US ICE raids - two Americans in New Zealand reflect on the immigration crackdown in their hometowns

My husband is a Kiwi.

He moved to the U.S. in 2018, and he was there on a green card, and that was via our relationship.

So there's lots of changes and statuses that we had to file for and things like that.

And with the ICE raids, that was one of the huge reasons that we came back here.

We lived outside of Chicago, and it got very, very close to home.

When I say very close, I mean I had heard stories within a 10-mile radius of people just being swooped out while taking out the

trash.

In the beginning, the administration's focus was people already in criminal custody.

But in June 2025, the White House deputy chief of staff changed tack, telling ICE to just go out there and arrest illegal aliens.

It just got really intense and scary for us, especially with his immigration status.

He had applied for a change in status back in, I guess it would have been 2021 and they extended his visa for four years and it was a pending status and we never heard back from them.

So we kind of were just in like an ambiguous place.

And so that felt extremely scary, um, to be there to even leave because we didn't know, you know, we had to fly out of Chicago.

So we didn't know what would happen when we got to the airport or anything like that, or when he presented his passport without, you know, having anything that says he's currently

there legally.

It was early 2025 when Mandy and her husband started talking about leaving.

All of his paperwork went out of date this past October.

So we felt like we had some time Eventually, I think it was middle October that we were like, we just have to go and we just have to buy tickets and go.

At the time they left, Chicago was the focal point for ICE action.

3,800 people were detained and nearly 2,500 were deported as part of Operation Midway Blitz, which largely targeted Mexican, Central and South Americans there.