For some, Trump’s deportation blitz last fall evokes painful memories of Latin American ‘disappearances’

In December 1979, Neris González was leaving the market in her farm town in central El Salvador when Salvadoran national guardsmen suddenly grabbed her and took her captive.

González, who was in her late teens, was taken to a clandestine prison where she was brutally tortured for two weeks before finally being released.

It was the beginning of the Salvadoran civil war, a bloody 12-year conflict with an estimated 5,000 forced disappearances according to a U.N. Truth Commission. For the duration of the war, González was separated from her two daughters, who were 1 and 7 years old at the time she was detained.

More than 45 years later, González, who moved to Chicago in 1997, thought she had seen the last of militarized patrols snatching people off the streets. But then U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents launched Operation Midway Blitz last fall, which González said brought back painful memories.

“Wow, incredible,” González, 70, said in Spanish, through an interpreter. “When I see Border Patrol here in Chicago, I never imagined … that in a country called the United States and here in Chicago, there would be such an aggressive, violent, unaccountable and military migration response.”

That response included a military-style overnight raid of a South Shore apartment building with federal agents rappelling from a helicopter onto the roof, knocking down doors and rounding up 37 people, mostly Venezuelan migrants, but also a handful of U.S. citizens and children. Masked agents also deployed tear gas on residential streets, shot two people, killing one, and swept up people at courthouses, schools, gas stations, grocery stores, and work sites, often without warrants. After being arrested, an unreliable ICE locator system meant that some detainees effectively disappeared for days at a time.

The deportation campaign has been carried out with little oversight or transparency, said Ariel Dulitzky, an expert in the inter-American human rights system.

“There is a need to really go back and see — and not only going back, but in the present — what is happening with the detention of immigrants,” Dulitzky said.

That includes the detentions of American citizens, detention conditions, lack of protocol for ICE agents’ interactions with community members and ICE presence at schools, courthouses and churches, which conflict with constitutional rights.

“We need to do more documentation of what happened… even if there [are] less aggressive tactics today, [they] could be repeated in the future,” Dulitzky said.

In the meantime, the Illinois Accountability Commission, established by Gov. JB Pritzker, is working to hold the Trump administration accountable for potential human rights violations. Earlier this month, the commission requested testimony from top current and former officials responsible for Operation Midway Blitz as part of its ongoing probe.

Following the backlash to the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Trump’s mass deportation campaign has eased up of late. But in Chicago it has left a lasting impact on the city’s Latino neighborhoods, where some residents still fear going outside.

And while caravans of masked agents aren’t roaming the streets like they did during Midway Blitz, ICE remains a potent symbol and go-to resource for Trump. His administration has recently deployed ICE agents to airports nationwide, including O’Hare, in an attempt to bolster airport security.

For some, the events of the last year echo a dark chapter in Central and South American history, when tens of thousands of people were detained and disappeared. They worry that Trump’s rhetoric and brand of immigration enforcement could eventually lead the U.S. down a similar path.

‘Nobody knew where she was’

In early June of last year, Valentina Galvis and her then-7-month-old boy, Naythan, spent five days locked in a hotel guarded by private security contracted with ICE.

Galvis was apprehended by masked, plainclothes federal immigration agents as she held Naythan in her arms while leaving her check-in for her asylum case at a Downtown courthouse.

As reported by Injustice Watch, she and her husband, Camilo Arias, moved to the U.S. together in 2022 after fleeing violence in their home country of Colombia. They had also obtained U.S. work authorization, according to her lawyer, William McLean.

Galvis and Naythan were driven to the ICE processing center in Broadview and were told they would be sent to a family detention center in Texas before being deported. She was allowed a brief phone call to her husband, who is a truck driver and was in Boston at the time.

Galvis feared Naythan would be forced to grow up without his mother and that she would be permanently separated from her husband.

“It was terrible because I always, always, thought I was going to be deported — that I didn’t have another option,” Galvis said, through an interpreter. “…Practically my family was going to be destroyed. I was scared… about returning to Colombia. I was scared for my son… for my husband… for my family most of all.”

The mother and son were driven to a hotel near O’Hare Airport, where a federal agent immediately unplugged and removed the hotel room phone. They stayed there for one night and at another nearby hotel for four days.

During all this time, her lawyer said, the ICE online locator system, meant to be a key tool for lawyers and families to find people in the immigration detention system, inaccurately showed Galvis was being held in Washington, D.C., where no ICE detention center exists.

“Nobody knew where she was,” said McLean, her lawyer. “I didn’t find out what the hotel was until I showed Valentina an image of all these hotels around O’Hare and she said, ‘That’s it, that’s the one right there.’ Completely cut off from me, completely cut off from her husband.”

“It’s the worst thing I have ever seen in my entire career — either that I’ve been involved in or that I’ve heard about or read about,” McLean said. “Considering my client’s equities — three, four years in the U.S., work authorization, valid asylum case, her U.S. citizen child in her arms, that’s probably what makes it the worst. And also the context of where they held her.”

“Enforced disappearance” is the legal term for González’s detention — and the hundreds of thousands of others detained during military dictatorships across Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. Similar detentions have since occurred in authoritarian regimes all over the world.

In her native El Salvador, which was controlled at the time by a U.S.-backed oligarchy allied with the military, so-called “death squads” placed white handprints on the homes of political dissidents, teachers, activists and people who challenged the government. The handprints signified a warning to stop speaking out. People who received them on their door were often kidnapped or killed.

