Chicago’s fightback against Trump’s deportation machine

The administration of US President Donald Trump launched a new wave of raids, arrests and harassment of immigrant communities in Chicago at the beginning of September. The ongoing attack, dubbed Operation Midway Blitz, follows the pattern of previous escalations in Los Angeles and Washington, DC: a campaign of shock and awe unleashed alongside de facto impunity for a range of abuses by agents from the Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other federal agencies.

At the same time, community resistance to the attacks has grown into one of the main fronts against Trump’s agenda, as people find creative and inspiring ways to protect their neighbours and fight back. Chicago resident and member of the Tempest Collective brian bean has been part of rapid response networks to obstruct the federal operations in the city. They spoke to Brendan Stanton over Zoom on 13 November about the impact of Trump’s escalation operation and the resistance to it. This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

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What has been the day-to-day experience in Chicago during this blitz?

In many neighbourhoods, there are continual encounters with these agents. It is ICE, Border Patrol and DHS driving around, raiding workplaces and grabbing people off the streets. There is a nearly constant presence of guys in SUVs masked up, with flak jackets and weapons, on the hunt. There have been military-style raids, like at the apartments on the South Side. They basically raided an entire apartment complex, took out kids and zip-tied them and had them standing on the side of the road.

More routine raids happen at workplaces and houses all the time. Last week, two agents went into a daycare centre, grabbed a worker and smashed her against the glass door. They brutally arrested her while the children watched on. There is disproportionate targeting of Latinx neighbourhoods and more diverse neighbourhoods with a higher density of immigrants, like where I live. You’re certainly not seeing the same raids in the fancy high-rises downtown.

But at the same time, there has been activity in neighbourhoods that has been a bit surprising. ICE agents have been rolling through regularly in some more affluent areas and targeting people there as well, like where the daycare centre raid happened. While there’s a disproportionate focus on Brown, Black and immigrant neighbourhoods, the breadth of the scale of the attacks means they seep into other places as well.

During raids, people stand up to confront agents and stand up for their neighbours, and the agents routinely respond with tear gas on residential streets, even outside an elementary school and a Halloween parade. Suburbs have also become a site of struggle, specifically in Broadview at the ICE detention facility, where the kidnapped people are taken. There has been an almost daily street fight in front of this prison. At a minimum, people stand as witnesses against the kidnappings. At a maximum, they’re trying to stop the kidnappings with civil disobedience.

When protesters sit down to block the ICE vans, agents and the state police in military-style armour attack them with pepper bullets, copious tear gas and all sorts of other riot weapons. The immigration regime has created a constant presence of militarised terror to confront resistance at this centre.

Who is leading these raids?

Border Patrol is at the forefront of these attacks, and they are more paramilitary than ICE agents, who are usually in plain clothes, although with masks and flak jackets. Operations use several agencies, with Border Patrol at the head coordinating with DHS, ICE, the FBI and even the ATF—the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Gregory Bovino is the leader of the operation. He’s the same intensely right-wing commander in Border Patrol who directed the Los Angeles escalation, and he’s been intent on making it a spectacle. Bovino has a film crew follow him around, making videos depicting these Border Patrol and ICE agents as some sort of war heroes. His team produces segments with dramatic music as the agents brutally arrest people and suppress protests.

A few weeks into his operation, there was a moment outside Broadview when protesters were not being particularly antagonistic—just standing on the side of the road. All of a sudden, Border Patrol agents came out in heavy military gear with Bovino at the head—the only person without a helmet on. Three guys with cameras surrounded him, before he gestured in this dramatic way, and the agents just charged at the demonstrators. They pushed people back and arrested a couple of people who were not really doing anything, just to make a movie, like an advertisement, for the operation.

You can see how it’s also a political escalation, targeted at “blue” cities with Democratic Party leadership and any semblance of progressive politics. The videos are designed to create the fiction of a war between supposedly brave federal agents and dangerous, faceless “antifa” protesters. It’s about promoting a narrative that these cities are unmanageable bastions of riotous activity that require the strong man Trump to regulate them.

What is the relationship between federal agents and local police?

