Chicago (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Among the most beautiful cities in world, my hometown Chicago has been defiled, violated, and ravaged by Trump’s paramilitary shock troops under the pretext of immigration enforcement. Though confronted by an anti-immigration army, neighborhoods throughout Chicagoland have mobilized in experimental and collective ways to push back against the blitzkrieg deportation operation.
At first it looked like early Halloween as dozens of costumed-for-war troops jumped out of vans in Chicago’s Gold Coast on a beautiful Sunday afternoon in September. Immigration and Customs Enforcement police (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection troops (CPB) wore full tactical outfits, ballistic helmets with sunglasses and masks, holstered pistols, and carrying long guns. The menace of their combat-costumed incursion quickly became clear as they mingled absurdly among bewildered, dressed-for-summer shoppers on Michigan Avenue — the Magnificent Mile.
This sinister freak-show was pure intimidation and fearmongering. A video of ICE troops marching in threatening clusters was posted by lawyer Berto Aguayo, advising Latino individuals to stay away. Social media livestreams showed four border patrol boats with armed soldiers and spikey-haired CPB Commander Greg “Göring” Bovino purposelessly policing the Chicago River far from any border.
War-ready troops stalked sight-seeing tourists in nearby Millennium Park. As a show of power, they illegally arrested a family of four citizens, apparently because they looked Mexican. Bystanders and passersby started following the troops, chanting “ICE, go home” and “Shame!” A shrill whistle cut through the noise repeatedly in an early demonstration of anti-ICE activism that has become more organized as the ICE infection spreads like a lethal virus through the city and suburbs.
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BROADVIEW, ILLINOIS – OCTOBER 24: Cook County Sheriff officers stand between local protesters and the ICE detention facility on October 24, 2025 in Broadview, Illinois. Demonstrations have been taking place outside of the facility for several weeks as the Trump administration’s Operation Midway Blitz has been underway, arresting and detaining immigrants in the Chicago area. (Photo by Abel Uribe/Getty Images)
Trump’s anti-immigrant military assault — so-called “Operation Midway Blitz” — was announced on Sept. 8 with a promise to “target the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens” in the city. Of course, he lied. ICE and CPB thugs routinely harass and chase U.S. citizens and drag them off by their clothes and hair and shove them into unmarked vans.
State power abusing Chicago’s citizens is a provocative incitement, a terroristic police-state training ground, and a camera-ready propaganda performance.
Unleashing illegal ambushes all over the city and its suburbs, ICE‘s faux macho attacks — punching, body slamming, teargassing, and firing pepper balls — are recorded, set to music, and released on social media to satisfy the cruelty fetish of the MAGA faithful. Cosplay Call-of-Duty soldiers bully and batter defenseless, traumatized, and intimidated people who are at the mercy of legalized sadism.
In a caravan of black SUVs, CPB goons rolled into the heart of Chicago’s Mexican community — Little Village and Cicero on the Southwest Side — last Thursday. With no plan other than disruption, they tried to enter Little Village Discount Mall before realizing it was closed. They were confronted by residents who had been quickly mobilized by photos and videos posted on social media. Wearing battle gear and gas masks, the troopers — proudly led by unmasked CPB boss Bovino — escalated a loud but peaceful protest into pandemonium by hurling tear gas without warning, which violated a court order.
In the CPB-caused chaos, they violently detained several protestors. On the previous day, the Feds caused a car crash that also drew outraged resisters who were pepper-sprayed. “They took at least eight people, of those eight, four were U.S. citizens, and two were members of my staff,” said Alderman Mike Rodriguez. “A reign of terror was brought upon our neighborhood.”
The attack caught the attention of U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis, who has shown increasing frustration with the feds’ tactics. On Friday, she ordered CBP Commander Bovino, who laughingly tossed a tear gas canister at the Little Village crowd, back to court next week.
Porcupine-headed Bovino — the face of the war on Chicagoland — admitted they were targeting passersby for arrests based partly on “how they look.” In an Un-American constitutional capitulation, the Supreme Court’s 6-3 MAGA majority ruled that ICE/CPB agents can detain people based on Race, which is the province of police state tyrants. The Kavanaugh-written ruling ignores the Bill of Rights assertion that Americans should be free of unlawful searches and seizures.
Invading Chicago‘s more affluent North and Near West Sides on Friday, federal police struck Lakeview and Lincoln Park as well as Bucktown, Wicker Park and Ukrainian Village, where I lived for years. Feds smashed one man‘s car window outside a family health center where his pregnant partner waited for her appointment. Other agents grabbed two construction workers from a house and teargassed dissenting neighbors. Driving recklessly, they hit a woman and drove off leaving witnesses horrified.
