Operation Midway Blitz launched in Chicago to tackle crime crisis

By M.D. Kittle | The Federalist

DHS says the new effort is in honor of Katie Abraham, who was killed in a hit-and-run car crash earlier this year.

A lot of things about Jan. 19, 2025, haunt Joe Abraham’s dreams. But one fact in particular about the way in which his 20-year-old daughter, Katie, was senselessly killed that day in a hit-and run crash keeps him up at night. 

“They didn’t just kill Katie. They killed Katie’s kids, Katie’s kids’ kids. Her legacy is no longer there. She has been stopped,” Abraham, of Glenview, Ill., told The Federalist in an interview Monday evening. 

You just can’t get past that,” the grieving father added. “Not only did she get a death sentence and we all got a life sentence, but her whole chain has been broken. And the silence [from Illinois government] is killing my ears.” 

On Monday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) smashed the silence in the name of Katie Abraham. 

‘In Honor of Katie’

The Department of Homeland Security launched Operation Midway Blitz in lawless Illinois, targeting “the criminal illegal aliens who flocked to Chicago and Illinois because they knew Governor [J.B.] Pritzker and his sanctuary policies would protect them and allow them to roam free on American streets,” according to a DHS press release. 

As The Federalist reported, Katie Abraham was pronounced dead at the scene of the January hit-and-run car crash near the campus of the University of Illinois in Urbana. A friend, 21-year-old Chloe Polzin, died from her injuries later at the hospital. 

The killer, according to police, was a previously deported illegal alien who was allegedly drunk when he slammed his SUV into the driver’s side of the vehicle Katie’s friend was driving as it was stopped at a red light. Julio Cucul-Bol, a 29-year-old Guatemalan national, was driving 78 miles per hour when his vehicle collided with the Honda Civic, Champaign State’s Attorney Julia Rietz said at the suspect’s arraignment earlier this year.

Rietz said Cucul-Bol applied the brakes about a half a second before the collision, and that he made “little to no attempt to steer out of the way” of the car filled with four college-aged students. Cucul-Bol immediately fled the scene. When U.S. Marshals ultimately apprehended him days later, he was about an hour south of Dallas, Texas, en route to the U.S. southern border, according to federal law enforcement officials. He had been using falsified identification papers, authorities said.

“DHS is launching Operation Midway Blitz in honor of Katie Abraham who was killed in Illinois by a criminal illegal alien who should have never been in our country,” Assistant DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in the press release. “This operation will target the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens in Chicago.”  

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