CHICAGO — Several Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and other federal personnel waited in unmarked cars as they prepared to approach what they called their target.
According to ICE, Christopher Fragoso Lara, 25, of Mexico, had been convicted of home invasion, aggravated battery, domestic battery, possession of a weapon and other crimes. A surveillance team had spotted him Monday morning at the Chicago tire shop where he worked.
Agents shut down the street outside the business and arrested Fragoso Lara as he spoke to a customer outside, in subfreezing temperatures.
The arrest took place without incident when NBC News was embedded with the agents during operations throughout the Chicago area Monday morning. The enforcement agents departed downtown Chicago before sunrise and drove to Berwyn, a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city.
Three door-knocking operations did not result in arrests, but they demonstrated the time and manpower that goes into the operations. At each location, there were at least seven officers, from ICE and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, covering all the entrances and exits.
Ten teams of about 10 federal agents apiece fanned out across the city Monday, a source familiar with the operations said. The operations came during immigration enforcement operations in multiple cities around the country ordered by President Donald Trump.
The Trump administration has sought in the past week to publicly demonstrate that it is following through on Trump's promises to enact mass deportations immediately after having taken office. Arrest numbers last week remained on par with those in September, the latest month for which figures were available, until Friday, when numbers doubled.
On Sunday, ICE arrested 1,179 people, according to data first obtained by NBC News. The figure, which is higher than the 956 arrests the agency announced Sunday night, is the largest number under the new administration.
When Fragoso Lara was arrested, Chicago resident Peter Sodini was watching. He thanked the ICE agents.
"I don't mind an immigrant, but if they're breaking our laws, they don't need to be here," he said.
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Afterward, Fragoso Lara was taken to an ICE processing facility on the outskirts of Chicago, where detainees are photographed, fingerprinted and held until their deportation flights, which typically take place on Fridays.
He said that he grew up in the United States and that if he is deported, he will leave his 5-year-old daughter here in the United States so she can have a better life.
“She’s without me. She grows up without a father,” Fragoso Lara said, adding that his message to Trump would be to ask for a second chance. “I’m still young. I did make poor decisions, but ... I grew up and I see how life is here.”
Twenty-five men and one woman were either being held or processed at the facility Monday afternoon. They are supposed to be there for no longer than 12 hours.
Frank Padula, the processing center’s assistant field office director, said the facility has been particularly busy in the past week.
“We’re nonstop," he said. "As you can see, we got a lot of guys here processing, guys in the holding cells waiting to be processed.”
While some operations, like the one to arrest Fragoso Lara, were successful, other times Monday, ICE was not able to identify and detain its targets.
Earlier in the day, ICE agents and others knocked on a door and found no one was home. Then, at a second stop, they spoke with the parents of their target, who said they had lost touch with their son. The officers appeared not to ask the couple about their immigration status and moved on to another location.
The Trump administration has said the crackdown targets criminals, but there has been concern that law-abiding migrants with varying forms of legal immigration status could also be rounded up, otherwise known as “collateral arrests.”
Asked about collateral arrests, Sam Olson, the enforcement and removal operations director in the Chicago field office, said they were possible. “We’re tasked to enforce the immigration laws," he said. "If somebody is here illegally, whether or not they’ve committed crimes, there is that possibility that they could be arrested.”
Officials have not always disclosed the number of migrants with and without criminal histories who have been arrested.
However, just 613 of the 1,179 people arrested Sunday — nearly 52% — were considered “criminal arrests,” a senior Trump administration official said. The rest appear to be nonviolent offenders or people who have not committed any criminal offense.
Being undocumented is considered a civil offense, not a crime. But it is considered a crime when an undocumented immigrant who was previously deported re-enters the United States without permission.
Since Trump took office, administration officials stressed, officers have arrested a slew of violent gang members, including dozens of suspected members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua in Colorado. Still, at least 566 people arrested Sunday had not committed any crimes and were detained only because they lacked legal authorization to remain in the United States.
Olson said that while ICE works to arrest criminals daily, Trump has taken a “whole of government approach” in which “we’re really bringing many different agencies out together to do it.”
