Berwyn, Illinois

On October 7th, federal immigration agents arrested Maricela Rosales Castillo near her home on the edge of Cicero, a western suburb of Chicago. Cicero had become the latest action zone in an operation dubbed Midway Blitz, targeting “the worst of the worst of criminal aliens,” according to a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson. Hundreds of federal immigration agents had descended on the greater Chicago area in response to what the spokesperson called “sanctuary policies” allowing dangerous immigrants “to roam free and terrorize innocent Americans without consequence.”

Rosales Castillo is a 53-year-old mother and grandmother who came to the U.S. from Mexico in 1995. On the morning of her arrest, according to an article posted on the MSNBC website, she “put her hair in a ponytail, grabbed her favorite blue sweater and backpack, and left her home… to head to a market for groceries. She was planning to make albóndigas, a meatball stew, for her children that day.” 

Arriving on the scene shortly after Rosales Castillo’s arrest, MSNBC’s Jacob Soboroff obtained a video of it from a witness. About an hour later, Soboroff encountered a distraught young woman seeking information about her missing mother. He played the video for her, and a quick look was enough for 19-year-old Samantha Rojas Rosales to confirm his suspicion. “That’s her,” she told Soboroff. “She always wears that blue sweater.

Appearing on The Bulwark podcast three days later, Soboroff described his conversation with Samantha as one of the most emotional interviews he had conducted in his ten years as a professional reporter. Observing her as she watched her mother being arrested by gun-toting agents in masks and bulletproof vests, “the security guys with us were crying, the camera guy was crying,” Soboroff said, and “she, of course… was bawling.”

Rosales Castillo’s children – Samanatha, Rosa and Juan – eventually learned that she had been taken to an emergency detention center. They set up a “Bring Maricela Home” GoFundMe page. “If you know my mother, she’s always willing to help,” Rosa wrote. “She has NO criminal record. She’s a very hard-working woman. She has three children who love her and grandchildren who long to see her again. We have not been able to speak to her and are in the process of finding legal help.”

The Midway Blitz task force consisted of about a hundred Immigration and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) agents and 200 Border Patrol agents – that agency’s largest deployment to a non-border state in decades. Some 500 National Guard soldiers were there in a support role, to protect ICE’s main processing facility in Chicago, among other duties. By the time of Maricela Rosales Castillo’s apprehension, the Midway Blitz team had captured more than a thousand undocumented immigrants across the region, including “pedophiles, child abusers, kidnappers, gang members, and armed robbers,” DHS declared. But, as Soboroff noted, the agency supplied backup information for only ten men with criminal backgrounds. Based on his own reporting, Soboroff said, the modus operandi of Midway Blitz seemed to be “large-scale, indiscriminate picking up of people off the streets because of the way that they look, or the way that they sound, or the job they have.”

On August 10^th, Rosa Rojas, Maricela Rosales Castillo’s other daughter, posted an update on the family’s GoFundMe page. She had briefly spoken with her mother, who remained in custody awaiting processing. “She is as OK as she can be,” Rosa reported.

Posted on November 13, 2025