The 13th Largest Army in World Is Unleashing Violence in Chicago
As federal agents kill and use extreme force in Chicago, their budget surges.
Sarah Lazare and Lindsay Koshgarian Photographs by Steel Brooks
If the immigration enforcement apparatus of the United States were its own national military, it would be the 13th most heavily funded in the world. This puts it higher than the national militaries of Poland, Italy, Australia, Canada, Turkey and Spain — and just below Israel.
That bloated force is due to a massive funding increase in President Donald Trump’s budget bill that went into effect October 1, and it comes as Chicagoland faces an escalation of violence from ICE and other federal agencies. Agents are tear gassing and beating protesters, raiding and ransacking communities across the area, and detaining people at homeless shelters and hospitals. They are roaming the city and surrounding suburbs in masks, sometimes in plain clothes and unmarked cars, and other times — especially near protests — in armored vehicles, wearing the militarized, camouflage uniforms that are the hallmark of soldiers.
“I think talking about this as an occupation is useful because it is so outrageous and abnormal,” says Jackson Potter, the vice president of the Chicago Teachers Union.
The $170 billion in new funding for immigration enforcement in Trump’s bill includes border control, detention and deportation, as well as funds for local law enforcement. The funds are available through September 2029, and the president’s budget request suggests that the administration expects to spend down fairly evenly over that period. On an annual basis this adds about $42.5 billion per year for immigration enforcement.
The $170 billion total includes $45 billion for expanding detention capacity, and $29.9 billion for ICE removal and enforcement (including new ICE officers and transportation costs). This brings the budget for detention facilities to about $14 billion per year, about triple the current budget.
The $14 billion annual budget for detentions alone — just a portion of the new spending — is more than the total military spending of 124 countries, including Norway, Pakistan, Denmark, Greece, and Iran. (There are 195 countries in the world, but not all of them have publicly available data about their annual military spending for the most recent year. However, recent estimates of military spending in the missing countries suggest their spending is not likely to be higher than $42.5 billion.)
“The budget shows the misplaced priorities of this administration, where they are cutting health care and cutting vital programs for people across the country, and putting all of this money into a domestic terrible force,” says Brandon Lee of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. “And it shows the cruelty that the Trump administration intends to enact on all people in the United States.”
The $14 billion annual budget for detentions is also more than Trump’s requested budget for the Labor Department ($8.6 billion), or the Environmental Protection Agency ($4.2 billion).
Since unleashing “Operation Midway Blitz” in Chicagoland on September 8, the Department of Homeland Security claims it has detained 800 people, though local organizers caution against taking these figures as fact, given the agency’s history of falsehoods. But they do say agents are increasingly using extreme force.
Masked federal agents have waged shocking violence on area residents, including last week’s ransacking of a five-story building in South Shore, a predominantly Black neighborhood of Chicago, in which agents descended in Black Hawk helicopters and pulled parents and children from their apartments in the middle of the night, some of them naked. They zip tied many, releasing some and abducting others. As Dave Byrnes and Raven Geary report for The Tribe, activists and community leaders estimate 40 people were taken into custody.
And in another incident last week, federal agents in an SUV deployed tear gas against people on a busy street near a Logan Square elementary school. A family walking by with their two-year-old was tear gassed.
Federal agents have so far shot two people in Chicagoland since the operation commenced, killing one of them: Silverio Villegas González, a 38-year-old father of two. And the agency has carried out raids, detentions and abductions throughout the city and surrounding suburbs, targeting day laborers, street vendors, domestic workers, families at the park and an alder trying to protect an individual at Humboldt Park Hospital.
Federal agents appear interested in broadcasting their aggression. There have been numerous public displays of violence, with masked, militarized forces marching downtown and kidnapping people, openly using racial profiling, taking boats down the Chicago River, and making violent incursions against protesters. The teachers union, CTU, reports a precipitous drop in school attendance, with many families too scared and traumatized to send their kids to school.
Protests at an ICE detention center in Broadview, Illinois have been met with tremendous violence, with agents firing tear gas, pepper balls and rubber bullets at protesters, as well as pushing them and dragging them on the ground. The National Lawyer’s Guild of Chicago has documented repeated incidents of federal agents pulling firearms on protesters. On Friday morning, Illinois State Police pinned in a crowd of protesters, and forcefully contained and pushed them, allowing federal agents to more easily assault and detain them.
Federal, state and local authorities arrested a total of 18 people on Friday alone, per the NLG. The role of Illinois State Police has angered numerous local organizers and community members, given Governor JB Pritzker’s pledges to oppose ICE.
“I’m protesting the kidnapping of people,” said one person at the Broadview detention center protest, speaking before the crowd was assaulted. (The individual, who was moving with the assistance of a walker, requested anonymity to protect their privacy.) “I’m here to support humanity. I’m here to support the undocumented. I think ICE is a terrorist group. I think the police that are supporting ICE are terrorists.”
In addition to the deployment of federal agents, Trump is moving to deploy 300 members of the National Guard to the Chicago area, after a previous effort failed in the face of opposition. Communities have expressed concerns about how military deployments not only terrorize immigrants, but also Black communities in Chicago, which have, too, been targeted by federal agents’ violence.
Yet, the surge in federal violence has been met by an outpouring of organizing and resistance in Chicago, where rapid response networks and know-your-rights trainers have been equipping communities with knowledge and skills to help protect residents and day laborers at hiring sites. Federal agents have been dogged by angry residents blowing whistles, telling them to leave, and warning others of their presence. Worker centers, community groups, unions and informal networks have fanned throughout the city, numerous individuals taking personal risks to their own safety to help defend their neighbors. Crowds of hundreds have flocked to community meetings and town halls about keeping neighbors safe from ICE.
“We are safer when we are in community with each other,” Miguel Alvelo Rivera, executive director of the Latino Union of Chicago, told me at one such town hall in the Albany Park neighborhood of Chicago a few weeks ago.
“We have individuals ranging from all sorts of different walks of life. We have retired seniors. We have teachers. We have college students. We have people representing so many different Chicagoans as part of these networks now, because they’re seeing the violence on their streets, they’re hearing the flash bangs on their block, and they want to do something about it. And they want to, more than anything, protect their neighbors,” says Jessica Vásquez, co-chair of Northwest Side Rapid Response and commissioner for Cook County’s 8th district.
These communities are mobilizing against one of the most well-funded forces on Earth, a result of Trump’s anti-immigrant push, abetted by bipartisan support for a more aggressive crackdown on immigrants. “This is what occupation looks like,” said Stacy Davis Gates, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, in a press statement released October 4.
She added, “This is what happens when a sitting president wages war on an American city.”
Sarah Lazare is the editor of Workday Magazine and a contributing editor for In These Times. She tweets at @sarahlazare.
