Trepidation, Defiance and Déjà Vu Mark Mexican Independence Day in Chicago

And while Mexican Independence Day festivities have begun in the Chicagoland area — there are several planned for Sunday as we near the anniversary date of Sept. 16 — organizers and residents have been, and are, largely moving forward with a mix of trepidation and defiance.

In some cases, organizers have canceled events as the Trump administration has recently threatened and attacked the area.

Trump appears to no longer be sending the National Guard to Chicago, at least for now (saying he is pivoting to Memphis), but Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers still appear to be intensifying their operations in the area.

There were two major assaults on Chicagoland residents on Friday. In one, an ICE officer shot and killed an undocumented man, Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, after a traffic stop in the suburb of Franklin Park. In another, ICE agents abducted a Chicago man, Willian Gimenez, who is suing off-duty Chicago police officers for abusing day laborers.

At a news conference about Gimenez’s abduction on Saturday morning, Congresswoman Delia Ramirez said: ​“The Department of Homeland Security has become the department of state terror.”

Organizers of the opening Mexican Independence Day parade, which took place on Saturday, September 6 in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood, prepared contingencies and took precautions for an assault by ICE officers in part by distributing informational Know-Your-Rights cards and having volunteers who were on the lookout for immigration officers and carried whistles in case they spotted them.

Mexican American Illinois Congressman Jesus ​“Chuy” Garcia marched in the Pilsen parade and, speaking to a television reporter, noted, ​“The important thing is that they’ve held it, they’re not intimidated, and we’re showing who we are and celebrating our history, our culture, and our traditions.”

But not all of the celebrations are happening. The main downtown event at Grant Park, ​“El Grito,” held for the first time just last year, was supposed to be held this weekend, on Sept. 13 – 14, and was officially postponed. Other, smaller events in surrounding suburbs, including Dia de los Muertos events that take place in late October or early November, may also be canceled because some organizers are worried that immigration officials will take advantage of the public gatherings to arrest and detain anyone suspected of being undocumented.

Those fears are not unreasonable given that such scapegoating and repression of Mexican immigrants in Chicago and throughout the United States has occurred repeatedly in the past. Officials have often initiated raids and roundups during periods of economic downturn, such as during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when the federal government deported some half a million people, including legal immigrants and even U.S. citizens.

In 1954, officials with Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) initiated the Chicago phase of the disgracefully named ​“Operation Wetback,” an effort to round up and deport undocumented Mexican immigrants across the nation. The timing of the Chicago phase intentionally coincided with Mexican Independence Day celebrations on September 16, 1954. Ultimately, the INS removed some one million people across the country.

At the time, the city’s Mexican and Puerto Rican populations were already experiencing the sting of negative media coverage, when both groups were maligned in the local press as, among other things, criminals and welfare burdens.

Just as today, community leaders organized to fight back and defend themselves. But by the time of the September raids in 1954, some immigrants were simply resigned to turning themselves in at federal offices in downtown Chicago. Ironically, however, these roundups took place at the same time the federal government was annually contracting tens of thousands of Mexican laborers to perform temporary work under the infamous Bracero Program.

This contradiction – and the ongoing use of guest workers – affirms the continuing reality that United States employers have regularly recruited cheap labor as needed, but then forcefully removed people at will when politically expedient.

During the economic downturn of the 1970s, immigration officials again descended on Chicago workplaces, movie theaters, and even churches, in search of suspected undocumented immigrants. Priests insisted that immigration officers respect the sanctity of church spaces, and as result, agents waited outside of churches to capture people leaving Sunday mass.

But as the border became more difficult to cross after passages of the Eilberg Act in 1976 and the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986, immigrants have established more permanent roots and deep community ties. They have formed families and have been less willing to abandon the United States. In the mid-2000s, when Congress considered the punitive Sensenbrenner bill, local immigrants such as Elvira Arellano and Flor Crisostomo became national figures for taking sanctuary and resisting deportation as long as they could.

For months, immigrant rights activists have distributed Know-Your-Rights toolkits, and vowed to protect Chicago’s diverse immigrant communities in the face of repressive enforcement.

Trump set his eyes on Chicago as his next target after a 30-day ​“takeover” of Washington D.C., which expired last week, though National Guard troops will reportedly remain there through Nov. 30.

A swell of Chicago’s community and justice groups, as well as Governor J.B. Pritzker, Mayor Brandon Johnson, and other leaders, said they would not kowtow to Trump or his regime’s threats, even as the administration capitalized on this year’s Independence Day celebrations to spread terror and promote ​“self-deportation.”

In a guest essay for the New York Times, Johnson claimed the National Guard ​“will not and cannot” address Chicagoans’ true needs.

“If President Trump had listened to the city’s leaders, he would recognize that Chicago just experienced record-low homicide numbers, making this the safest summer since the 1960s,” Johnson wrote, ​“a result of effective collaboration between communities and law enforcement.”

Stacy Davis Gates, president of the Chicago Teachers’ Union, echoed Johnson’s sentiment in a recent statement, saying that ​“for weeks, the people of Chicago have made it clear that we do not need federal agents in our city, whether that is to separate immigrant families or racially profile in our Black neighborhoods.”

The Trump administration launched so-called ​“Operation Midway Blitz” on Sept. 8 to increase the number of ICE officers in Chicago. Trump also cavalierly called for a ​“Chipocalypse,” mockingly referencing the film Apocalypse Now, with his usual poor taste. 

The cynical timing of it all is quite revealing. 

As in decades past, our nation’s broken immigration system is revealing its dysfunction. It relies on vulnerable immigrants to sustain our economy and maximize profits, exploits that labor when needed, then just as readily expels it on demand. 

While such practices are not new, Trump’s policies seem particularly cruel and vindictive. And with police and federal authorities largely acting with impunity around racial and ethnic profiling, the apprehension and outrage among Chicago’s Latino communities is understandable.

Even more concerning, perhaps, is that the Trump administration is making other authoritarian displays of power, defying laws and norms, and unleashing a stream of fascist policies. 

And for those who are not alarmed by these most recent immigration raids, they may change their minds as Trump’s egregious violations of constitutional rights more directly reach U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents

Jane Houseal contributed to this article.