Chicago rises against Trump’s deportation regime
CHICAGO—More than 200,000 people turned out in downtown Chicago on 18 October to join the “No Kings” demonstration against the Trump regime. At one point, the march from the gathering spot through the Chicago Loop (downtown) stretched two and a half miles (4km).
The Chicago protest was part of a national effort, organised by a coalition of liberal groups, that brought as many as 7 million people—one in 50 Americans—into the street to protest Trump. Protests occurred everywhere, from the largest cities to small towns in conservative parts of the country.
Democratic politicians boosted the national effort, and the liberal MSNBC network promoted it. This was a departure from earlier national “No Kings” (in June) and “Hands Off” protests (in April), when leading Democrats kept their distance. But protesters in Chicago didn’t need prodding. The Trump administration’s attack on the city and its surrounding suburbs, beginning in September, was more than enough motivation for hundreds of thousands.
Trump ordered “Operation Midway Blitz”, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other militarised federal police forces descending on Chicago on 9 September. Trump’s racist crackdown on immigrants picked Chicago because it is a Democratic Party-dominated city, in a Democratic-dominated state, where more than one in five residents was born outside the US.
Since 9 September, Chicago has been on high alert. Each day, a battle with marauding federal agents unfolds. ICE, Border Patrol and other masked agents of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) drive through neighbourhoods in unmarked SUVs and arrest immigrants (and many citizens) going about their daily business.
Parents dropping off their kids at school. Construction and landscape workers on job sites. Day labourers looking for work at Home Depots and Menard’s (“big box” hardware stores where contractors pick up building supplies and hire casual labour). People attending church services. Individual tamaleros/as (people who make and sell tamales from street carts) or vendors at neighbourhood swap meets (a flea market for multiple vendors). Even, seemingly, random people walking down the street or waiting at bus stops.
Since the Supreme Court essentially legalised racial profiling at the Trump administration’s request, federal agents are making warrantless arrests each day. Apparently, having brown skin or speaking Spanish are the main pretexts that ICE is using for its stops and arrests. This, of course, gives the lie to Trump and his apologists who claim that they are focusing on criminals and dangerous individuals. As of 8 October, ICE had reportedly arrested 1,500 people in its Operation Midway Blitz. Even ICE admits that only about 1 percent of them have violent criminal records.
ICE agents have already killed one man, who they tried to arrest after he dropped his son off at school. ICE and its mouthpieces at the Department of Homeland Security—one node of the Trump Administration’s “Ministry of Truth”—accused Silverio Villegas González of trying to run into ICE agents with his vehicle. Subsequently, video, including body camera footage from local police department officers, exposed DHS’s story as a fabrication.
Another Border Patrol agent shot Marimar Martínez five times while she was sitting in her car behind the agent’s vehicle in the Latino working-class neighbourhood of Brighton Park. Miraculously, she escaped life-threatening injury. But, again, video footage of the incident showed that the Border Patrol—which claimed Martínez had rammed the feds’ vehicle and threatened them with a weapon—was lying about the confrontation. It’s becoming conventional wisdom among many in Chicago—activists, journalists and many everyday folks—that DHS’s statements are lying cover stories that unravel within a few hours.
Perhaps the pinnacle (so far) of the ICE theatre of cruelty was the 30 September early morning commando raid on an apartment building in the city’s South Shore neighbourhood. ICE and other federal agents stormed the building, some of them rappelling down its five stories from helicopters hovering overhead. DHS was treating a dilapidated apartment housing poor African Americans and Venezuelan migrants as a militia stronghold in wartime Iraq. And DHS filmed the assault to provide the likes of Fox News and MAGA influencers with images of “heroic agents” taking on what they said was a den for Tren de Aragua gang members.
The ICE agents marched dozens of people, in handcuffs, out of the building. They included barefoot children and adults in various states of undress. Agents racially segregated the detainees (Black people in one group, Latinos in another) before processing them. They arrested 37 people, only one of whom ICE alleges in court has any connection to a gang. And when people returned to their apartments, they found them ransacked, with doors torn off their hinges.