Federal enforcers are now penetrating nearly every corner of Chicago, and residents are responding with anger and disgust. “As a lawyer, someone who adamantly believes in the rule of law, watching it in open sight in front of my house just be completely eroded,” one witness said. ”It’s upsetting.”
An American citizen Scott Sakiyama was handcuffed and unlawfully arrested last week by immigration police outside his child’s Near West Oak Park elementary school — Abraham Lincoln School. Five of my nephews and nieces formerly attended this school and never worried that a parent outside might be kidnapped by police. Sakiyama said he was driving behind the agents‘ vehicle, honking his horn and blowing a whistle to warn neighbors of their presence. This was enough to stoke the ire of Trump’s henchmen.
My wife and I currently live in Oak Park — a diverse, tolerant, anti-Trump enclave that voted over 90% for Kamala Harris in 2024. We despise the infestation of our neighborhood by Trump’s private army and worry that their egregious police state tactics are being ignored and therefore normalized by the national media.
A uniformed thug pointed a gun at state Rep. Hoan Huynh in Northwest Albany Park last Tuesday after blocking his vehicle. In an anti-ICE alert, he was honking his horn and yelling. “I never would have imagined in 2025, we would be living in an authoritarian regime in the United States,” Huynh said. “But if they can do this in broad daylight to an elected official, and point a gun at someone, imagine what’s happening behind closed doors.”
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BROADVIEW, ILLINOIS – OCTOBER 17: Police detain a protestor as people gather to stage a rally in front of the ICE building after the recent dismantling of the facility’s security fence in Broadview, Illinois, Chicago, United States on October 17, 2025. (Photo by Jacek Boczarski/Anadolu via Getty Images)
In other ICE gunplay, a trigger-happy agent fatally shot a single father with no known history of violence. Silverio Villegas González, a father of two, had just dropped one of his children off at school when ICE agents killed him. A teacher’s aide at a Montessori school, U.S. citizen Marimar Martinez was also shot and wounded.
With no regard for legal status or citizenship, the anti-immigration squads have detained people first and sought information about them later. It’s a scene that has played out repeatedly since early September on courthouse steps and in small-scale street stops, outside hardware stores as in suburban Naperville, even at hospitals, churches, and schools such as St. Jerome’s in far North Side Rogers Park where my son once attended school and, infamously, inside an apartment building in the South Shore neighborhood. All without due process.
This appalling midnight assault occurred at a five-story brick building at 7500 S. South Shore Drive. Kanye West grew up just half a mile south of the building. Jesse Jackson lived for a long time in South Shore’s Jackson Park Highlands, an area of elegant houses also once home to Chicago Bears legend Gale Sayers. Michelle Obama’s childhood home stands about a mile away off of Euclid Avenue, where she and Barack Obama lived, briefly, after they were married. In her memoir Becoming, she credited the neighborhood and its strong sense of family and supportive spirit for shaping her core identity and values.
What happened in the middle of the night at this South Shore apartment on Sept. 30 is so far the most horrific moment in six weeks of horrific moments involving ICE and CPB ambush activity.
Blackhawk helicopters hovered over the building and snipers rappelled onto the roof. As booming flash bang grenades went off inside the 130-unit mid-rise, ICE, CPB and FBI agents — dressed for battle — broke down doors and smashed windows, terrorizing residents. Backed up by riot trucks and smoke bombs, they forced people — some crying and screaming — from their beds at gunpoint, refusing to let them gather their things or get dressed.
After binding some with zip-ties, they corralled them into rented Budget box trucks. They held others outside for hours while ignoring their pleas of being fellow Americans. Four nearby South Shore residents said they saw naked children zip-tied on that shocking night. “Imagine somebody coming in the middle of the night, taking your kids away from you, zip-tying them, and you have no idea where they’re going, what’s going to happen to them, you don’t know if you’ll ever see them again — especially if those kids are U.S. citizens and you’re not,” said one witness.
The raid was described as a “mind-blowing violation of the Fourth Amendment” by Northwestern University Law Professor Paul Gowder. He considered the military-style siege “one of the most unconstitutional things the federal government has ever done. The whole point of our system of warrants for searches, due process rights, and so forth, is that we don’t actually know that somebody’s a criminal” unless declared so in court.
Otherwise, as currently in Chicago, we are living in the science fiction dystopia of the 2002 movie Minority Report, where police arrest people for pre-crimes — for their imagined intentions.
A warrantless operation by nearly 300 troops in a largely Black community, the federal government has provided no public accounting of how many people were detained, who remains in custody, and what happened to the children who were living in the building before the blitz but haven’t been seen by residents since that night.
The Chicago Tribune has been able to confirm the identity of only one immigrant taken into custody by federal agents that night: a 41-year-old pizza delivery man whose family said he first came to the United States from Mexico when he was 10 years old. Currently in a Kentucky jail, he has no criminal history.
