In the early morning last September 30, hundreds of federal agents swarmed the South Shore Apartments, a beige brick building on Chicago’s South Side. As feds in body armor rappelled down from a Black Hawk helicopter overhead, others crashed through the building’s doors with battering rams, rounding up residents at gunpoint.
A group of burly, masked agents wearing helmets and bulletproof vests, and toting suppressor-equipped M4 rifles, moved through the hallways in a rapid, tightly organized file. Padraic Daniel Berlin, a 34-year-old Michigan native and son of a Detroit firefighter, held Yoda, his Belgian Malinois, on a leash. David Dubar Jr., a 53-year-old onetime construction worker, followed closely behind him. Their team leader, Corey Myers, a Marine veteran from the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector, checked apartment doors. Paul Delgado Jr., a standout cross-country runner in high school, was the final member of the entry team.
The four men are members of the Border Patrol Tactical Unit, or BORTAC. Based mainly out of Fort Bliss, with at least 11 detachments stationed around the United States, BORTAC and its sister unit, Border Patrol Search, Trauma and Rescue, or BORSTAR, were once reserved for desert rescues, executing high-risk warrants, conflicts with armed drug cartels, and manhunts.
Under Donald Trump, however, they have been sent into the streets of major US cities. The result is the largest known deployment of BORTAC and BORSTAR agents in US history, a fact made difficult to pin down due to the government’s secrecy around their operations. Many of the agents’ identities have remained hidden from the public. The decision to use an offensive, heavily armed paramilitary units for street-level immigration sweeps in American cities is a first—a bellwether of the Trump administration’s project to militarize domestic law enforcement operations.
Myers, Berlin, Dubar, Delgado, and their teammates seemed keyed up. The intelligence briefing they received claimed the building was controlled by Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan street gang the Trump administration categorized—despite contrary evidence amassed by its own intelligence services—as a foreign terrorist organization. Gang members were supposedly occupying the building and storing grenades, handguns, and rifles on the second floor, where a suspect with an open warrant for firearms possession lived. This intelligence was never released or substantiated, and Illinois later launched an investigation into whether the property owner had sent baseless claims to the feds. But at that moment, it didn’t matter.
At every door approached by his team, Berlin yelled, “Police! Speak to me now or I’ll send the dog!” In a second-floor unit, the BORTAC team detained one man. Further down the hall, Myers noticed “signs of forced entry” and smashed open the door. Tolulope Akinsulie, an undocumented immigrant from Nigeria, happened to be hiding in the bedroom. Without issuing a warning or verbal command, Berlin let go of Yoda’s leash and the Malinois pounced, sinking its teeth into Akinsulie’s leg as he screamed in agony. Yoda bit Akinsulie repeatedly in the leg, hip, and hands before Berlin called the dog off and his team placed the man in cuffs. Akinsulie, who was not a target of the raid and has no known history of violent crime or gang affiliation, was treated for his injuries and taken to the Broadview Processing Center to face removal proceedings.
Berlin’s actions that morning were not isolated. He was involved in at least five uses of force during Operation Midway Blitz, the Trump administration’s 2025 surge of hundreds of immigration agents into Chicago and surrounding communities. Nor were the actions of his team, according to a WIRED analysis of US government records, which appeared to escalate tensions with civilian onlookers rather than quell them. Since last year, BORTAC and BORSTAR have fronted several of the US government’s invasions of its own cities, often engaging in almost theatrical uses of force that litter newscasts and social feeds, adding a new salience to US Border Patrol Special Operations Group’s self-proclaimed status as the “tip of the spear.”
