CHICAGO —In a parking lot just outside O’Hare International Airport on Monday afternoon, a man prayed next to his car as a plane took off.
The parking lot, just east of the airport’s Terminal 5, is where Uber and Lyft drivers wait for the ride-share apps to assign them passengers. There, the drivers make phone calls and eat lunch. Sometimes, they pray.
Last Friday, Border Patrol officers arrested 18 people at O’Hare, the Department of Homeland Security confirmed. Labor groups said immigration officers targeted the ride-share drivers’ parking lot.
Stacy McCloud, who works at a food truck in the lot, told the Tribune she saw it all.
Immigration agents came to the parking lot twice Friday, once in the morning and once in the afternoon, McCloud said Monday. They surrounded the lot and blocked off its entrance, she said.
When drivers realized that immigration officials were there, McCloud said, people started screaming “ICE, ICE” and “the whole parking lot just ran.”
“People were bumping into each other with their cars,” she said. But they had nowhere to go.
Federal agents asked drivers to provide their documents, McCloud said. “They didn’t focus on anybody who didn’t look Mexican,” she said. “Anybody who was Mexican, it looked like they went straight for.”
For two years, McCloud has worked at a food truck in the lot. On Monday, she spoke to the Tribune in between customers, who bought tacos and energy drinks. She had time to talk because business was slower than usual.
Ricardo Velasquez, a ride-share driver eating lunch on the trunk of his car that afternoon, said he is a U.S. citizen, but his friends who aren’t were avoiding the airport.
“I feel sorry for all my friends,” Velasquez said. “Everybody has to have a right to work.”
Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said Border Patrol officers conducted a “targeted” operation at O’Hare and that the people arrested were “all in violation of our nation’s immigration laws.”
“Under President (Donald) Trump and Secretary (Kristi) Noem, if you break the law, you will face the consequences. Criminal illegal aliens are not welcome in the U.S,” McLaughlin said in a statement.
McLaughlin named one person arrested Friday whom she described as a “a criminal illegal alien from Venezuela” who previously had been arrested for “domestic battery causing great bodily harm.”
The Tribune reviewed court records that showed a man with the same name had been charged with domestic battery in Cook County last year, but that prosecutors later decided not to pursue the charges against him. A police report put his birthplace in Mexico, not Venezuela. It’s not clear if the man is the same person McLaughlin was referring to.
McLaughlin did not provide details about any others arrested.
McCloud said the agents in the parking lot Friday “showed no sympathy.”
“They were ripping everybody out of the cars,” she said. “Whoever showed that they weren’t a citizen, basically, they were just ripping out of the cars.”
The Illinois Drivers Alliance — a labor coalition seeking to organize ride-share drivers across the state — decried the raids, saying it was “deeply concerned that the drivers’ due process rights were violated at O’Hare.”
“This is part of a broader pattern of attacks on immigrant families by an administration that continues to weaponize fear and division,” said the Drivers Alliance, which is anchored by locals of the Service Employees International Union and the International Association of Machinists.
The O’Hare sweep comes amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Chicago, which officials claim has resulted in the arrests of more than 1,000 people so far. Over the course of the crackdown, advocates have raised concerns about the targeting of low-wage workers, as reports have surfaced about construction workers, street vendors and day laborers all being detained by the feds.
In a statement about the O’Hare immigration sweep, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said his administration was working to ensure that city property “is never used to facilitate unlawful civil immigration enforcement.”
Last week, Johnson signed an executive order banning federal immigration authorities from staging and carrying out enforcement operations on city-owned land. The mayor called for criminal charges against agents who violate the order.
Johnson spokesperson Cassio Mendoza said the administration believed that because signs laying out the immigration enforcement ban had not yet been installed at the airport parking lot, the administration lacked a legal avenue to pursue against the feds for carrying out a raid in the lot. Such signs should be posted in the lot soon, Mendoza said.
On Monday afternoon, many of the spaces in the parking lot were empty. Drivers who were there said that was unusual.
Uber driver Jim Weber wasn’t in the lot during the raids Friday, but said he disagreed with them.
Some of his ancestors came to the U.S. without legal permission more than a century ago, fleeing pogroms in Europe, he said.
“They snuck in through Canada,” said Weber. His family settled in the Upper Midwest, where his great-grandfather met his great-grandmother, raised children and grandchildren, worked hard and paid taxes.
“All he wanted was a better life,” Weber said. He thinks that’s what his fellow ride-share drivers want too.
“They want a better life,” Weber said. “Who doesn’t?”
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—Chicago Tribune’s Jonathan Bullington contributed.
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