One Wednesday morning, Adam Gonzalez’s day started like any normal day. He got his 17-month-old son ready for day care, put him in the car and drove to a school in Chicago’s Roscoe Village neighborhood. As he approached Rayito de Sol Spanish Immersion Early Learning Center, which is located in a shopping plaza, he noticed two unfamiliar cars out front. Immediately, Gonzalez felt worried, as if something might have happened — maybe it was a car accident, since he saw flashing lights. But as he cautiously got closer to the vehicles to see what was happening, he noticed that the vehicles weren’t police cars with blue lights. Then he saw men wearing black body armor, some masked, and his heart sank. It became clear they were Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
As a lawyer and a volunteer with rapid-response work, Gonzalez knew how to handle the next few minutes that would unfold in front of his son’s school. He said he knew not to get too involved by getting too close, but to record the incident. He knew not to antagonize, especially with his child with him, but to document as his son’s teacher, Diana Patricia Santillana Galeano, was dragged out by ICE agents with her arms behind her back in front of kids, coworkers and parents during morning drop-off. In a video of the Nov. 5 event, the teacher was pushed up against a car as she was telling the agents she had papers.
“I heard her yelling ‘tengo papeles,’ which is Spanish for ‘I have papers,’ you heard parents yelling, ‘leave her alone,’ you heard staff yelling, ‘she has papers,’” Gonzalez told Salon in a phone interview. “You just hear her crying, and then they put her in the car.”
In September, the Department of Homeland Security announced Operation Midway Blitz as part of the Trump administration’s broader immigration crackdown. Across the country, ICE agents have been deployed in multiple cities conducting heavily armed raids. Multiple videos have shown that these enforcement tactics have been aggressive. In one video, a father was arrested by immigration agents while armed officers drove away with his toddler in the car in a Home Depot parking lot in Los Angeles. Guns were drawn as agents conducted a raid on a Chicago apartment building.
After Galeano, the day care teacher, was arrested, Gonzalez said the parents were still crying, and the older kids — the 4- and 5-year-olds— were asking why everyone was so sad.
“It was beyond traumatic. It’s been less than a week, but I still have moments where I relive what I saw, and I can hear the crying,” he said. “It was just a gut punch that this place that was so safe for us, that was so much a community, so much a family, and that day it was taken away from us.”
In a press release, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security claimed to “set the record straight,” stating that ICE is “not targeting schools or day care centers.”
“The illegal alien female was arrested inside a vestibule, not in the school,” said Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin in the press release.
On Thursday, Galeano was released. The event continues to cause widespread fear among parents, children, and childcare workers in the Chicago area.
Alice Dreyden, who works at a Head Start center in Chicago, told Salon the presence of ICE in the community is affecting her workplace as well.
“We’ve lost several families just due to specifically not feeling safe with ICE in the area,” Dreyden told Salon in a phone interview. “One of my toddlers, a 15-month-old, who I got really close with, just stopped showing up one day.”
She called their home, went by to visit and see if the family was OK, but couldn’t get an answer. She eventually learned the family returned to the country they came from because they didn’t feel safe. Dreyden said she is seeing firsthand how the fear of ICE is affecting young children, even if they don’t understand all the details of what’s happening. Sometimes, she said, families are afraid to leave their homes and drop their children off at school, which can be disruptive to their routines and affect their sense of consistency and stability.
“Kids pick up on all of that. They may not understand the details, but they absolutely understand that the adults are afraid and things aren’t safe,” Dreyden said. “And that is so damaging developmentally to a young child, to have to be in that kind of environment.”
Dreyden added she sees the fear directly in the 2-year-olds she cares for at school.
“Usually when we would walk around the neighborhood in the past, and we’d see a fire truck or an ambulance, with their sirens on, the kids would wave and think it was really interesting,” she said. “And now some of them just kind of their eyes get wide and they don’t like it, it’s really sad to see in someone so young, to see their little nervous systems try to jump at everything.”
According to the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN), chronic separation from a caregiver can be very overwhelming. While it depends on the circumstances, the most traumatic part can be exposure to “frightening events.” “Such as witnessing a parent being handcuffed,” the institute says.
Dr. Carla Marie Manly, a psychologist based in California, told Salon that early childhood is an especially formative period in life, and that being exposed to “hostile,” “aggressive,” or other “fear-inducing events” can certainly affect them.
“When a violent event occurs in school or other ‘safe’ setting, the child comes to equate that once-safe space with being a source of fear, anxiety, and instability,” Manly said. “When a child’s teacher is taken away, the child can feel abandoned, scared and unsafe.”
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In July 2025, a study from the University of California, Riverside, stated that “even the threat of separation can generate profound emotional harm” for children of immigrant families.
Erma Jackson, who has a home childcare center in Chicago, told Salon the mere presence of ICE in Chicago is absolutely affecting children and schools across the city.
“They may not think about why we may be hesitant to answer the door if we don’t have a camera because we don’t know who’s on the other end of the door,” Jackson said. “When they see that fear, they become afraid.”
When Salon spoke to Gonzalez nearly a week after the day care raid, he said he still hadn’t sent his son back to the day care. He was still trying to figure out how to move forward along with other parents—and it’s not just the parents of Rayito de Sol Spanish Immersion Early Learning Center.
“All over Chicago, people have to make that decision every day, especially the Latino community,” he said. “People have to make the decision, do I go to work so I can feed my child, or do I stay at home and know I’m safe? Or do I send my child to school that day and worry ICE will be outside the school?”