The apartment strike was a made-for-TV display of brutality that was featured, two-days-later, in a slickly produced, DHS propaganda video that perversely celebrates the operation’s malice, domineering power, and dehumanization.
Beginning with ominous helicopter sounds, the camera looks down like a predator on the dilapidated building as spotlights probe the windows. Dressed in tactical gear, masked armed soldiers, wearing night vision goggles, climb a ladder into the apartment. It resembles the attack on Osama Bin Laden‘s house in the movie Zero Dark Thirty. The video makes a spectacle out of beating up distressed, terrified people.
As a false justification for the unconstitutional raid, CPB bully Bovino used the Trump administration’s all-purpose rationale: they suspected Tren de Aragua gang members were inside. Suspicion that someone is a gang member does not legally justify arrest or detention or, for that matter, banishment to an El Salvador concentration camp or execution on the high seas.
f. j. zirbel, “Junta — Minister of Justice.” © f.j.zirbel
Aside from propaganda and intimidation, there was no point to the apartment siege other than as a training operation, as threatened by Trump later that same day.
Hours after the raid, Trump spoke to hundreds of serving generals and admirals summoned from their posts around the world. A physically and mentally debilitated Trump spoke weakly. His speech sounded “incoherent, exhausted, rabidly partisan, at times stupid, meandering, couldn’t hold a thought together,” as described by retired General Barry McCaffrey.
In the middle of Trump’s unhinged stream of pathological lies and madness, he told the country’s military commanders that he was declaring war on America, in particular the cities of San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. He vilified these beautiful cities as “crime-filled, urban hellscapes” and promised that the generals will be fighting a “war from within,” using these cities as “training grounds for our military.”
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‘No Kings! Rally and March’ event in Chicago. CHICAGO, ILLINOIS – OCTOBER 18: Demonstrators gather at Butler Field in Grant Park for the ‘No Kings! Rally and March’ in Chicago, Illinois, United States on October 18, 2025. Thousands are expected to join the peaceful protest against the Trump administration’s policies, including ICE arrests and authoritarian measures, organized by Indivisible Lincoln Square and the No Kings network. (Photo by Jacek Boczarski/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Three hundred troops from the Texas National Guard were shipped to the Chicago area and stationed several miles away at the Army Reserve Training Center in Elwood, Illinois. Their further deployment was condemned by Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker and, so far, stopped by the courts. But how long before armed soldiers with Dixieland accents are shoving northern cops aside in northern cities? Trump has also called for the jailing of Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, who said that the President “has made it very clear that he has declared war on the city of Chicago.”
If there is a front to the war, it is along 25th Avenue in West Suburban Broadview, a mostly Black suburb, where the ICE processing center is located next to a pest-control company. A two-story brick structure, the windows are boarded with plywood and the street closed off with concrete Jersey barriers, suggesting the ambience of the Baghdad Green Zone during the Iraq War. It is here that hundreds of people targeted for deportation are imprisoned to languish in squalid conditions before being shipped to other detention gulags around the country. No exact number of detainees is publicly available.
The ICE center is a focal point for resistance to Trump’s immigration crusade. Protestors regularly gather to voice their dissent and heckle any visible agents with chants of “Quit your job!” and “Take off your mask!” Deploying rubber bullets and chemical munitions against people exercising their right to free speech, ICE police attacked protesters, journalists, and even politicians.
When the 5-foot-tall Illinois’ ninth congressional district candidate Kat Abughazaleh was shoved and slammed hard to the asphalt while protesting, the video went viral. DHS’s official X account acknowledges the incident but claims absurdly that she was “siding with vicious cartels, human traffickers and violent criminals.”
“What this administration is trying to do is terrifying,” said Abughazaleh. “They want to crack down on our basic human rights. They do not want appeasement, they want complete and utter submission.”
Protests there have continued for six weeks. Over 200 protestors joined fifty ministers who gathered at the detention site last Friday. They prayed for the detainees inside — and the repentance of ICE agents who arrested them. Clergy from different faiths hosted a prayer service at the site each Friday, part of a growing movement of religious leaders’ opposition to the illegal crackdown.
Chicago native Pope Leo XIV joined the litany of condemnation last week when he denounced the mistreatment of immigrants during an address. “With the abuse of vulnerable migrants, we are not witnessing the legitimate exercise of national sovereignty, but rather serious crimes committed or tolerated by the state,” he said. “Christianity, on the other hand, refers to the God of love, who makes us all brothers and sisters. More than 250 local Christian spiritual leaders signed an open letter condemning ICE’s malicious tactics. It was titled “Jesus was tear gassed at Broadview.”
