"I Wish I Had Made More of a Ruckus"
Ally Henny, a hospital chaplain in Chicago, confronted a team of ICE agents attempting to abduct a Latino worker off the street in broad daylight this week on the city's southeast side.
CHICAGO, IL. — A hospital chaplain was shoved by a federal immigration agent Tuesday morning after she stepped into the street to intervene when ICE agents seized an unidentified Latino man in the South Shore neighborhood — and she’s not sorry she did it.
Ally Henny, a chaplain at a Chicago hospital and a religious leader on the city’s southeast side, told Migrant Insider she was preparing to leave for work around 6:40 a.m. when she heard a man’s voice cut through the morning quiet.
“Ayuda.”
She knew enough Spanish to know what it meant.
“You Are Not the Chicago Police”
Henny said she looked down the street and saw flashing lights and an unmarked black car. The agents on the scene were wearing tactical vests marked “POLICE” — but she knew immediately they weren’t CPD.
“I started yelling, ‘You are not the Chicago Police,’” she told Migrant Insider. She began calling out “ICE, ICE, ICE” to warn the neighborhood.
She said she asked one of the agents what the man had done. One told her to move. Another said they had a warrant. Then a third agent ran toward her.
“A third ICE agent ran over and tried to shove me to the ground,” she said. Watch a bystander video of the encounter here:
Henny and her husband captured the incident on two separate videos, which she provided to Migrant Insider.
“I Knew It Could Happen to Me Too”
Henny, who is Black, said her decision to intervene was as personal as it was moral.
“Because I know it could happen to me too,” she said. “I’m an African American woman. This could very easily happen to me. If it happened to me, I would hope that my neighbors would step up and say something.”
She didn’t flinch in her assessment of the administration behind the agents who shoved her.
“I think it’s wrong that the Trump administration is going after migrants,” she said. “I think that it’s wrong the ways that the Trump administration is treating my neighbors. And I’m not going to stand for it.”
When asked what she wished she had done differently, Henny had one regret — and it wasn’t stepping in.
“I wish I had made more of a ruckus than I did, even after ol’ boy put his hands on me,” she said. “There were people outside watching and I would have tried to get those people to rally, intervene, or react.”
South Shore Has Seen This Before
Tuesday morning’s confrontation did not happen in a vacuum. Henny lives approximately a mile from the M75 apartments, which were raided by federal immigration agents last year.
South Shore is one of several Chicago neighborhoods that have been repeatedly swept during Operation Midway Blitz — the DHS-branded enforcement campaign that began in September 2025 and produced an estimated 1,600 arrests, with roughly 81 percent of those detained carrying no prior criminal convictions, according to data later analyzed by The Marshall Project.
The operation brought together ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations, ICE Homeland Security Investigations, CBP tactical units, and U.S. Marshals task forces — often operating from unmarked vehicles with mixed insignia, the same configuration Henny described encountering on her block Tuesday morning.
Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker created the Illinois Accountability Commission in October 2025 specifically to investigate federal immigration enforcement conduct during the Blitz. The commission, chaired by former federal judge Rubén Castillo, has since conducted 16 independent investigations and reviewed hundreds of hours of video, including body-cam footage of violent arrests in Evanston and the shooting of Chicago resident Marimar Martinez, who was shot five times by federal officers last fall.
A federal judge in February 2026 ordered the release of four individuals as test cases out of 615 people identified as likely having been arrested without proper warrants during the Blitz — in possible violation of the Castañon Nava consent decree, which limits ICE’s authority to conduct warrantless vehicle stops and collateral arrests across six Midwestern states.
Despite all of it, as Chicago alderpersons have been warning residents in ward-level briefings: deportation operations in the city remain ongoing.
The identity of the man taken from Henny’s block Tuesday morning has not yet been confirmed. Migrant Insider is continuing to report.
“I just knew a man was crying for help,” Henny said, “and so I tried to help.”
She had one message for the agents who put their hands on her.
“I hope the ICE agents feel really bad for what they did.”
Migrant Insider has been the most independent news outlet in the Washington press corps since we launched in October, 2024. If you’ve read this far, please consider supporting us by subscribing to the site:
Ally Henny is a brilliant, righteous activist and writer whom I've been following for a while. She wrote "I Won't Shut Up", so it doesn't surprise me that she'd follow her principles in a situation like this.
Thank you for this information.
we need to have these voices heard that are stepping up for people being abused!