Volunteers like Lucy, doing ICE or migra watch shifts across the city, tend to work in their own neighborhoods. They are part of a network of rapid-response groups that have sprung up over the last few months to protect immigrant communities from the Trump administration’s brutal, far-reaching “mass deportation” program, led by Department of Homeland Security director Kristi Noem. It would easily take dozens of pages to provide a full accounting of the abductions, arrests, and protests that have taken place in Chicago as of mid-November. The Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, or ICIRR, posted verified sightings of federal immigration agents nearly every day in September and October. Shortly before I met Lucy, ICIRR identified federal agents in at least nine Chicago neighborhoods and suburbs on a single day: Melrose Park, Oak Park, Cicero, and more, as well as at the Kane County Courthouse and the O’Hare International Airport. At O’Hare, according to reports verified by ICIRR, at least 20 agents shut down exits at rideshare lots, demanded identification from drivers, and detained multiple people. All told, according to the Department for Homeland Security, more than 4,000 people in the city have been taken off the streets by federal agents and held in immigration detention facilities since September, in what the Trump administration calls “Operation Midway Blitz.”
ICE, CBP, and others have violently retaliated against these groups in part because the agencies correctly understand what many do not: An organized movement is a formidable adversary.
On the far Southwest Side of Chicago, by Lucy’s estimate, hundreds of people have been working together since early September to defend their neighbors, joining thousands across the city. Just outside the parking lot of a nearby Home Depot on Western, a broad street dividing Brighton Park from Back of the Yards, one community group starts its shift at six in the morning: a couple of people with a table, folding chairs, and free coffee. Not far away, ICE uses the parking lot of a strip mall as a temporary base. Enforcement officers gather here, their faces covered in balaclavas, name badges stripped off their uniforms. They idle in their unmarked vehicles, some with the license plates removed. Then they caravan together to pick off people setting up food carts, taking their kids to school, or just out walking alone.
It’s no surprise, then, that these efforts have been cast by Noem and other officials as violent and criminal. Almost all of the people to whom I spoke for this story chose to use pseudonyms, to ensure that they can keep doing community defense work in this environment of new and escalating legal threats. Some are also immigrants or have immigrant family members to protect. People are risking a great deal to defend their neighbors, their students, their co-workers, and their customers, while trying to withstand the chaos caused by armed, masked federal officers operating on Chicago streets with apparent impunity. “What they’re doing is an occupation,” Lucy says. “It’s lawless.” And anybody questioning this reality, she tells me, “is living in their own fantasy land.”
While many of the rapid-response groups that formed during that period were new, and many people new to community defense work joined, the effort was “not our first rodeo,” as Lucy noted. Chicago is a big city, but the Southwest Side still feels like “an incredibly small town,” she explained, in which many of the community networks now involved in ICE watch already existed. Long before this wave of neighborhood organizing in Back of the Yards, immigrant workers at the Union Stockyards, Chicago’s meatpacking district, organized their own communities. Saul Alinsky’s famed neighborhood-based approach to community organizing took shape here. The European immigrant families are now mostly gone, but the Mexican immigrants who have lived and organized in the neighborhood since the 1920s remain, now joined by multiple new generations, most recently from Venezuela.
These are now some of the immigrants whose neighbors have come out to defend them from ICE. Even those who are at high risk of being detained have joined the rapid-response networks, whether to watch and report possible ICE activity or to visit with neighbors and document what happens after a family member is taken. By the time ICE launched its operation in Chicago in early September, neighborhoods were ready. Homan’s complaints were accurate: They were educated and they were trained. Now, when ICE arrives, “sometimes it’s not even the rapid-response team that starts with the whistles and the honking,” Lucy explained. “It’s the neighbors on the block.”
During the first Trump administration, immigrant rights groups in Chicago, like Organized Communities Against Deportations, were monitoring ICE and developing deportation defense, said Rey Wences, then a volunteer with OCAD and now the senior director of deportation defense at ICIRR. But it was after working alongside Black-led racial justice groups in the city, such as Black Youth Project 100 and Assata’s Daughters, that migra watch evolved. “We saw the connections,” Wences said, between deportation defense and cop watch, and OCAD asked if it could work with the other groups to build something tailored to watching ICE. The migra watch training ICIRR now leads drew inspiration from all those efforts. In September and October alone, Wences said, ICIRR trained more than 6,700 people. It feels like the organizing has reached “a critical mass,” they said. Indeed, ICIRR was only one of many groups training people up—“like a muscle we all flexed.” As with cop watch, ICE watch is not only a form of protest; it builds and demonstrates a kind of safety net that law enforcement cannot provide—that, in fact, law enforcement actively undermines.
