'We protect our own': Chicago parents stand up to ICE despite threat of gas and violence

This story has been updated with comments from the Department of Homeland Security, received after publication.

One recent weekday, a group of Chicago kindergartners visited their neighborhood high school. It should have been an unremarkable moment — but as the visit was in motion, parents learned that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents had been spotted nearby.

Instantly, the community mobilized. Teachers left school and hopped on their bikes. Around 100 volunteer patrollers came out to “protect these kindergarteners … and make sure that they got back safely,” said Lizzie Turner, a parent of a sixth-grader at the Peirce School of International Studies in the Andersonville neighborhood.

“It was very encouraging and very inspiring,” Turner said.

Turner is an administrator of Peirce Pathways, a parent-led support network with more than 100 volunteers currently monitoring neighborhood ICE activity, coordinating parent patrols and working with the school “sanctuary” team to address concerning interactions with agents known to detain parents and teachers, and to have deployed chemical agents near schools.

The group is one of several activated in Chicago since agents descended on the city as part of an aggressive Trump administration immigration enforcement mission, Operation Midway Blitz.

“The resistance movement here has been so successful,” Turner said.

“As much harm as they have been able to get away with, I also think as a city we protect our own … everybody's come together, and everybody's been very selfless in how they've approached it — the collaboration and just willingness to put our own needs aside in the moment to protect our neighbors.”

Jenn Graville Bricker, a second-grade parent, co-founded another parent-led network, Rogers Park School Patrols.

Part of grassroots neighborhood support organization Protect Rogers Park, the group has nearly a thousand volunteers across 10 schools on the city's north side, Graville Bricker said.

Volunteers wear orange armbands to signal they’re safe people to ask for help. Children have taken note, Graville Bricker said, describing how one child was recently overheard telling her caretaker, “Orange is for whistles, butterflies and safety.”

“Kids are clearly feeling it, and there's a lot of fear,” she said. “It impacts families in really, really deep ways.”

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is currently "surging" its law enforcement in Charlotte, N.C., "to ensure Americans are safe and public safety threats are removed.," said DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin via email.

“Americans should be able to live without fear of violent criminal illegal aliens hurting them, their families, or their neighbors," McLaughlin said.

"There have been too many victims of criminal illegal aliens, and President Trump and Secretary Noem will step up to protect Americans when sanctuary politicians won’t."

‘On the fly’

Turner said her group was “building the plane as we fly it” but had come up with a multi-faceted system for monitoring ICE activity and protecting children whose families might be undocumented.

First, a coordinator monitors channels on Signal, an encrypted messaging platform, for reported ICE sightings.

Then the group organizes two volunteers at each of the four corners around a school, during drop-off and pick-up. Mobile patrol teams use bikes or cars.

Local businesses have agreed to be “safe haven sites” for anyone in need of protection from ICE, Turner said.

The community has created other “scrappy” ways to monitor and respond to ICE activity, said Turner, who built a searchable database of license plates confirmed to be ICE vehicles.

“Even just the tooling and technology that we've thrown together on the fly to make it work has been impressive,” said Turner, whose day job is at a software company.

“I hope that other cities don't experience this but if they do, I hope we can be a helpful starting point or model for how to tackle it, and I'm sure other cities will do it better if they build on it.”

‘Collective response to oppression’

Volunteers working with Turner have gone through “ICEWatch” training, which nonprofits and community organizations throughout Chicago have put together to help people know their rights, document when ICE comes into neighborhoods and warn neighbors who might be targets.

Jill Garvey, co-director of anti-authoritarianism nonprofit States at the Core, hosts a weekly ICEWatch training in partnership with Protect Rogers Park.

Gabe Gonzalez, an organizer with Protect Rogers Park, said as many as 6,000 people have been trained — 80 percent from the north side of Chicago and 20 percent watching from around the country.

Gonzalez estimates the group’s reach is as much as 7 percent of Rogers Park, which he said is “enormous.”

“I did community organizing for years, and if you had 1 percent of the neighborhood engaged in what you're doing, you had power, and we're well past that,” he said.

The training has its roots in CopWatch training that originated in the 1960s with the Black Panther Party and is focused on “documenting and responding, not interfering,” Garvey said, adding that the training emphasised “nonviolent protest and dissent.”

