“They’re Not Welcome”: How Chicago Residents Are Resisting Trump’s ICE Invasion of the City

Federal agents have made their presence felt throughout the city, to a chilling effect. On a recent Sunday afternoon, groups of armed border patrol agents marched through downtown Chicago, patrolling several popular spots and tourist destinations such as Millennium Park, where they stopped a family of four, including a toddler, and took them away in a white van. (The mother and children were later released, but the father is in a federal detention facility in Indiana.)

ICE agents are snatching people out of their cars on the street, showing up at schools, workplaces, day care centers and businesses. Last weekend, after word went out that ICE agents detained two men at a Home Depot in Evanston, just north of Chicago, the local youth soccer league, which plays at a park just down the street, sent out a notification to families saying, ​“If you do not feel safe playing your soccer game today, do not go!”

There is a pervasive sense across the city that ICE agents could be anywhere. People are afraid. The Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights is getting more calls to its family support service than ever before in the organization’s history. Callers to the multilingual hotline are seeking legal advice and asking for help finding loved ones who have disappeared.

Schools and churches are on high alert. A priest at a largely Latino Catholic parish in my neighborhood of Rogers Park delivered an unusual warning to his parishioners during a recent Sunday mass, urging them to leave cautiously because immigration officers were reportedly in the area. Several schools have gone into lockdown, following active shooter-style protocols.

Last week, ICE agents arrested four people, including a tamalera (tamale vendor) outside of the local Walgreens, my family pharmacy. The other arrests were made a few blocks south, on the corner of Clark and Lunt. Last weekend, over 400 people in the neighborhood gathered on that corner to protest those arrests for three hours.

“This corner is a crime scene,” said Louise LeBourgeois, a 61-year-old artist and resident of the neighborhood. ​“ICE committed a crime here. And the whole neighborhood has reclaimed and cleansed the energy of that crime.” This sentiment is widespread. It’s not uncommon to hear people refer to ICE ​“abducting” or ​“kidnapping” immigrants, not merely ​“arresting” or ​“detaining” them.

The crowd chanted ​“No hate, no fear — immigrants are welcome here”; ​“Get up, get down — Chicago is an immigrant town”; ​“Hands off Chicago — protect Rogers Park”; and, in the staccato cadence of the well-worn chant ​“This is what democracy looks like,” ​“This. Is. What. A-MER-i-ca. Looks. Like.”

Our far North Side neighborhood is one of the most diverse and multilingual, not only in Chicago, but in the United States. More than 80 languages are spoken here. One of the neighborhood’s high schools, Sullivan, has a long history as a home to immigrant and refugee students, and was the subject of the 2021 book Refugee High: Coming of Age in America by the journalist Elly Fishman. My father, a child of immigrants, attended Sullivan in the early 1940s. Another member of my family, also a child of immigrants, is on the staff of the school today, working with special education students.

So the chant ​“This is what America looks like” had a powerful resonance in this neighborhood with deep immigrant roots, and with the diverse assembled crowd. Several demonstrators wore hoodies adorned with the words ​“Raised by immigrants. The children of those who turned nothing into something.” People held signs that read “‘Love thy neighbor.’ Note the full stop.” and ​“Fuck ICE. No human is illegal.”

There was a palpable emotional intensity on the street. Virtually every car that drove by over those three hours honked in support of the rally. It was hard to hear anything over the sound of the horns and chants. Several drivers rolled down their windows and raised their fists. One woman pulled over and asked me what was going on. When I told her what had happened two days prior, she expressed dismay and said she was with the demonstrators.

Protect Rogers Park, the group that organized the rally, is a rapid-response network that monitors ICE activity in the neighborhood. Members share real-time updates via Signal to let one another know where ICE vehicles or agents have been spotted. Members show up as quickly as they can get there, blow whistles to alert neighbors of imminent danger and document any encounters with federal agents on their phones. The group offers online training sessions in ICE monitoring and understanding people’s legal rights when dealing with federal agents.

“We’ve had at least 500 people in our online training sessions,” Protect Rogers Park organizer Marissa Graciosa recently told Block Club Chicago, which has become a go-to online source for neighborhood-level news in Chicago, especially since the onset of ​“Operation Midway Blitz” in September. That number has now doubled. The last training had over 1,000 people sign up. And Protect Rogers Park is just one of several organizations leading training sessions and mobilizing people.

The recording of encounters with federal agents is crucial, given that ICE’s own account of events tends to differ sharply from what many people have witnessed on the ground. Organizers stress the need to have direct footage that contradicts the claims of ICE, which maintains that its agents have committed no abuses or used excessive force.

Protect Rogers Park also coordinates response teams stationed outside of neighborhood schools as children are dropped off and picked up, when families feel particularly vulnerable because of the fixed schedule and known locations. Many immigrant parents in Chicago are afraid to send their children to school. Some are keeping their kids home. Stories abound of children hugging their parents extra tightly before leaving for school, in case their parents are taken away during the school day and they aren’t there when the kids get home.

We don’t have to speculate about the impact of this climate of fear on students. ​“Protecting the American People from Invasion,” an executive order that Trump signed on the first day of his first term, in 2017, effectively turned state and local police around the country into arms of ICE. The consequences were immediate. A study of 55 counties found that this program to ​“enhance collaboration” between federal and local levels reduced the Latino student population by 10% in just two years.

“Many children experienced heightened levels of stress and anxiety, had difficulty concentrating, and needed more frequent referrals to specialists,” Adam Goodman, an associate professor of history at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), wrote in his 2020 book The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Expelling Immigrants. ​“They also struggled with tardiness, absences, and sleep problems,” Goodman noted.

