On a street in the South Shore neighborhood of Chicago, Reverend Ciera Bates-Chamberlain stood in front of a five-story apartment complex praying with other city faith leaders and residents. Windows across the facade of the building were broken. Inside, occupants told Chamberlain, doors had been torn from their hinges and the apartments they belonged to had been ransacked.

“You could tell that something happened that destroyed that building,” Chamberlain, the executive director of Live Free Illinois, which mobilizes Black churches to improve public safety and enact criminal justice reform, recalls to TIME. “Once you walk up, it looks like it's an abandoned building.”

A couple nights earlier, around 1 a.m., federal agents arrived in unmarked trucks and a helicopter to carry out a raid o

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