CHICAGO – It’s been nearly two months since Chicago became the main target of President Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) regime in what the government calls Operation Midway Blitz. Since then, one person has died, agents have fired tear gas at peaceful protesters, and over 1,000 people have been arrested and, often, functionally disappeared from their communities and lawyers. We’ve seen apartment raids. Propaganda videos. Children in zip ties. Aggression, anger, and resistance.
Chicago is a notoriously segregated city, which means that some neighborhoods have been completely transformed by ICE’s presence, while in non-Latino neighborhoods, it’s mostly been business as usual.
But the response to the federal incursion knows no boundaries. Regardless of where in the city Chicagoans live, they have mobilized. Activists have started “migra watch” group chats on the secure messaging app Signal, where they monitor ICE sightings, share resources, and plan protest campaigns. Each chat has hundreds of participants, and my phone rarely goes more than five minutes without a buzzing notification.
Others have taken to the streets en masse. An estimated 250,000 people marched through downtown on October 18 for the latest No Kings protest, more than three times as many as the first protest in June. ICE’s main processing facility in Broadview, a suburb outside of Chicago, has been the site of protests every Friday for months, amid tear gas and violence from officers. And smaller confrontations are a near-daily occurrence in South and West Side locations, as residents alert neighbors to ICE’s presence.
The Signal chats can at times be chaotic. Well-meaning participants often misidentify city cops or security guards as ICE agents, raising alarm bells that end up draining the limited resources of the migra watch.
On October 17, for example, one member of a Northwest Side migra watch chat texted: “Federal agent spotted in vehicle going west on Logan boulevard right now.”
“any info on vehicle type/color, license plate etc?” Another group member asked. “can you share more info on why you believe they’re a federal agent?”
The original poster sent a picture. More chat members fired off, trying to help identify the vehicle.
“There was a federal logo on the side of the vehicle.”
“which logo?”
Another chat member sent an infographic they made to identify common ICE vehicles, alongside city and state police vehicles. And within minutes, the matter was settled. “That’s not federal.”
The propensity to see ICE around every corner would be avoidable if ICE were mandated to clearly identify themselves. But they aren’t, and agents are taking pains to hide their identities.
In other chats, Chicagoans track the unmarked cars coming in and out of Broadview. Some of those cars appear to have Mexican flags painted onto the hoods or stuck in the window, social media posts show, in an attempt to bamboozle residents. At least one has a “Fuck ICE” sticker on the back.
Members of the chats, some of whom are formally trained to monitor ICE by local nonprofits like the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, help other activists strategically share information without instigating panic. Activists politely remind each other to include S.A.L.U.T.E. information in their reports, a mnemonic that stands for “size, actions, location, uniform, time, and equipment.” Including this information makes reports of an ICE sighting more credible, and gives rapid responders an idea of where to go to protest them.
When someone reports a potential raid, chat members typically react within minutes. “Tip at 42/maplewood alley if anyone wants to check that out. [Confirmed] Ice vehicle at 47/western,” someone wrote in a chat on October 17, naming cross streets on the city’s Southwest Side.
“We’ll head that way,” someone else messaged two minutes later.
The chats play an increasingly important role as the Department of Justice cracks down on other forms of organized resistance. This month, Meta succumbed to pressure and removed a Facebook group that Chicagoans used to monitor ICE. Two weeks earlier, Apple and Google removed ICEBlock, an app that allows users to report ICE activity, from their app stores.
The fear that ICE could be lurking in any car on any street has pushed many Chicagoans to avoid going out in public, where having brown skin makes you a target. Notorious U.S. Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino said the quiet part out loud to a white WBEZ reporter, describing how ICE makes arrests based on “the particular characteristics of an individual, how they look. How do they look compared to, say, you?”
In response to fears of racial profiling, neighbors are organizing grocery deliveries for those who are too scared to leave the house. Parents gather at elementary schools during dismissal, keeping watch for federal agents as their at-risk neighbors pick up their children. Advocacy groups hand out whistles to anyone they see, telling them to sound the alarm if they see la migra.
In one chat, someone asked how they could get involved in bringing groceries to neighbors who weren’t leaving the house. Another participant shared resources. “My Tia is in Berwyn and she said they are scared and have been having a very hard time leaving the house so I’m interested if there are mutual aid groups for Berwyn/Cicero,” someone else asked.
THERE HAVE BEEN FLASHES OF IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT outside of predominantly Latino neighborhoods. The biggest example was a massive militarized raid on an apartment building in South Shore, a 93 percent Black neighborhood nestled against the shore of Lake Michigan on the city’s South Side. In the early-morning hours of September 30, 300 federal agents descended on the brick apartment building at 7500 S. South Shore Drive, with Black Hawk helicopters thrumming above and flash grenades going off.
Residents, including children, were forced outside, zip-tied, asked for their documents, and inspected for tattoos. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said 37 people were arrested, including four children.