Volunteers who respond to an ICE encounter are instructed to send videos and documentation to their local ICEWatch group and an immigrant rights hotline.

Protect Rogers Park’s efforts extend to incorporating other community-based support as a “collective response to oppression,” Gonzalez said.

That includes a knitting club making hats and scarves for patrollers, volunteer appreciation events and arts shows, including one where people get two minutes to vent or perform at a local wine shop. It’s all part of “people coming together to resist,” Gonzalez said.

‘Breaking bodies’

ICEWatch and neighborhood support work comes with risks. Garvey said training focuses on helping people “physically stay safe and to be as prepared as possible for what we would now consider really unusual or aggressive behavior from law enforcement.”

Responders have been detained, tear-gassed, driven off the road while riding bikes and “had guns pointed into their cars,” Garvey said.

Illinois State Senator Graciela Guzmán said she and her staffers are working by 7 a.m. nearly every day, responding to calls from the Northwest Side Rapid Response Team. Ninety schools on Chicago’s Northwest Side have “school watch” teams, Guzmán said.

One Saturday in October, in a residential neighborhood, Guzmán and her staffers were tear-gassed.

“I'm not sure that I'm gonna get the sound of my staffer trying to breathe out of my brain for quite some time,” Guzmán said.

“It's really, really scary when that happens to you. It's scary when you're seeing it happen en masse to community members.”

Guzmán said ICE’s presence has been "overwhelming," the Trump administration "indiscriminate" in who it detains.

Of Guzmán’s constituents, those detained include a daycare worker, a cook, “parents on their way to school with their kids” and a handyman — not to mention U.S. citizens, she said.

“One of the eerie feelings is when you just miss someone getting detained, and you get on site and their car is still on. It's parked, everything is open,” she said.

Andre Vasquez, alderman for Chicago’s 40th Ward, said the Trump administration’s claim of detaining the "worst of the worst" was “bull—t.”

Landscapers, single parents, elderly people and churchgoers have also been detained, Vasquez and Garvey said.

“They're breaking bodies. They're breaking doors. They're breaking windows, and they use tear gas as if it's something that should be used every day in our streets, when we know that it should not be,” Guzmán said.

“They're using incredibly violent, heartbreaking tactics.”

ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection "are trained to use the minimum amount of force necessary to resolve dangerous situations to prioritize the safety of the public and themselves. Our officers are highly trained in de-escalation tactics and regularly receive ongoing use of force training," McLaughlin said.

"We remind peaceful protestors and members of the media to exercise caution. Being near unlawful activities in the field does come with risks – though our officers take every reasonable precaution to mitigate dangers to those exercising their protected First Amendment rights.

"However, when faced with violence or attempts to impede law enforcement operations, our officers will take legal and necessary steps to ensure their own safety and that of bystanders, up to and including use of force.

One ICE agent “clocked” a young man in the chin as he observed the arrest of a woman in suburban Evanston who crashed her car into an ICE vehicle after it stopped suddenly, Gonzalez said.

Gonzalez said he and other observers were threatened with pepper spray. Agents sat on the young man and one “put his foot by his neck” before handcuffing him, he said.

“The kid was staring at me. His face was just beat up, already starting to swell up, and it was ugly. It was really f—g bad,” Gonzalez said.

Of the incident, McLaughlin said “agents were being aggressively tailgated by a red vehicle. As agents tried to make a U-turn, the red car crashed into Border Patrol.

"A hostile crowd then surrounded agents and their vehicle and began verbally abusing them and spitting on them. One physically assaulted a Border Patrol agent and kicked an agent," McLaughlin said.

"As he was being arrested, he grabbed the agents genitals and squeezed them. As you know this is an extremely painful experience for most human beings and justifies certain responses, the agent delivered several defensive strikes to the agitator to free his genitals from the agitator’s vice."

Vasquez was tear-gassed twice when visiting the ICE facility in Broadview, Ill.

He has organized whistle kit events, “Know Your Rights” business trainings and rapid response efforts with his chief of staff, Cat Sharp, who is running for Cook County commissioner and was one of six Broadview protestors federally indicted for conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers.

“These fascists are looking [at] every possible way to attack people,” Vasquez said.

“If it's not physically on residential streets, it's politically to the court systems, so what we know is, ultimately, justice will prevail.

“These folks don't understand Chicago if they think we're going to tolerate it.”