ICE Still Targeting Chicago Immigrants at Courthouses
A Venezuelan immigrant was arrested outside a South Side courthouse in April 2026, as ICE enforcement quietly continues across Chicago and suburbs.
Federal agents arrested a Venezuelan man outside a South Side courthouse on April 15, 2026, setting off a new round of confrontations between Illinois officials and the Trump administration over immigration enforcement at state court facilities.
Dario Quevedo Marquez had walked out of the Branch 35 and 38 courthouse at 727 E. 111th St. after a hearing on a misdemeanor battery charge when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents moved in. His wife, Daymelis Martinez, was with him. She tried speaking to the agents in Spanish, asking why they were taking her husband. An agent told her to be quiet or she’d face arrest herself.
She backed off. She had no choice.
Their three children, ages 15, 12, and 11, are still working through asylum proceedings. Martinez is holding that together on her own right now.
“They’d be alone. We don’t have anyone here,” Martinez said.
The Quevedo Marquez arrest isn’t an isolated incident. Community organizers and Cook County officials say courthouse enforcement has continued well past the headline-grabbing sweeps of Operation Midway Blitz, which drew sharp public attention earlier in 2026. Enforcement didn’t stop when the cameras left. It just got harder to see.
Evelyn Vargas, leadership and development organizer for Organized Communities Against Deportations, said the suburb of Cicero is back to getting daily reports of arrests. Similar accounts are surfacing across the city and surrounding areas, with federal agents spotted near courthouses and in neighborhoods throughout the Chicago region. Since the start of April, immigration agents have entered Cook County courthouses or used courthouse property to attempt arrests at least seven times, resulting in at least three people taken into custody, according to reporting by Block Club Chicago.
Illinois passed the Court Access, Safety, and Participation Act in December banning civil immigration arrests at state courthouses without a warrant. A Cook County judge backed it up with a separate order. The Trump administration sued Illinois over the law the same month, and that federal case is still pending. None of it’s stopped the arrests.
Matthew Hendrickson, spokesperson for the Cook County Public Defender’s Office, didn’t mince words in a written statement.
“Our courts cannot properly administer justice if people are afraid to attend hearings, as they are required to do by law, because they risk abduction by federal agents on unrelated civil matters,” he said.
The Department of Homeland Security answered with its own statement, arguing the Constitution doesn’t bar agents from arresting someone “where you find them.” The agency’s position: “The ability of law enforcement to make arrests of criminal illegal aliens in courthouses is common sense.”
That framing is exactly what’s in dispute. Quevedo Marquez was at a courthouse because the court system required him to be there. He wasn’t a fugitive. He showed up. Advocates with the National Immigrant Justice Center and allied groups argue that using mandatory court appearances as enforcement opportunities isn’t just legally questionable under Illinois law, it’s corrosive to the court system itself. If people stop showing up to hearings because they fear arrest on unrelated civil immigration matters, the whole machinery seizes.
That’s not a hypothetical. Vargas and other organizers say they’re already hearing from immigrants who won’t go to scheduled court dates, won’t report crimes, won’t cooperate with local law enforcement. The effect compounds fast in communities where legal status is uncertain and word travels.
Martinez, for her part, can’t afford to disappear from the process. She and her children are still in asylum proceedings. She’s got to keep showing up, keep filing paperwork, keep the case alive. But the April 15 arrest at that courthouse on 111th Street made plain what the stakes are every time she walks through a courthouse door.
Cook County officials have been vocal in opposing the enforcement tactics. The federal government has been equally firm in defending them. Between those two positions, families like the Quevedo Marquezes are doing the math on whether showing up in court is worth the risk.
For Daymelis Martinez, there’s no clean answer. There’s just the next hearing date.