Because of these terror tactics, the ICE processing centre in Broadview, a small suburban town to the west of Chicago, has become a flashpoint for face-offs between protesters and federal agents. In previous periods of immigrant rights activism, the Broadview facility was a focal point for often symbolic civil disobedience actions, including politicians and clergy. With Operation Midway Blitz, hundreds have turned out regularly to protest and resist.
In response, federal agents have brutalised and tear-gassed crowds of unarmed people. In one incident that went viral, an ICE agent standing on the roof of the building fired a pepper ball into the head of Reverend David Black, a Presbyterian pastor, who was making a moral appeal to the ICE agents. This was yet another example of DHS’s gratuitous violence, as anyone watching the video could see that Black posed no threat to—indeed wasn’t even near—the agent who inflicted severe injury on him.
These repressive actions, and similar ones in city and suburban neighbourhoods, against unarmed civilians have prompted a series of federal lawsuits from immigrant rights advocates and the media against these tactics. Federal Judge Sara Ellis has issued rulings barring federal agents from using tear gas and other violent measures against demonstrators and the press. ICE has already flouted the judge’s orders.
Yet the most important story in Chicago is one of resistance. Chicago was a centre of mass protests for immigrant rights in the mid-2000s. Although the movement subsided, it produced thousands of activists and dozens of immigrant rights organisations rooted in communities across the region. As Chicago-based socialist Sharon Smith wrote about the thousands who attended the Chicago “No Kings” event:
“The demonstrations drew large numbers of people who had never attended a protest before, but also many who have already joined one of the ‘Rapid Response Networks’ that have been organized by immigrants’ rights activists, neighborhood by neighborhood, across the city and suburbs.
“These neighborhood-based networks have been around as long as ICE, but they have mushroomed since Trump took office in January—to serve the many needs of the fearful migrant population. People volunteer to help distribute copies of ‘Know your rights’ brochures in immigrant communities. They set up phone and internet hotlines to notify the network of a suspected ICE sighting; once they have verified it, they then broadcast it to the entire neighborhood. They also hand out whistle kits to everyone in the neighborhood, along with the different types of signals to use when ICE has been spotted in the area versus when ICE is attacking someone in the immediate vicinity. Those driving cars beep their horns if they see ICE goons in the area.
“Many migrants are too afraid to leave their homes to go grocery shopping, or to bring their children to school, so the network assigns volunteers to individual families to go and buy groceries, accompany their kids, and help with the other basic necessities of life.”
The activism in neighbourhoods around the city is yet another example of the fact that thousands of working people are willing to stand against the authoritarianism coming from the Trump administration in ways that elites at institutions like universities, corporations and the Democratic Party have not.
For many liberals, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, a billionaire scion of the family that owns the Hyatt hotel chain, is something of an exception to this elite capitulation. Pritzker has denounced Trump and his “lackey” Stephen Miller, the white supremacist White House domestic adviser who is thought to be the main architect of the anti-immigrant assault. Pritzker has warned federal agents of consequences if they violate Illinoisans’ civil rights.
But Pritzker’s image is mostly based on talk, rather than action. In fact, Pritzker has ordered the Illinois State Police to set up a “free speech zone” at some distance from the Broadview facility’s driveway. The state police themselves have already beaten and arrested protesters in multiple confrontations there. In other words, while Pritzker touts his support for peaceful protests against ICE, his police force is performing crowd control for ICE—allowing it to maraud throughout the Chicago area. The Democrats’ commitment to uphold the status quo renders them accomplices to Trump, rather than serious opponents.
At the time of writing, the Supreme Court is reviewing the Trump administration’s emergency appeal of a district court ruling barring the federal deployment of the National Guard to Illinois. Under a 150-year-old law, the federal government is barred from using the military for domestic law enforcement. But Trump’s order to deploy the National Guard in Illinois, following a similar deployment in Los Angeles earlier this year, is intended to usurp that authority.
By law, Illinois’ claim that Trump’s order is illegal should be a clear-cut case. But the Supreme Court has been one of chief enablers of Trump’s effort to crown himself king. So, we shouldn’t expect that the court will stand in his way. A National Guard deployment into the streets of Chicago would mark another dangerous escalation. It would require the resistance to broaden and deepen.
