Through the window of a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicle as it pulled away last September, Laura Murillo could see her tamale stand near the busy Home Depot on 47th Street and Western Avenue. A folding table held coolers, containers and supplies beneath a striped umbrella next to her silver minivan. Only minutes earlier, Murillo, an immigrant from Mexico, had been waiting for her customers.
The night before her arrest, Murillo had made the tamales in the kitchen of a brick building she rented on the Southeast Side. Before sunrise, she and a worker packed them into her van and she drove to set up her stand.
For years, Murillo arranged much of her life around this routine. The tamale business allowed the mother of two to care for herself, support her daughters and offer work to other women. While it was grueling work, it was central to how Murillo understood herself: as an independent provider, a business owner and someone others could depend on.
“Everything was work,” Murillo says now in Spanish, speaking with the confidence of someone accustomed to running things on her own. “It was happiness.”
But the 55-year-old is now questioning the life she had built around constant work. She was arrested during last fall’s aggressive Operation Midway Blitz deportation campaign and spent six months in federal immigration detention.
Murillo returned to Chicago in March, among the small number of immigrants who have been released as a result of a court order rather than deported. She says she’s in the process of obtaining legal status.
In the meantime, Murillo is making more room for her daughters and accepting their growing independence. And she’s trying to rebuild a new identity around a newfound appreciation for her city, a slower pace of life, her faith and the people she loves.
“My life is different now. I take it day by day,” Murillo says.
The work of caring
Murillo first arrived in Chicago in 2005 from Tamaulipas, Mexico, with her then-partner, expecting to stay only a few years. Instead, they found work, raised their daughters, Génesis, now 20, and Daniela, 17, and built a life in the city.
The young mother first worked in factories before learning the tamale business.
In 2013, her close friend Gina Otamendi had separated from her husband and was raising four young children when she came to Murillo looking for work.
Murillo hired her, taught her to make and sell tamales and arranged her hours around her children’s school schedules — giving Otamendi the flexibility she needed as a single mother.
“She let me leave to feed my children and take them to school because I had to work to pay for everything they needed,” Otamendi says in Spanish. “She gave me food. She always helped me.”
Otamendi, 50, remembers long hours of making tamales, but also music and laughter. The women competed to see who could make the most tamales in an hour. They sang and danced while they worked.
“[It was] a very beautiful friendship,” Otamendi says.
Years later, Otamendi would help Murillo’s daughters while their mother was in detention.
Otamendi checked on Génesis and Daniela, brought groceries and arranged meals.
She also connected the family with Centro de Trabajadores Unidos, an immigrant workers’ rights organization where they found an attorney who took Murillo’s case.
Génesis took on more work to pay the bills while attending college. She also became the main point of contact with the attorney handling her mom’s case.
“Currently, I am a full-time college student doing my best to keep everything together, but my salary cannot cover all the sudden legal and household expenses we are facing,” Génesis wrote on a GoFundMe page in September 2025.
“I would talk with her,” Otamendi says. “And the poor girl would become desperate and say, ‘Gina, how am I going to do this?’”
Daniela, whom Murillo describes as having special needs, learned to wash dishes, take out the trash and handle more of her own personal care.
The community stepped in, too. The morning after Murillo was detained, neighbors and organizers took over her usual spot, selling more than 300 of her tamales in about an hour to raise money for her family.
Inside detention
Murillo was nearly 1,500 miles away at Camp East Montana in El Paso, Tx.
She met women in detention whose lives outside were beginning to fall away.
There were older women whose husbands had stopped answering their calls. Some said their children no longer sent money. There were mothers separated from their families, a woman who walked with a cane and another who used a wheelchair.
One woman, Murillo recalled, had been arrested while watering the yard outside her home.
“What crimes did they supposedly commit?” Murillo still asks. “They were at their homes.”
Immigration officers twice asked Murillo to sign voluntary departure papers, but she refused and waited while her attorneys challenged her detention.
Other women eventually signed, she says, because they had become desperate and no longer believed anyone was coming for them.
Murillo lost 36 pounds during her six months there. She says her faith helped her endure the uncertainty and what she describes as psychological abuse from the guards. A woman from a nearby Catholic shelter visited and read passages from the bible.
Guards, meanwhile, often reminded the women how little control they had, she says.
When Murillo asked what time it was, she says they questioned why she needed to know. When she wanted clean socks, she says one told her, “What for? You’re not getting out.”
Unable to fill the role she had long held at home, Murillo could only speak to her daughters over the phone.
“What I missed most were my daughters’ little faces,” Murillo says.
“When they lock you up, you lose control. [My daughters] weren’t calling me anymore to ask me things or ask permission. My daughters were doing things on their own.”
By last spring, she didn’t have much hope that she would be released. But in late March, the federal government unexpectedly released Murillo after acknowledging that her arrest had violated the Castañón Nava consent decree, a 2022 federal court settlement that limited immigration arrests without warrants.
Upon her release, officers took Murillo to a Catholic shelter in El Paso, where she spent the weekend. Murillo said it took time to understand that she was free. She initially remained inside the shelter until a woman there reminded her that she was allowed to leave. Murillo went for a walk and attended Mass the following morning.
Her daughters had planned to visit her in detention, and they decided to make the trip anyway to bring their mother home. They arrived that Sunday and flew back with her to Chicago.
“You know how, in movies, people come out of some ordeal, arrive home and kiss the ground? I almost wanted to do that,” Murillo says. “I swear to you, I truly experienced it that way.”
A different life in Chicago
Back home, Murillo does not want to rebuild the same life, but she knows she still needs — and wants — to work.
She has considered opening a small tamalería without the demanding schedule she once kept. Murillo holds out her hands, showing the rheumatoid arthritis she says she has from repeatedly moving between heat and cold while cooking and selling tamales through Chicago winters.
“I no longer see life as killing myself trying to achieve things,” Murillo says. “Not anymore.”
Murillo’s reluctance to return to her old pace and routine mirrors a similar withdrawal by other street vendors.
Nearly a year after Operation Midway Blitz began, leaders of the Street Vendors Association of Chicago said fear continues to determine when — and if — vendors go out to sell.
Vendors who continue working still risk immigration enforcement, even as ICE agents have carried out arrests more quietly than during the height of President Donald Trump’s deportation campaign. Association leaders also said local police officers have increasingly scrutinized street vendors for selling without licenses or in prohibited areas.
Murillo says she’s in the process of obtaining legal status. She was not comfortable sharing specifics because of her recent detention. Her partner helps with the rent. Génesis started paying for her own phone and internet.
Murillo is proud of her daughters, though she says it was difficult accepting they had learned to manage much more on their own.
“I struggle with it a little bit,” Murillo says. “It’s like they don’t need me anymore.”
Murillo is spending more time with them, including trips to the park and the movies. For years, work came first. “Wait until tomorrow, wait until tomorrow,” she recalls telling them when they wanted to hang out.
After long defining independence as being able to care for herself and others without asking anyone for help, Murillo now understands how many people had stepped in while she was gone — bringing food, offering money, advice and helping her daughters navigate the months without her.
“Mami, you have no idea how much people love you,” Murillo recalls Génesis telling her. “You can’t even imagine.”
Deportations From Chicago
