Inside Chicago’s Neighborhood ICE Resistance

ICE also goes after residents who dare to document and follow them around town. On October 20, The TRiiBE, an independent local news site, reported, a lawyer named Scott Sakiyama, who was following immigration officers in his car, was arrested by them at gunpoint. Sakiyama had defended a man who faced federal charges for allegedly assaulting a Border Patrol agent outside the immigrant “processing center” in Broadview, an inner-city suburb of Chicago. The government had already dropped the charges. But when Sakiyama spotted armed, masked immigration agents driving through Oak Park and blew his whistle to alert neighbors, the agents arrested him. “Get out of your vehicle or we will break your window and drag you out,” one of them said. All of this took place across the street from Abraham Lincoln Elementary School, where one of Sakiyama’s children is a student. He was loaded into the officers’ vehicle and driven to the Broadview Detention Center, where he was simply given a citation and taken back to his car. “The federal government intends to abuse 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’s a crime to tell your neighbors what’s happening.” He encouraged people to take rapid response training and start their own whistle brigade. The ICIRR now organizes virtual training courses every week; the one I went to at the end of October brought together more than a thousand people from dozens of neighborhoods.

As community defense projects multiply, some local elected officials support them. Some, like Alderman Jessie Fuentes, were arrested while defending their constituents. Others 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. One night in late October, when Lopez was scheduled to open his offices, the doors were locked and the lights turned off when community members announced a protest. Jaime Perez said his girlfriend, a tamale seller, was taken by ICE near 47th Street and Western and her pleas for help to Lopez were ignored. “He didn’t want to 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, “and not against us.” Before leaving, they taped a letter to Lopez’s office door demanding his resignation.

But even among the most sympathetic government leaders, Chicagoans’ political efforts to protect immigrant communities have not succeeded. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson spoke of the protection afforded by the city’s harbor ordinance, which aims to prohibit collaboration between immigration agents and Chicago police, but when ICE and Border Patrol pass through city neighborhoods, police are right there. Residents have been told that Chicago police are prohibited from engaging in immigration enforcement operations (unless ordered by a court), while they can see with their own eyes that Chicago cops are clearing the roads for the fleets of sport utility vehicles and oversized trucks used by ICE and the Border Patrol to transport people to Broadview. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker has earned a national reputation as a leader standing up to Trump and his mass deportation machine, but outside Broadview, where activists, religious leaders and the media gather, the officers firing tear gas and pepper balls at them are the Illinois State Police, sent there, Pritzker said, to “ensure people can safely express their rights.”