Immigration rights groups have seen a massive spike in hotline calls for legal and other help as federal Homeland Security officials this week launched a much-anticipated immigration enforcement surge in the Chicago area, the groups said Thursday.

“The Trump deportation machine is out of control, and it’s our communities and our families that are being torn apart,” Lawrence Benito, executive director at the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, said Thursday at a news conference in Brighton Park, a heavily Latino neighborhood on the Southwest Side.

Benito said the group’s family support hotline received 500 calls on Tuesday alone, the highest volume since January, with the “vast majority” reporting sightings of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. Before

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