ICE Arrests Dozens in Boston as Trump Signals Chicago Is Next

Federal immigration agents conducted raids across Boston and nearby communities over the weekend, arresting dozens of people, according to a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security.

The move came as the Justice Department filed suit against the city and its mayor, intensifying a clash over local sanctuary policies. Local officials have rejected the federal operations as unnecessary and authoritarian overreach.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement said the operation, dubbed “Patriot 2.0,” followed a similar sweep in May. The agency said those taken into custody included individuals accused of sexual assault, drug trafficking and gang activity who had been released from local jails despite federal requests to hold them. US officials said Boston’s policies allowed dangerous offenders to remain in communities instead of being deported.

President Donald Trump, who has deployed National Guard troops and federal law enforcement officers to Washington, has also threatened repeatedly to send forces into Chicago to tackle crime there.

On Saturday, the president posted a meme on Truth Social evoking the Vietnam War movie Apocalypse Now, with a caption that said, “I love the smell of deportations in the morning” and saying Chicago is about to find out why he changed the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War.

Trump has said he wants to project a more aggressive image for the Pentagon toward the country’s adversaries, but he drew criticism for suggesting that approach could apply domestically.

“I guess we could solve Chicago very quickly, but we’re going to make a decision as to where we go in the next day or two,” Trump told reporters when he returned to Washington from the US Open tennis championship in New York.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson pushed back against Trump’s threats, saying the city just experienced its safest summer since the 1960s, the result, he said, of effective collaboration between communities and law enforcement.

“Sending in the National Guard is the wrong solution to a real problem,” Johnson wrote in a New York Times opinion article on Monday.

Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, was asked Sunday during an interview with CNN’s State of the Union on whether enforcement activities are expected in Chicago this week. “Absolutely,” he replied. “You can expect action in most sanctuary cities across the country.”

Illinois’ Democratic governor, JB Pritzker, also rejected Trump’s threat, writing in a post on X that “Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator.” Even so, organizers decided to postpone a major Mexican Independence Day festival scheduled for next weekend amid fears over a potential immigration crackdown. A smaller celebration went ahead as scheduled on Saturday.

In downtown Chicago, fencing was set up ahead of the weekend near the Everett McKinley Dirksen Courthouse, a federal building. Another building that will be used by ICE in the village of Broadview, west of downtown Chicago, was also fortified.

At a press conference on Friday, Senator Tammy Duckworth, an Illinois Democrat, said the ICE mission would run for a month through Oct. 5, according to information provided to Illinois lawmakers by officials at a meeting at the Naval Station Great Lakes near Lake Michigan.

Two days before the raids in Massachusetts, the Justice Department sued Boston, Mayor Michelle Wu and the Boston Police Department, arguing the city’s sanctuary ordinances obstruct federal enforcement. Attorney General Pam Bondi called Boston “among the worst sanctuary offenders in America.”

Wu pushed back, accusing the administration of political overreach. “For months, the Trump Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement have been spreading blatant lies and threatening to ‘bring hell’ to cities like Boston who refuse to bow down to their authoritarian agenda,” she said in a statement Saturday.

(Updates with Chicago mayor’s comments comment in eighth paragraph.)

--With assistance from Se Young Lee, Chenny Chen, María Paula Mijares Torres and Greg Ryan.

To contact the reporters on this story:
Myles Miller in New York at mmiller899@bloomberg.net;
Miranda Davis in Chicago at mdavis537@bloomberg.net;
Erin Ailworth in Chicago at eailworth1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Kevin Whitelaw at kwhitelaw@bloomberg.net

Wendy Benjaminson

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