Thousands more were ‘disappeared’ in countries like Peru, Chile, Guatemala, and Colombia. In Argentina, the number was closer to 30,000. Last month, demonstrators marched in Buenos Aires on the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the last military dictatorship (1976-1983) to commemorate those victims who were taken captive and never seen again.

Similar messaging and tactics

Dulitzky, a University of Texas law professor who served on the U.N. Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances and wrote an article summarizing enforced disappearances in Latin America, says that though happening at a smaller scale, he sees some similarities between those past regimes and present-day U.S.

“This is exactly what we saw in Latin America,” Dulitzky said. “It’s creating this terror that the authorities can come in the middle of the day, take you, don’t disclose where you are, don’t say why they are detaining you, don’t say who is detaining you —not only for you, but for everybody else to see that and to fear about what you are doing.”

Three elements define enforced disappearance: deprivation of liberty, government involvement and the government’s lack of acknowledgment of the detention or lack of transparency about the person’s whereabouts.

Dulitzky cautions that the situation in the U.S. is not nearly as dire as those Latin American countries decades ago. Forty-seven people have died while in ICE custody during Trump’s second term, according to ICE death reports and news releases.

But he does believe that some recent examples of immigration arrests in the U.S. can be considered short-term enforced disappearances. Dulitzky said the ideological justification for the operations is the one “very, very similar” element between past Latin American regimes and the Trump administration.

“The way that the undocumented immigrants are portrayed as [an] enemy of [traditional] American values is the same concept as [how victims of disappearances] were portrayed in Latin America,” Dulitzky said.

Carlina Tapia-Ruano said that in her 45 years as an immigration lawyer, she had “never seen individuals more terrorized by the U.S. government,” than during Trump’s deportation campaign.

“The brutality, the legality and the lack of any just or due process involved in the arrest is jaw-dropping,” Tapia-Ruano said.

An unreliable ICE detainee locator system

Shannon Shepherd, an immigration lawyer, had a similar experience with two of her clients who were arrested by ICE during their routine check-in appointment Oct. 27 in Chicago. Both were detained on the spot, despite both having no criminal records, having already obtained work authorization and having complied with their immigration cases, she said.

Shepherd described the next several days as a “blackout period.”

“I knew they were being detained, but they [ICE] still don’t tell you where they’re taking them initially,” Shepherd said. “In Chicago, they go to the Broadview facility first, but that’s not supposed to be a long-term detention center, so you know they’re going to be moved somewhere else.”

ICE officials told one of Shepherd’s clients she was going to be held in Indiana, and the other one was told he would be taken to Michigan. Shepherd began preparing habeas corpus petitions in those states to challenge the legality of their detentions and to secure a bond hearing so they could potentially be released.

But her clients’ whereabouts weren’t showing up in the ICE detainee locator system.

“It was two or three days later when one of them popped up as being in Kentucky instead of Indiana, and the other one as being in Indiana instead of Michigan,” Shepherd said. “So, during those three days, we had no communication with them.”

Starting in the fall, the ICE online locator system became even less reliable as people’s names would sometimes not show up at all despite being in ICE custody, according to a National Immigrant Justice Center report published in December.

“When they [government] refuse to provide information to the relative, to the lawyers, to the press, where these persons are detained or whether or not they were deported… when you lose track of the person’s whereabouts, that’s enforced disappearance,” Dulitzky said, noting the term’s definition has no time component.

Tapia-Ruano, the immigration attorney, said ICE intentionally makes more arrests on Fridays because the law gives the agency 48 business hours to investigate the individual without allowing them to contact an attorney or to charge them.

“And they can send them wherever they want on Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, when they finally have to notify the individual [of] their charge,” she added.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees immigration enforcement, denied that the agency improperly limits detainees’ ability to communicate. They said detainees are provided access to phones and lists of attorneys. They did not respond to a question about whether ICE intentionally boosts arrests on Fridays.

“Once [a detainee] is transferred to ICE custody, the agency makes a custody determination based on bed space and ensures their presence for immigration proceedings or removal from the United States,” the DHS spokesperson said. “Despite a historic number of injunctions, DHS is working rapidly overtime to remove these [detainees] from detention centers to their final destination — home.”

‘I have already seen it’

After the Salvadoran civil war, González joined an organization helping people resettle and took college courses at night. It was difficult to concentrate on her studies, she said, due to the lingering trauma from her time in captivity, but she eventually moved to Chicago to work with other victims of torture.

González said she understands ICE’s and CBP’s tactics well from her experience working at the southern border during the “zero tolerance” era of Trump’s first administration in 2018, which included the notorious family separation policy. She worked for the Consulate General of El Salvador, providing services to Salvadorans detained at the border.

“I saw how they ripped children out of the arms of their families,” she said. “I was able to hear the words they said to them: ignorant, you are lice-infested, cockroaches, you are useless, you are nobody. I mean, words that break you, you understand? Dignity. It’s about breaking their dignity.”

And while it is different from the physical abuse she experienced in El Salvador, the degradation seems to flow from a similar mindset.

“To me, that behavior shows the low self-esteem of the person directing it,” González said. “Because a person who has low self-esteem and is filled with power in their hands is dangerous, just like the oligarchs of my country. I have already seen it, inside and out, all over. Now I know it well.”

Contributing: Anthony Vazquez