Chicago is a sanctuary city and a sanctuary state, and so, by law, the Chicago Police Department (CPD) is not supposed to assist with immigration enforcement—nor stop it. On the ground, it appears that the police are taking a hands-off approach and not aiding the raids themselves. That being said, when ICE agents are met with protests, they claim things are out of control, and they call in the CPD to do crowd control.

For instance, last week, Border Patrol agent Charles Exum shot a woman, Marimar Martinez, and even bragged about it. (He texted friends: “I fired 5 rounds, and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book, boys.”). A couple of months before, Border Patrol shot and killed Silverio Vallega Gonzalez, and provided dubious information about the circumstances of his death. These tragedies triggered immediate protests, and Border Patrol then called in the Chicago Police to do crowd control, or what we call suppressing the protest.

Additionally, at the Broadview facility, [Illinois Governor] J.B. Pritzker consistently deploys state police to protect ICE and the Border Patrol operations. At daily protests against the kidnapping of community members, protesters are confronted by State Police with four-foot-long wooden batons, who mete out violence and random arrests. Pritzker is a Democratic governor positioning himself to run in the next presidential election. Many liberals would say he has put himself forward as a face of resistance and spoken very strongly against Trump and against the ICE escalation in Chicago. But, in reality, he’s a billionaire who runs the state as a billionaire would. His big words and a legal fight against Trump come at the same time his state police are at Broadview beating and arresting protesters, trying to suppress the movement, every day.

What has resistance against the attacks looked like?

There have been large demonstrations like the No Kings march and semi-regular protests against ICE downtown. However, the more exciting and hopeful form of resistance has been a flowering of community rapid response networks. Most areas of the city have self-organised groups of neighbours coordinating to respond to immigration enforcement activity—and these networks are massive. In my neighbourhood, for instance, the rapid-response Signal group actually reached its membership limit. I’ve never seen that before.

People in these networks patrol areas with vulnerable people, watch for suspicious activity and quickly share information about where agents are. They blow whistles and yell at agents, sometimes even physically confronting them to prevent them from kidnapping people off the streets.

Neighbours are getting bold and creative. Some found immigration agents using alleyways to get around; they blocked their movement with dumpsters. People just get in their faces and yell “fascists” over and over again, disrupting their ability to carry out operations. In my neighbourhood, someone on a bicycle confronted a truck full of ICE officers with what he called “an angry mob” behind him—and ran them off the street. In every neighbourhood in the city, people are coming out of their houses in bathrobes to stand in front of ICE cars to stop them. And this has happened in other places, too.

Who is organising all this resistance?

The wide range of networks are organised differently, many by local community members, though some grew from existing grassroots networks. I know of at least one started by a left-wing alderperson [city councillor]. The citywide coordination feels a little bit lacking. These neighbourhoods have people communicating, connecting and fighting at a local level, but there doesn’t seem to be a sense of how that connects up to the bigger fight. It is an organisational challenge and also a product of the moment in which there’s such a surge of immigration enforcement activity that people are responding to.

Whistles are becoming ubiquitous symbols of resistance. People will wear them as a sign to say, “I’m here to protect and defend my neighbours”. So, when ICE shows up, people start blowing these whistles, and instead of running away from them, other people usually run towards the agents. People are showing a change in consciousness and increased confidence in what they can do collectively.

During the first major attacks in my neighbourhood, ICE grabbed a street vendor, and 300 people protested in response. On a random street corner—not where protests normally occur—hundreds of people defiantly chanted, “No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here!” High schoolers had a massive walkout after there was ICE activity near their school in Little Village. Two days after the childcare worker was kidnapped, hundreds were demonstrating in front of the daycare centre. Yesterday, I unexpectedly ran into a protest at a Target store in response to a raid there.

The city is full of continual small manifestations of support for immigrant communities and resistance to ICE. More people are unafraid and are willing to stand up to them.

Has there been a backlash to the protests from right-wing groups?

Not of any notable frequency. The massive amount of support for people mobilising against the ICE escalation has meant any attempts by right-wing or pro-MAGA people have not been noticeable—aside from the police and immigration agents, of course.