The city’s public school system — Chicago Public Schools (CPS) — does not collaborate with federal immigration agencies and recently expanded its 24-hour Student Safety Center with a dedicated team that handles issues related to the ICE crackdown. CPS also has a Safe Passage program, offering adult accompaniment for students as they get to and from school. The adults, who sport brightly colored vests emblazoned with ​“CPS Safe Passage,” are employed by local community-based organizations.

Protect Rogers Park’s response teams, in contrast, are all-volunteer and their mission is more directly political. I recently went to the school down the street from where I live to observe them in action. The first response team member I encountered was Matt Butz, a 43-year-old who works in AI program management for a life sciences company. When I asked him how long he has been involved with Protect Rogers Park, he told me, ​“48 hours.”

I asked him what motivated him to plug in. ​“I don’t know where to put this rage I feel,” he said, referring to the ICE crackdown and the Trump administration’s threats to deploy the National Guard to Chicago. ​“This has saturated all aspects of life in Chicago,” Butz said. ​“Following the news — local news, social media, footage of ICE encounters — I felt like I was going to burst,” he said.

“I want the ICE agents to know they’re not welcome, I want them to have a hellish experience,” he said. Unlike members of the National Guard, who didn’t enlist thinking they would be deployed on the streets of U.S. cities, he said, ​“ICE agents signed up for this — to terrorize people, to terrorize the community. They are personally accountable. They are the phalanx of this evil. I hope they’re made to feel ashamed about their participation in this chapter of American history.”

Butz said his studies in Russian history and 20^th-century totalitarianism inform how he thinks about the current moment in the United States. ​“I see all the hallmarks,” he said. He also mentioned the book How Democracies Die by the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. ​“Those boxes are being checked. I almost can’t believe this is happening in this country.”

Patricia Caswell-Evans, a 71-year-old crossing guard at the school, echoed this sentiment. ​“I’m horrified,” she said. ​“I never thought I would see this happen in my lifetime. I thought we had checks and balances. I thought we had laws.”

I asked her if she saw any changes among the students at the school, as someone who interacts with them day in and day out. ​“They’re anxious. They’re nervous. They’re not the same,” she said. ​“They’re worried.”

For his part, Butz plans to keep showing up as part of the response team. ​“I’m going to keep watching, document them, confront them, yell, to beat the drum very loudly.”

What ICE and CBP are doing now — not just in Chicago but in multiple U.S. cities — is extreme but not without precedent, as Goodman shows in painstaking detail in The Deportation Machine. And yet, ​“What’s happening today is different in important ways,” he said. ​“To give one example: More people are organizing and standing in solidarity with immigrants than ever before.”

This is on full display throughout Chicago today. And not only through organized channels like Protect Rogers Park and its counterparts in other neighborhoods. Much of the response to ICE stopping and grabbing people off the streets is spontaneous. Since the launch of ​“Operation Midway Blitz” in September, people have been confronting ICE agents on their blocks and in their neighborhoods, whenever and wherever they happen to encounter them, on a daily basis. 

“Communities are being forced to think differently about safety and providing safety to each other,” said Xanat Sobrevilla, an organizer with Organized Communities Against Deportations (OCAD). Those networks of support ​“have been the sole reason many of these disappearances are not going unnoticed,” she said. ​“Violations are being documented and families at least know who may have taken them.”

Trump all but declared war on Chicago with his ​“Chipocalypse Now” meme and Truth Social post of Sept. 6, which featured an AI image of himself as the fictional Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore (played by Robert Duvall) from Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film ​“Apocalypse Now.” The image included the words ​“I love the smell of deportations in the morning,” a paraphrase of Kilgore’s famous line ​“I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” followed by a scarcely veiled threat: ​“Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR” (all caps in original, followed by three helicopter symbols).

This was two days before ​“Operation Midway Blitz” was announced, and thus before a single protest against federal agents in Chicago. Yet the U.S. president insists that Chicago is a ​“war zone.” The political scientist Sanford Schram, author of the forthcoming book The Trajectory of Trumpism, sees an ideological sleight of hand at play here. ​“Trump deploys the military to quell protests in a way that seemingly seeks to incite the very violence it supposedly seeks to put down,” Schram writes. ​“That way he can create the reality he is seeking to establish to justify his extremist actions.”

On a recent episode of The Political Scene podcast, the journalist Evan Osnos made a similar observation. He noted that, in his recent address to the generals and admirals he summoned to Quantico, Virginia, self-declared ​“Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth used the military phrase ​“move out and draw fire,” something he would have learned as a young officer. ​“It means you mobilize,” Osnos said, ​“you get moving as a unit and then you draw fire from the other side, from the enemy, so as to … generate the conflict, to essentially hasten the events that you expect.”

“In a sense,” Osnos added, ​“what you see happening right now is the Trump administration is moving out and drawing fire in American cities, trying to elicit the very conflict that they believe will provide the predicate on which to then take the political steps to establish a greater sense of emergency, the political architecture of emergency.”

The Trump administration is currently attempting to deploy National Guard troops on the streets of Chicago. The governor of Illinois, JB Pritzker, is mounting a robust legal and rhetorical resistance to those designs — which itself serves as a major irritant to Trump, who seems borderline obsessed with Pritzker and has suggested that he and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, who has also resisted Trump’s efforts, should be ​“in jail.”

Whatever happens next, here in Chicago’s neighborhoods people are out on the streets, mobilizing to support their immigrant neighbors and preparing for the long road ahead.

This story was originally posted at New Lines Magazine.