A Black Hawk helicopter, flash-bang grenades, and TV cameras turned a Chicago immigration raid into a Trump-era spectacle aimed at showing how the Department of Homeland Security was detaining and deporting the “worst of the worst.”

As about 300 armed agents from Border Patrol, the FBI, and other federal units descended on the South Shore apartment block, terrified families had their doors smashed in and homes ransacked, as children were dragged out of bed and some—including U.S. senior citizens—were zip-tied and hauled into rental vans and driven away.

The federal show of force had been ordered by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem as the centerpiece of her aggressive immigration crackdown in Illinois, dubbed “Operation Midway Blitz.”

Afterward, Noem boasted that the raid had been

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