That fact is interesting because a couple of years ago, [Texas Governor] Greg Abbott grabbed busloads of desperate people, including many Venezuelans, at the border in Texas and dropped them off in the middle of Chicago. This was part of an attempt to provoke a political crisis in blue [Democratic Party-run] cities, and it fostered tense divisions even within the immigrant community. Some migrants were saying that these people broke the law and did not deserve support. Right-wing media amplified these messages, intent on stoking divisions between these communities and between Black and Brown Chicago more broadly.

All of that was pushed onto the back burner by the enormity of the ICE attack and the dramatically increased sense of solidarity in the fight against it. In neighbourhoods that had these simmering tensions, people are now organising and mobilising to defend their neighbours.

The attacks target Democratic Party-run cities. And more of Trump’s recent rhetoric has been about attacking what he calls “the radical left”. Is this anti-left tilt coming out in attacks on the ground?

The reach of the activity in Chicago is so broad that it does not seem like a specific attack on any left organisation right now. The general activity is so broad and slapdash that it does not really feel like an attack on the left, but rather an attempt to create a general atmosphere of terror. At the same time, they did target and grab notable left-winger Eman Abdelhadi at a protest after an online campaign against her by the right.

Overall, it’s like the Trump administration is showing the brute force of the federal state to show domination and to intimidate in a very Trumpian way. They are trying to force the people of Chicago, even Mayor Brandon Johnson, to do exactly what they want or face dire consequences. You see it with the sabre-rattling about the National Guard, which eventually came, but they still haven’t been deployed from their suburban base.

The method Trump is taking is to throw a bunch of completely wild things at the wall—some stick, others don’t, but then he just moves on to the next thing. So, people are off balance due to the constant changes from this autocratic leader, and it’s a challenge to organise as things change rapidly. We are seeing a far more focused fight back against ICE in Chicago.

Mayor Brandon Johnson recently called for a general strike. As cynical as that may have been, have organised workers been part of the resistance?

He’s reflecting the resistance already occurring. The notion of a general strike is an initiative of May Day Strong, a coalition of community organisations and labour unions. It aims to build a labour resistance against Trump that can hopefully culminate in a general strike. It’s hard to know if it will get there. We have a long way to go in the United States for that to be possible, but I think for anyone within the labour movement to have that as an aspiration—not just giving press conferences and legal injunctions—is really important. I think Brandon Johnson saying that helps more people know about it, but he will not be the person to make it happen.

I will say that the schools have established themselves as safe places for immigrant families pretty much across the board, and educators have basically said that ICE will not be allowed in schools. There were a couple of minor instances in which ICE attempted to enter schools, and the Chicago Teachers Union helped initiate a quick response that forced ICE to leave. Since then, keeping schools off limits to ICE has had everything to do with CTU and the politics of struggle that they have carried out.

Where do you think the movement against ICE and the broader movement against Trump is going?

I think people feel a sense of power from the breadth and the depth of the resistance against ICE. You feel that walking around the street and the solidarity that you have with your neighbours. But it is also very obvious that the contours of the struggle are entirely defensive—everyone is focused on how to immediately resist these attempts to kidnap people. So there hasn’t seemed to be much on how to move past this and to really mount an opposition to the Trump administration.

There’s a certain weakness of the far left, and we need to figure out how to organise a broader fight using the potential that we see in the resistance to ICE. People are not just showing anger, but a willingness to stand up and confront these paramilitary goons. It is really inspiring, but we need to figure out how to translate that into organising for a broader systemic change. Clarifying for people how ICE is an important part of the federal system, and the Democrats give no answers on how to stop them. In fact, the Democrats under Vice President Harris were trying to run to the right of Trump on the question of immigration.

It’s an open question about how to build resistance against Trump. People are mad about the cost of living and inflation. People are mad about the continual degradation of democracy. I think what people do about that is the question and challenge; the paths of resistance still need to be laid. The May Day Strong effort is one attempt to say that resistance means building a broader coalition to oppose Trump’s broader agenda. The resistance against ICE may translate into more durable and resilient organisations that can go on the offensive, but that is just a possibility at the moment.