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Some corners of Chicago have been unnervingly quiet this week.
Residents who have lived in the city for decades without immigration documents have been worried about leaving their homes. Undocumented parents have been signing powers of attorney to ease custody issues if they are detained and separated from their children. Business owners are deputizing employees to take care of their affairs if anything happens.
But in other ways, the city has been buzzing with action. Know Your Rights workshops taking place at community centers, local parks and union meetings across the city have been packed with participants. A network of local advocates has been coordinating to track operations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents, and connect the families of those detained with legal aid.
“The administration wants to instill in all of us fear tactics. They want to paralyze us. They want to make us immobilized by this moment,” said US representative Delia Ramirez at a press conference at Chicago’s Malcolm X college on Wednesday. “But what does the community and the state of Illinois do when we are under attack? We stand up and we fight back, folks.”
Chicago had been bracing for raids for months, ever since Donald Trump won the election and signalled he would be enacting his campaign promise of “mass deportations” as soon as he took office. In advance of inauguration, reports were already circulating that the city would be an early target.
Since then, Ice, the largest branch of the Department of Homeland Security, announced that it would be conducting “enhanced targeted operations” in Chicago along with several other federal agencies, including the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency and the US Marshals service. The Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, said the raids could target up to 2,000 people in the city.
The scale of the raids, which are targeting people all across the region, has been chilling, said Tovia Siegel, the director of organizing and leadership at the Resurrection Project, an advocacy group that provides legal aid and community education for immigrants.
“It’s causing really significant fear, and it’s causing people not to leave the house, not to want to go to work or bring their kids to school,” she said.
Agents have been primarily apprehending people at their homes, Siegel said. Officers in unmarked vehicles and those wearing the insignia of various federal agencies have confused people, she said. “We’re seeing children who are terrified their parents are not going to be there when they get home from school.”
Trump and his appointees have emphasised that the raids are targeting criminals, but people with and without criminal histories have been apprehended so far.
“It’s being articulated that there’s a prioritization of dealing with criminals, but the impact is wider,” said Kwame Raoul, Illinois’s attorney general, who has been an outspoken critic of Trump’s immigration orders and is one of several Democratic attorney generals suing the administration over its efforts to end birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented people.
US citizens and legal residents are being swept up in the raids, Raoul said, “whether intended or as unintended consequences of racial profiling”.
Adding to the unease is the administration’s decision to lift a longstanding ban on immigration raids in schools, churches and hospitals. Late last week, Chicago public schools officials announced that they had spotted immigration agents at Hamline elementary school in the city’s south-west side. It later became clear that the officers were from the Secret Service, and were not conducting immigration enforcement. But the incident has nonetheless continued to unnerve parents and educators
In Chicago’s ward 25, which encompasses Pilsen and is made up of many immigrants, Alderman Byron Sigcho-Lopez said that right after the Secret Service incident, attendance at high schools had declined by at least a third, and attendance was even lower at elementary schools. In Chicago’s Brighton Park neighborhood and Little Village, home to many Mexican American and other immigrant families, neighborhood associations who run afterschool programs said they noticed significant drops in attendance.
At the Lincoln United Methodist church in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood, where about three-quarters of residents are Mexican American, the Spanish-language Sunday service is now being held over Zoom so that congregants of all immigration statuses can safely attend. “We haven’t done this since the beginning of the pandemic,” said the church’s pastor Emma Lozano, who’s a longtime immigration advocate. “Back then we felt it would be temporary. We were waiting for the vaccine, for medicine.”
This time around, she said, she’s not sure how long her congregants will have to worship virtually. “We’re all just trying to figure out how long this is going to last – and what’s the medicine for this?” Lozano’s church has long been a refuge for migrants. In 2006, it drew national attention when the activist Elvira Arellano took refuge and resisted arrest there for months along with her young son, and churches around the US joined a sanctuary movement in solidarity.
But now, the city has come into the Trump administration’s crosshairs – and Lozano is shaken. The church has ramped up its security protocols, making sure the door is locked behind the kids coming in for the evening capoeira classes. Lozano said she herself has felt rattled, and worried about her safety and threats from Trump supporters.
Social media videos and televised broadcasts of immigration agents battering down people’s front doors or raids attended by the television psychologist Dr Phil, have pained her, she said. “It’s almost like lynchings,” she said. “There’s a perversion and some kind of pleasure they’re getting from terrorizing this population of immigrants.”
To many activists, the administration’s activities in Chicago did not come as a surprise. The city, which has been a sanctuary for immigrants since 1985, has long drawn the ire of immigration hardliners and conservative politicians. Its sanctuary status was first ordered by mayor Harold Washington, who prohibited city officials from cooperating with federal immigration agents, and required that city services were provided to all residents regardless of their immigration status. The order was eventually passed into law, and then weakened by mayors over the years. Chicago’s current mayor, Brandon Johnson has vowed to fiercely defend his city’s immigrants. On Wednesday, congressional Republicans called on him to testify at a hearing on sanctuary cities.
In the past two years, the state of Texas has bussed thousands of people – mostly from Venezuela – to the city and its suburbs, including during the dead of winter. Now, both the recent arrivals and people who have been living in the city for years without documentation have been on high alert, and advocates are straining to make sense of why and how people are being targeted.
For Yess Gómez, who has been living in Chicago for two decades, the raids have brought back a familiar anxiety – but also a defiance. “We are afraid, but fear hasn’t paralyzed us,” said Gómez, who has been involved in Chicago’s immigrant rights movement for many years. “My kids don’t deserve to see their mother hiding. And I’m not going to do it.” Instead, she has been preparing.
The Guardian is not publishing Gómez’s full surname to protect her from retaliation. She has a work permit as part of a program that delays deportations for workers who have witnessed or experienced workplace abuse, and works as a bartender. She, her husband and five children – three young kids and two in their 20s – have implemented a safety system to check in every few hours. “If someone doesn’t check in, the plan kicks in, and we start figuring out where they are. Some of us even have location tracking on our phones as a precaution,” she said.
It’s not being deported to Mexico that scares her so much, she said – it’s being ripped away from the life she’s built in the US. “What really scares me is having to start over. That’s what most of us fear: starting over again.”
During the first Trump administration, Gómez had asked her bishop to take custody of her children in case she and her husband were arrested and deported, she said. This time around, her adult children have been tasked with caring for their siblings, and contacting the family’s attorneys should anything happen to their parents.
They have also been leaning on local networks of advocates who have been patrolling and tracking Ice activity, and investigating which rumours are credible and which ones are misinformation.
Like many activists in the city, she was delighted by recent complaints by Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, that Chicagoans are too “well-educated” about how to resist immigration agents.
“Sanctuary cities are making it very difficult to arrest the criminals. For instance Chicago, very well-educated, they’ve been educated how to defy Ice, how to hide from Ice,” Homan told CNN on Monday night.
It goes to show, she said, that people in this city know how to take care of one another. “Even though they wanted to create a spectacle here, they couldn’t do it,” she said.
