One year ago this month, 32-year-old mechanic Wilmer Catalan-Ramirez was awoken by the sounds of ICE agents entering his house. Not that he knew at the time that they were in fact Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers–their jackets were marked with the word “police.”

The agents stood above Catalan-Ramirez and forced him out of bed with difficulty–he had been partially paralyzed months earlier in a drive-by shooting.

When Catalan-Ramirez struggled out of his bedroom and into the living room, he found four more officers who had entered his home in the Back of the Yards neighborhood that morning without a warrant or consent. The officers had come to the house earlier, only to be turned away by Catalan-Ramirez’s wife, Celene Adame, while she was taking their children to school.

When Adame returned, the officers were still there. Again, she asked them to leave, entering her house as she heard her 3-year-old son begin to cry.

Upon stepping into the apartment, Adame encountered even more officers, and she was interrogated about “guns and drugs” as the officers moved to surround her husband. The men asked Catalan-Ramirez for identification. Assuming (by the markings on their uniforms) that they were police officers, the couple gave over Catalan-Ramirez’s birth certificate and passport, exposing him as an undocumented immigrant.

The officers subsequently slammed the already injured Catalan-Ramirez to the ground, and took him to an ICE field office as his wife and son helplessly screamed after them.

“Why did you lie to me?” Adame cried after the agents in Spanish, her voice almost incoherent over the sobbing of her 3-year-old. “He’s sick!”  

Chicago is what’s known as a sanctuary city–a city in which police shouldn’t be asking about immigration status when completing law enforcement duties. In fact, a city that allows for ICE agents to masquerade as police officers in order to illegally obtain information about suspects, all based on bogus information from a faulty “gang database,” is not the haven for undocumented people that the name suggests: it’s a false sanctuary.

In the past year, Catalan-Ramirez spent ten months in detention where he was under extreme emotional distress. He was threatened with deportation by officials.  He suffered physical discomfort from–and limited medical attention for–his pre-existing and new injuries, such as the fractured shoulder given to him by ICE agents during the raid.  And he was separated from his wife and children all the while.

Stories like these should make us shake our heads. We might even tell a friend about it, if we’re feeling particularly empathetic, and return to our lives. But the reality is that for too many undocumented people in Chicago, harassment and mistreatment are not issues that can be simply scrolled past. Catalan-Ramirez’s case, although jarring, is painfully not unique.

Chicago calls itself a Sanctuary City, and for Chicago to become a true Sanctuary City, Chicago’s Welcoming City Ordinance needs to be amended to remove the four loopholes that allow Chicago’s Police Department (CPD) to share information with ICE.

The CPD can legally share information with ICE if someone: 1) has an outstanding warrant, 2) has been convicted of a felony, 3) has a pending felony charge, or 3) is a “known gang member.”

This final clause–the one about being a gang member–is how ICE defended arresting Catalan-Ramirez, as they have scores of others.

Chicago’s gang database has over one hundred thousand Chicagoans on it, and being on the database strips the accused of any privacy protections under Chicago’s sanctuary city ordinance.

But there is no way for you to know or discover if you’re on it–and no way to remove yourself from the list even if you can prove that you are not a member of a gang.

Plus the database is vastly overinclusive and often wrong in its accounts. In Catalan-Ramirez’s case, he was listed as a member of two rival gangs.

He belonged to neither.

Despite his mistreatment and time wrongly spent in detention, Catalan-Ramirez eventually gave up his right to sue the city for his injuries and other grievances–in exchange for being allowed to return to his rightful place with his family.

“Being with my children has no price,” he said.  “That’s why I agreed to the deal and to forego the lawsuit.  I know this is not right, I know they used violence against me, and I’m not okay with that, but at the end of the day, there is no price on me being with my children.”