The day that the federal immigration agents raided his home, Leo Feler was hundreds of miles away in Canada. He said there was no time to think, much less juggle his emotions. He was just moving.
“I was talking to my assistant here in Chicago, and I asked them, get me any flight, any flight going back to Chicago,” he said. “There was still so much going on.”
He was still fielding calls from reporters as his plane home pushed back from the gate, he said. A flight attendant saw that “there was something going on.” So did the person seated next to him.
“As soon as I hung up, she put her arms around me,” he said. “And that’s the moment where I started crying. I couldn’t do anything.”
The next week was Halloween. Agents were tearing through other parts of the city and suburbs like Edison Park and Evanston, but on Feler’s block in Lakeview, everyone’s mind was still on Oct. 24. Feler lost count of how many neighbors stopped by to check in and offer hugs.
Someone else hosted a drinks gathering for the block, which Feler said is home to attorneys from “basically every major law firm.” That meant that some neighbors had expansive resources to share and “gave $1,000 without batting an eye” to support the legal costs for the construction worker detained during the raid on Feler’s home.
And it turned that Halloween week get-together into something of an impromptu legal workshop: “We all went through the legal theories behind what happened, what’s wrong, what can I do about it.”
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People from Feler’s professional life wanted to offer support, too. Feler is an economist, and said his colleagues immediately reached out to wish him well and consider “if we can research what the impact of stuff like this is on the construction industry. Or on spending of immigrants or on the economies of Chicago, of Minneapolis and Charlotte.”
Feler’s house is the one that was raided, and his name is the only name on the lawsuit against the agents and the government. But he could take that step, he said, because he had neighbors, friends and colleagues backing him up.
“You often get yourself into situations where you think, ‘How am I ever going to be able to deal with this?'” he said. “And then I look back and I’m like, OK, I guess I was able to deal with this. I realized that I live in a very privileged neighborhood where we can get that kind of support.”