Chicago residents are increasingly resisting operations being conducted by federal immigration enforcement operations in their city, while at the same time warning the rest of the country about the trauma federal agents are inflicting on their communities.
In a lengthy article published in the Chicago Tribune over the weekend, journalist Andrew Carter documented how residents of the Little Village neighborhood in Chicago, which has been the target of multiple raids over the last month, have created a network of neighbors who carry whistles with them at all times so they can alert people when federal agents are in the area.
Baltazar Enriquez, president of the community counsel in Little Village, told Carter that he began walking around wearing a whistle this past June, and he said that since then “it grew like wildfire,” and spread to other neighborhoods in the city.
One person who has joined in the resistance to the immigration raids is Lisa Porter, a 53-year-old suburban mother who told Carter that she had never been much of an activist until she found herself horrified by videos of masked agents snatching people off the streets.
Porter said that she’s been following the lead of other Chicagoans in trying to warn people in her neighborhood whenever federal agents are in the area. In one particularly memorable instance, Porter said she saw a young man mowing a lawn in her neighborhood and told him to keep an eye out for Immigration and Customs Enforcement patrols that she’d seen earlier.
“They came and took my dad 10 minutes ago,” the young man said in reply.
Kyle Kingsbury, a Chicago-based computer safety researcher, wrote on his personal blog over the weekend about the pervasive sense of fear that has consumed his community ever since immigration officials began ramping up operations earlier this fall.
In his lengthy essay, Kingsbury said that he is constantly receiving messages from neighborhood watch groups alerting him about masked federal agents detaining people while going about their daily lives, including one notorious recent incident where officials dragged a woman out of the local childcare facility where she worked.
“This weight presses on me every day,” he explained. “I am flooded with stories. There are so many I cannot remember them all; cannot keep straight who was gassed, beaten, abducted, or shot. I write to leave a record, to stare at the track of the tornado. I write to leave a warning. I write to call for help.”
Kingsbury also warned that federal immigration officials, whether in the form of ICE or the US Border Patrol, are acting like an unaccountable secret police force akin to those typically seen in totalitarian states.
“I want you to understand, regardless of your politics, the historical danger of a secret police,” he wrote. “What happens when a militia is deployed in our neighborhoods and against our own people. Left unchecked their mandate will grow; the boundaries of acceptable identity and speech will shrink.”
Chicago Alderman Mike Rodriguez, who represents Little Village, toldBlock Club Chicago on Monday that recent Border Patrol operations in the neighborhood have been like a “reign of terror,” and he noted that agents once again deployed tear gas while making arrests over the weekend.
Despite angry condemnations from local officials and residents, US Border Patrol Commander-at-Large Gregory Bovino appears completely unbowed.
As Block Club Chicagoreported, Bovino brought dozens of agents with him on Monday for a photo-op at the famous Cloud Gate sculpture—often called The Bean—in Millennium Park in which they smiled and collectively said “Little Village,” in mocking reference to the neighborhood they’ve been raiding, as photographers snapped pictures.