Inside Chicago’s Neighborhood ICE Resistance

ICE has also turned on those residents who dare document and track them across the city. On October 20, reported The TRiiBE, a local independent news site, an attorney named Scott Sakiyama, who had been following immigration agents in his car, was detained by them at gunpoint. Sakiyama had defended a man who had faced federal charges for allegedly assaulting a Border Patrol agent outside the immigrant “processing center” in Broadview, an inner suburb of Chicago. The government had already dropped the prosecution. But when Sakiyama spotted armed, masked immigration agents driving in Oak Park and blew a whistle to alert neighbors, agents stopped him. “Exit your vehicle, or we’re gonna break your window and we’ll drag you out,” one said. This all took place across the street from Abraham Lincoln Elementary School, where one of Sakiyama’s kids is a student. He was loaded into the agents’ vehicle and driven to the Broadview detention facility, where he was merely given a citation and returned to his car. “The federal government is intent on abusing its power to kidnap and violate the rights of our friends and neighbors,” Sakiyama wrote in an Oak Park neighborhood Facebook group, “and now, they say it is a crime to tell your neighbors this is happening.” He encouraged people to attend a rapid-response training and start their own whistle brigade. ICIRR now holds virtual trainings every week; the one I dropped in on in late October was attended by more than a thousand people from dozens of neighborhoods.

As community-based defense projects have ramped up, some local elected officials have supported them. Some, like Alderwoman Jessie Fuentes, have been detained while defending their constituents. Others have ignored their constituents, or, in the case of Democratic Alderman Raymond Lopez, who represents part of Back of the Yards, welcomed Tom Homan and defended Operation Midway Blitz. On a night in late October when Lopez was scheduled to have open office hours, the doors were locked and the lights were off as community members announced a protest there. Jaime Perez said his girlfriend, a tamale vendor, was taken by ICE near 47th Street and Western, and his calls to Lopez for help were ignored. “He wouldn’t come to the phone,” Perez said. As the sun set, Leslie Cortez spoke about the raid she witnessed on 47th Street. “Our community deserves someone who will fight for us,” she said, “not against us.” Before they left, they taped a letter to Lopez’s office door demanding that he resign.

But among even the more sympathetic government leadership, Chicagoans’ political efforts to protect immigrant communities have only gone so far. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has referred to the protection afforded by the city’s welcoming ordinance, which is meant to prohibit collaboration between immigration officers and Chicago police, but when ICE and Border Patrol roll through city neighborhoods, the police have been right there. Residents have been told that Chicago police are prohibited from engaging in immigration enforcement (unless ordered to do so by a court), when they can see with their own eyes that Chicago cops are clearing roads for the fleets of sports-utility vehicles and oversize trucks used by ICE and Border Patrol to haul people to Broadview. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has gained a national reputation as a leader who stands up to Trump and his mass deportation machine, but outside Broadview, where activists, religious leaders, and media gather, the officers firing tear gas and pepper balls at them are Illinois State Police, sent there, according to Pritzker, to “ensure people could safely express their rights.”