CHICAGO — Abel Orozco was getting home after buying tamales for his family, like he did most weekends for the past 30 years. They would have breakfast and head to church.

Instead, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained the Mexican immigrant outside his home in Chicago suburb Lyons without a federal warrant. Now, nearly six months later, he is still detained.

Immigration and civil rights attorneys argue that his arrest was not only unfair but illegal. Thanks to the video his son recorded of the arrest, Orozco has become the face of a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and ICE. Attorneys say the two government agencies violated the constitutional rights of Orozco and at least 25 other people, including one U.S. citizen, during the first week of increased immigration enforcement in the Chicago area after President Donald Trump took office.

“I’m not used to (speaking in public), it’s something that’s really awkward for me and embarrassing,” his son Eduardo Orozco told the Tribune. “But even though I feel like that, I still have to do it for my father, and because there are many other people who are supporting us.” 

The father, 47, has a clean record. Yet he is the only plaintiff left that is still in detention. One was deported. The rest have been released.

“We are angry and concerned,” his son said. “I hope the judge can see what we experienced on Sunday morning, and make a ruling in favor of my family and all the families affected by the cruelty of the ICE agents.” 

A federal judge heard arguments earlier this month for a motion filed by immigration attorneys and advocates who argued that DHS and ICE officers violated warrantless arrest policies amid sweeping arrests in the Chicago field office region in January.

The motion, filed in March of this year, focuses on 25 people who were detained, including one U.S. citizen, in the Trump administration’s highly publicized enforcement operation over the winter. In making arrests, the federal government allegedly went against both immigration laws and the Fourth Amendment, which protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government, the plaintiffs argue.

“It seems as if there are repeat violations,” said Mark Fleming of the National Immigrant Justice Center in his closing argument to the judge. “There is real concern that they are not following the law.”

Judge Jeffrey Cummings of the District Court for the Northern District of Illinois was asked by Fleming to consider whether ICE’s January arrests violated the 2022 Castañon Nava settlement agreement, which states that ICE must meet two criteria to make a warrantless arrest: probable cause that someone is in the U.S. unlawfully, and that the person is a flight risk.

Immigrant advocates say ICE ignored those standards when it detained people in January without probable cause and before warrants were filled out. As for Orozco, Fleming said that federal agents allegedly created an administrative warrant while he was handcuffed.

The Castañon Nava settlement agreement, which expired on May 13, had been the result of several ICE raids in the Chicagoland area in 2018 that the NIJC argued led to the collateral arrests of hundreds of individuals in vehicle stops and without warrants. Collateral arrests, or the detaining of individuals who are not targets, have become more common as the federal government ramps up daily quotas of people detained.

Fleming described a pattern of reckless and unlawful enforcement actions after President Trump was sworn into office and pledged to begin mass deportations in Chicago. In some cases, he said, ICE agents will carry around blank warrants.

“​​That doesn’t sit well with me,” Judge Cummings said, after asking to see a copy of the blank form.

Defense attorneys William H. Weiland and Craig Oswald defended their policies, stating that there is nothing inappropriate about the agency’s use of warrants and that ICE is entitled to continue the practice.

Fleming focused on the case of Abel Orozco, who remains detained in a detention center in Indiana despite mounting legal and community pressure for his release. 

Abel Orozco had a prior removal order, said Fleming, but only because he wanted to see his ailing father in Mexico one more time before he died. According to the motion, ICE officers were apparently looking for one of Orozco’s sons, who is decades younger but has the same name. The agents allegedly grabbed and handcuffed Abel Orozco after they saw his driver’s license. 

His son Eduardo, 26, ran outside when he heard his father screaming, “I can’t breathe … call a lawyer.” 

Eduardo Orozco began questioning the agents and demanded a warrant. The agents stayed quiet and can be seen walking away from Eduardo Orozco who began recording the interaction “knowing that something was not right,” he said. 

There were more than six agents with guns who surrounded their home and they refused to identify themselves. That’s a scene that still haunts the family. 

“They were trying to knock down the door to my house without a warrant,” Eduardo Orozco recalled. 

Weiland and Oswald defended the arrest by saying that assessing flight risk in real time can be difficult.

But the motion argues that ICE didn’t consider or document the individual’s community ties — whether Abel Orozco had a home, family, or employment. Abel Orozco’s wife has cancer, said Fleming.

Abel Orozco had just started a tree-cutting business — a dream come true, his son said. In the months since Abel Orozco’s arrest, according to Fleming, his business has floundered.

Many of the other detainees were allegedly arrested after leaving their houses for work. They were often handcuffed and put in their cars, the motion states, without being allowed to call relatives and let them know what was happening.

Plaintiffs cited two hours of security footage from a restaurant in Liberty, Missouri, showing 10 “heavily armed” federal agents who allegedly went into a restaurant and held 12 employees in booths before escorting them out and detaining them. Missouri is one of six states that the Chicago Field Office covers.

On repeated occasions, ICE misspelled names or omitted important information while filling out warrants that were “riddled with defects,” according to the motion. ICE was also delayed in its response after plaintiffs requested that it provide details on the arrests and paperwork, the motion states.

Among other actions to prevent alleged unlawful ICE arrests, the motion seeks to extend the Castañon Nava settlement agreement for three years, demand the release of Abel Orozco, mandate the reporting of all arrests since Trump took office and order ICE officers operating in the Chicago region to be retrained.

Cummings expressed that the allegations altogether seemed “troubling,” especially considering that no one “knows the magnitude of this problem.” The violations that the attorneys uncovered, he said, only came to light because families reached out to the immigrant advocacy organizations.

Cummings did not make a ruling, but said he would try to come to a resolution as soon as possible.

At a news conference after the hearing, community organizers gathered outside federal court to decry ICE’s arrest practices in January. Fleming called the ICE arrests a “parallel universe of unlawful policies” because the agency has no real method of accountability.

The result is hundreds of people being taken from neighborhoods, said Xanat Sobrevilla, of Organized Communities Against Deportations. She said that after the 2018 immigration sweeps, ICE told her organization it would implement changes.

“Since January of this year, that commitment has been blatantly broken,” she said. “We bear witness to families shattered, fathers and mothers taken from their homes.”

For Eduardo Orozco and his family, the last six months have been overwhelming and heartbreaking. They missed several mortgage payments and the turmoil has caused emotional chaos to all of the family members. 

Still, he shows up in courtrooms, news conferences and other actions against ICE because he believes his father’s story can spark change.

“We’re not just fighting for him anymore,” Eduardo Orozco said. “We’re fighting for everyone who was taken like this.”

As Judge Cummings weighs a decision that could set a precedent for how ICE operates in Chicago communities, immigrant rights advocates and families like the Orozcos wait. Not just for a ruling, but for repair by releasing Abel Orozco.

As the elder Orozco remains in detention, Eduardo now juggles fatherhood, his father’s collapsed business and caring for a sick mother, hoping to keep his family’s faith that justice will be served and that his father will be released.