rose to 760 in September and nearly tripled to 2,074 in October, according to a report by UIC and the Hispanic Federation. An audience listens to a panel of speakers during the hearing on federal immigration enforcement in Chicago on Wednesday.Giacomo Cain/Sun-Times Sheila Bedi, an advisor to Mayor Brandon Johnson, said at the hearing that immigration enforcement has not stopped in Chicago even after most agents left the city. She said federal agents were waiting outside domestic violence court Wednesday morning.Rubén Castillo, a former federal judge who chaired an Illinois commission scrutinizing federal agents’ actions, said a separate request for a special prosecutor to investigate federal agents is another avenue for accountability.“This needs to stop,” Castillo said. “Justice to me is a courtroom.”Berto Aguayo, an attorney and co-chair of the Rapid Response Network at the Hispanic Lawyers Association of Illinois, said families felt “fear” and “trauma” with children wondering whether loved ones would come back and entire neighborhoods feeling “under siege.”“Our communities were desperately looking for lawyers they could trust,” Aguayo said. “For many families, we were the only lawyers they knew personally.“What happened here in Chicago during Operation Midway Blitz cannot be forgotten,” Aguayo said. ...read more read less