A couple of weeks after the raid, I went down to South Shore to speak to residents of the building and nearby neighbors, who all rejected the government’s claim that the building was overrun by Venezuelan gang members. “The building was a problem before the Venezuelans got here,” said a neighbor across the street from the complex who had witnessed the raid. “Most of them were working men trying to feed their families. They were just happy to be here.”
The raid has devastated the building’s already neglected tenants. One resident, an older Black woman, was hauling moving boxes into the building, planning to get out. “You finna get PAID!” a young neighbor shouted at her from across the street. “I’m just trying to get out,” she yelled back, chuckling. “Outta here in the morning. Bye bye! Getting the hell out.”
After storming the building and arresting its residents, DHS edited footage of the raid into a dramatic, war-movie-style propaganda video that Trump administration officials plastered all over X.
Appearances seem to be top of mind for ICE, especially in Chicago, which has long been used as a symbol of blue-state failure by Republicans (never mind the facts that Chicago has been named the country’s best big city nine years in a row and crime falls by double digits each year). On one sunny September day, agents cruised down the river, which cuts right through Chicago’s beautiful, skyscraper-crowned downtown, filming yet another TikTok-worthy fascism-slop video. In it, agents including Bovino stand on guard, gripping their guns and standing on the boat’s bow. Maybe they were wary of the pedestrians enjoying the end-of-summer warmth along the river walk, or the kayakers and architecture tour boats passing them.
But, of course, it’s not all kitschy propaganda videos. On the same day that agents marched downtown, they arrested a family enjoying Millennium Park, a major tourist destination. The father of the family remains in ICE detention and has since been flown to Texas, the Chicago Tribune reported.
AMONG THE CITY’S HIGHEST-RISK POPULATIONS are those without stable shelter, such as the many who ride the 24/7 train lines or sleep in tent encampments. In Washington, D.C., federal officers raided tent encampments where homeless people lived. Knowing this, nonprofits serving the city’s homeless people have been preparing for a federal incursion for months. Back in September, organizations like the Night Ministry, which helps connect Chicagoans to housing and health care, were handing out “know your rights” sheets in English and Spanish, instructing people who sleep outside to try to find their way into shelters to avoid becoming visible targets.
Even before the peak of the federal crackdown, unsheltered people were struggling to find space in the city’s shelters. As ICE becomes more visible and the weather cools down, shelter beds will only get harder to find.
But homeless shelters are targets now, too. ICE has arrested people outside of at least two shelters in Chicago in the past two months. Agents detained two people outside a shelter in Budlong Woods, and, days later, arrested four people outside a Bronzeville shelter. The Chicago Coalition to End Homelessness is investigating arrests of at least 19 other homeless Chicagoans, the Chicago Reader reported.
Chicago’s chief homelessness officer, Sendy Soto, described how the city has been trying to manage the overlapping needs of Chicago’s homeless population and its new-arrival migrants.
Last year, Soto said, the city merged its services for homeless Chicagoans and for the city’s new arrivals, most of whom are Latin American migrants who were bused to Chicago by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott between 2022 and 2024. Now that the city’s new arrivals are integrated into its homeless services system, shelters have become targets for immigration arrests.
Still, getting people indoors is a priority for the city. “We put together a strategy to increase our shelter beds so that people who are in high priority, highest-impacted encampments can move into shelters right away,” Soto told me. By activating the city’s winter bed program earlier in the year and scrounging up extra funding, her office has added 600 new shelter beds that are immediately available for those who are most vulnerable to federal agents.
Soto admits that adding shelter beds is ultimately a temporary solution. Many people prefer not to stay in shelters because they have to pack up and leave each morning, or because they have a pet they can’t bring with them. Her office has broadly focused on affordable housing, which is a more permanent answer for homeless Chicagoans and new arrivals.
But for now, Chicagoans who want to get inside can call 311 to get connected to shelter resources. The additional beds will require funding to stay open, but Soto hopes they will be sustained through at least March, seeing the city through Operation Midway Blitz and the coldest months of winter.
GIVEN THE PRESENCE OF HEAVILY ARMED federal officers, migrants afraid of detention and deportation, and protesters in between the two, violence was inevitable, and in one instance, deadly. On September 12, ICE agents shot and killed Silverio Villegas González, a Chicagoan of nearly two decades. Villegas González was driving in Franklin Park, a suburb of Chicago, when ICE agents pulled him over and boxed him in with another car. According to accounts from another driver, Villegas González tried to maneuver his car away. As he drove, an ICE officer fired and hit the driver. Villegas González died soon after in a hospital.
The Mexican consulate in Chicago paid to fly his body to Michoacán, where he was laid to rest in the town he grew up in. The wake was held in the small, tin-roofed home where Villegas González spent his childhood. Michoacán-based reporter César Cabrera and the South Side Weekly, a Chicago-based paper, published a poignant report of his funeral in Michoacán and the traumatized family he left behind in Franklin Park.