Visiting Broadview in early October, DHS Secretary Kristi “ICE Barbie” Noem —Trump’s top goon and unrepentant dog killer — toured properties the administration is looking to acquire. She oversees a massive influx of $170 billion that Republicans gave DHS for their anti-immigrant war. Running roughshod over the rule of law, Noem is first in line to become warden of America’s police state.
A raging narcissist, Noem traveled with a MAGA propaganda mascot Benny Johnson. A longtime fraud and recipient of Russian covert disinformation money, Benny films her every move, which are little more than fascist fashion shoots.
Benny’s most unintentionally amusing video shows Noem facing resistance from a Broadview Village worker. In the video, Noem says she was in Chicago to “pick up some guys with criminal convictions” when she was denied access to the Village of Broadview Municipal building. The voice of a man standing behind the glass front door can be heard telling Noem, “No, you cannot!” after she asked to use the restroom.
In Chicago, city officials and neighborhood activist groups have coordinated closely on efforts to slow ICE’s extra-legal assault. Illinois Governor Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Johnson are fighting the National Guard deployment in court, and Johnson has declared city property off-limits to ICE, though it’s unclear how he’ll be able to enforce “ICE Free Zones” other than by not opening locked gates to city property.
As ICE wreaks chaos and violence, communities are challenging Trump’s occupation by mobilizing in inventive and collective solidarity. Some keep vigil outside Home Depots and taquerías. Activists have also begun locating agents’ suburban hotels, such as in Downers Grove, and hosting noisy protests outside.
“I have lived here for 28 years and have never felt so profoundly unsafe until this week,” one Chicago resident recently posted. “And it’s not because of gangs or crime or unhoused people or drug users or migrants. I feel unsafe because there are militarized units with loaded guns in the school parking lots of my district, kidnapping my neighbors.”
Chicago Public Schools (CPS) does not collaborate with federal immigration agencies and recently expanded its 24-hour Student Safety Center with a dedicated team that handles issues related to the ICE crackdown. CPS also has a Safe Passage program, offering adult accompaniment for students as they get to and from school. Several schools went on soft lockdown, preventing students from leaving for lunch and canceling recess.
Many of the street-level activists are working under the leadership of a decades-old group, the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights — ICIRR or “ICER.” Along with other groups such as Protect Rogers Park, ICIRR tracks and verifies immigration raids and organizes “Rapid Response” volunteer brigades that quickly deploy to hot locations where ICE officers might ambush people.
Along with hosting Zoom training sessions for volunteers, they’ve produced a constantly updated ICE Response Toolkit — “a living document” — that “equips community members with practical tools to monitor, document, and respond to ICE activity.” When ICE is on the move, some volunteers will follow on foot, on bikes, and in cars, honking their horns and blowing whistles to create a rolling alarm system that alerts neighbors. They also film encounters with ICE patrols. Organizers stress the need to have direct footage that document unconstitutional tactics and arrests.
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Protesters rally against Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Chicago
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS – OCTOBER 26: Demonstrators in Jonquil Park in Lincoln Park, unite in solidarity on October 26, 2025 demanding an end to ICE enforcement actions targeting undocumented residents in their neighborhood. (Photo by Jacek Boczarski/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Small inexpensive whistles have become a popular way to alert people of ICE activity. From coffee shops to bars to adult stores, businesses and other volunteers have handed out thousands of whistles across the city in solidarity. Hundreds have also assembled whistle kits at various “Whistlemania” events. The kits include “Know Your Rights” information, whistles and a zine with instructions on how to use them. Others have distributed “Hands Off Chicago” posters to hang in windows or carry during the 250,000 strong “No Kings” protest last weekend in Chicago.
“I want the ICE agents to know they’re not welcome, I want them to have a hellish experience,” one volunteer said. “ICE agents signed up for this — to terrorize people, to terrorize the community. They are personally accountable. They are the phalanx of this evil.”
77 million Americans elected as president a vile racist psycho, who promised mass deportations. That is what Trump voters have gotten: a white supremacist government with mass deportations serving as pretext for a war against American Blue cities. Glorifying cruelty, depravity, and savagery to the delight of his Republican lapdogs, Trump summarily executes Brown people on boats in the ocean, authorizes Gestapo-style tactics by ICE, and disappears captured migrants into an American Gulag. Despite a government shutdown, Democrats cannot stop this deranged, authoritarian wrecking ball.
Authoritarian power feeds on despair. Once hopelessness infects our collective minds, repression no longer requires external force. You don’t need prisons or guns if you can convince people that protest is pointless. The enemy within, despair empowers the status quo; democratic resistance feeds on hope. Hope takes the form of 7 million Americans who flooded the streets to protest tyranny in the “No Kings” marches as well as the relentless resistance of everyday Chicagoans.
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