CHICAGO — Just before noon on a sunny Friday earlier this month, federal immigration agents threw tear gas canisters onto a busy Chicago street, just outside of an elementary school and a children’s play cafe.

Parents, teachers and caregivers rushed to shield children and have been grappling ever since with how to protect them when masked men in unmarked SUVs show up unannounced in neighborhoods across this city.

A half-dozen toddlers were sitting in the window of the Luna y Cielo Play Cafe, where children learn Spanish as they play, on Oct. 3 when a white SUV rolled down their street in Logan Square, a historically Hispanic neighborhood that’s been steadily gentrifying for years.

Cafe owner Vanessa Aguirre-Ávalos ran outside to see what was happening, as the children’s nannies hustled

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