Federal agents tried to justify the shooting, saying their lives were at risk. In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security said that, as Villegas González allegedly tried to escape, “one of the ICE officers was hit by the car and dragged a significant distance. Fearing for his own life, the officer fired his weapon.” In another statement, DHS claimed that the officer was “fearing for his life” and required stabilization in a hospital.
Body cam footage tells a different story.
The agent who had shot Villegas González can be seen on camera speaking to responding officers with a torn pant leg. “I got dragged a little bit,” he said. “Just a left knee injury, and some lacerations. Nothing major.”
The killing of Villegas González is not the only ICE shooting so far in Chicago these past few months. On October 4, ICE agents shot Marimar Martinez on the city’s Southwest Side. Details of the case are muddled; the government and Martinez’s lawyer give different accounts of what happened. In the criminal complaint against Martinez, the FBI alleges that Martinez was following a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) car, eventually driving into its driver’s side. One of the CBP agents in the car shot Martinez five times, and she drove away. She was later found by paramedics and brought to a hospital for treatment.
At one point, federal agents said they were boxed in by ten cars. The FBI’s own criminal complaint described only two cars. Feds say Martinez rammed into them, but Martinez’s lawyer says the CBP vehicle actually swerved into his client’s. And now, it’s come out that a federal officer drove the CBP vehicle, a crucial piece of evidence in the case, 1,100 miles away to Maine. A judge has ordered the feds to drive the car back to Chicago.
ICE has consistently claimed that they are facing violence to justify their own crackdowns and shootings. President Trump and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem have used these claims as pretense for sending the National Guard to Chicago and cracking down further on the city’s immigrants and activists.
Around 500 National Guard troops were sent to Chicago earlier this month, but a judge quickly blocked their deployment. The Trump administration has appealed that decision, and the issue is still up in the air as it bounces through the courts.
THROUGHOUT IT ALL, CHICAGOANS HAVE FOUND WAYS to materially and spiritually resist the federal crackdown.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson have refused to give in to Trump’s threats, which has proved a powerful way to divert his attention. On Saturday at the main No Kings rally, Johnson called for a general strike to protest the federal presence. “If my ancestors, as slaves, can lead the greatest general strike in the history of this country, taking it to the ultra-rich and big corporations, we can do it too!”
Some of the city’s alderpeople have stepped up, too, including Jessie Fuentes, who represents the city’s historically Latino 26th Ward. On October 3, Fuentes showed up in the emergency room of Humboldt Park Health, asking ICE agents if they had a judicial warrant for one of the hospital’s patients whom they had detained earlier. ICE agents didn’t answer Fuentes’s question, and instead roughly spun her around and placed her in handcuffs. She’s now planning to sue the agent who detained her.
Meanwhile, Chicagoans gather weekly to protest outside of ICE’s Broadview processing facility, diverting dozens of agents away from enforcement duties and forcing them to engage with peaceful protesters instead.
The facility is where ICE sends out unmarked vans and cars to arrest Chicagoans, and where they hide detainees from their lawyers and families before surreptitiously shipping them out of state. Every Friday, protesters gather on the road outside the facility and sit in its driveway, peacefully using their bodies to obstruct the flow of ICE vehicles.
Agents respond with disproportionate force, picking up and throwing protesters on the asphalt (including congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh, who has been a regular at the protests alongside her opponent and Evanston mayor Daniel Biss), firing rubber bullets and pepper balls, and lobbing tear gas canisters at protesters and journalists alike. I was personally shoved by ICE agents, even when clearly identified as a member of the press. Agents stand on the facility’s roof, masked and wearing full tactical gear, pointing massive weapons down at the protesters. Looking up, it’s hard not to feel a pulse of fear as you stare into the barrel of a pepper ball gun.
There’s often a large religious contingent at the Broadview protests. A Christian congregation chants: “Love your neighbor, love your God. Save your soul, quit your job!” ICE agents aren’t listening. One Chicago pastor, the Rev. David Black, who leads First Presbyterian Church of Chicago, joined an ACLU lawsuit against the Trump administration after federal officers allegedly shot him with pepper balls without warning as he prayed in front of the facility.
In the downtown Loop on Saturday, immigration enforcement was top of mind for No Kings protesters, as it was during the first rally in June. Marchers carried a 75-foot replica of the Constitution through the crowd, which at one point spanned two miles of city streets.
No one should downplay the terror campaign ICE is waging throughout the city, or the lives that have already being upended by it. But people are making material change, disrupting the raids in whatever manner possible. It’s no easy thing to confront the state, especially when its officers are armed with tear gas and bullets and surveillance technology. But Chicagoans are trying and, as much as anyone can, succeeding.