The injunction came as a result of a legal challenge filed by demonstrators, religious practitioners, and journalists (including the Chicago News Guild, which is part of the national NewsGuild-CWA, as is The New Republic’s union, the NewsGuild of New York). The challenge argued that federal agents’ use of force violated constitutionally protected protest and religious and news gathering activities. In her ruling, Judge Ellis singled out Border Patrol commander Bovino—who is often the only unmasked and clearly identified federal officer on the scene of ICE abductions and violence against community members—stating that Bovino repeatedly lied under oath about agents’ use of force. Hours later, Bovino was out with a caravan on the Southwest Side, as federal agents fired pepper balls at a moving vehicle in Gage Park and pointed rifles at people in Little Village. The operation, he told the Chicago Tribune, was “going very violent.”
“I like to say they’re running from us,” Lucy said. “If we’re not already there, we’re coming in like two minutes.”
Inflatable Halloween decorations wave in some of the front yards we pass. Outside of Gage Park High School, we pause to chat with a crossing guard in a yellow vest. Lucy rolls down the window. “I’m a neighbor in the area,” she explains. “We’re doing ICE watch, so just looking out for ICE vehicles.” New message notifications ding again. “We got reports of a Wagoneer, which, you don’t see too many Wagoneers around here, they’re long and boxy…. I figured I would let you know, just in case.” Before she is done, the crossing guard is already repeating, “Just in case. All right. Thank you,” like this happens all the time. It’s not her first rodeo either.
ICE has also turned on those residents who dare document and track them across the city. On October 20, reported The TRiiBE, a local independent news site, an attorney named Scott Sakiyama, who had been following immigration agents in his car, was detained by them at gunpoint. Sakiyama had defended a man who had faced federal charges for allegedly assaulting a Border Patrol agent outside the immigrant “processing center” in Broadview, an inner suburb of Chicago. The government had already dropped the prosecution. But when Sakiyama spotted armed, masked immigration agents driving in Oak Park and blew a whistle to alert neighbors, agents stopped him. “Exit your vehicle, or we’re gonna break your window and we’ll drag you out,” one said. This all took place across the street from Abraham Lincoln Elementary School, where one of Sakiyama’s kids is a student. He was loaded into the agents’ vehicle and driven to the Broadview detention facility, where he was merely given a citation and returned to his car. “The federal government is intent on abusing 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 is a crime to tell your neighbors this is happening.” He encouraged people to attend a rapid-response training and start their own whistle brigade. ICIRR now holds virtual trainings every week; the one I dropped in on in late October was attended by more than a thousand people from dozens of neighborhoods.
But among even the more sympathetic government leadership, Chicagoans’ political efforts to protect immigrant communities have only gone so far. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has referred to the protection afforded by the city’s welcoming ordinance, which is meant to prohibit collaboration between immigration officers and Chicago police, but when ICE and Border Patrol roll through city neighborhoods, the police have been right there. Residents have been told that Chicago police are prohibited from engaging in immigration enforcement (unless ordered to do so by a court), when they can see with their own eyes that Chicago cops are clearing roads for the fleets of sports-utility vehicles and oversize trucks used by ICE and Border Patrol to haul people to Broadview. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has gained a national reputation as a leader who stands up to Trump and his mass deportation machine, but outside Broadview, where activists, religious leaders, and media gather, the officers firing tear gas and pepper balls at them are Illinois State Police, sent there, according to Pritzker, to “ensure people could safely express their rights.”
As we drive, we see them, more and more people out on the streets, watching. On a corner at a gas station, a small group of people, some in KN95 masks, stand on the grassy strip at the side of the road, watching. At the Home Depot, Lucy parks and hops out to say “hi” to the people at the table near the parking lot, expecting them to shut down for the morning. A new shift of volunteers, however, has come to stay longer. Another small group is out on a side street lined with houses: four young people in hoodies and puffer coats. They repeat the ICIRR hotline number on a megaphone as they walk. Lucy tells them about what she saw, and they head right back out on foot. “Small town, small town,” Lucy says to me, and we drive off.
It can feel like ICE agents are everywhere. That, presumably, is how they want it to feel. At the same time, more and more people who have never engaged in anything like these actions before are purposefully running toward the trouble. As much as their resistance can appear organic and spontaneous—and some of it is—it’s supported by deliberate effort, an infrastructure working to help them expand their tolerance for taking risks.
Intentional or not, this way of spreading rapid-response work ensures that there’s no one point of failure. Multiple groups are employing multiple communication platforms, and generating new methods as they go. New people join them, “just coming up with their own ideas on how to defend Chicago,” as Lucy put it. It turns out that you can’t just gas and detain everyone in the streets. There will be more people tomorrow.
Baltazar Enriquez had been recording ICE for almost an hour by the time I tune in. He was following the federal agents’ caravan at the same time that, a few neighborhoods away, we were driving around Back of the Yards. Witnesses hopped out of their cars, turning their phones toward the agents and yelling, “Shame! Shame! Where’s your warrant? Why are you terrorizing us? Why? Why?” They walked toward the agents, phones up. One woman had a megaphone. The agents kept their faces fully covered with black and camo balaclavas and reflective sports sunglasses. They pointed their long guns at the ground as they paced. “Leave! Leave!” A few agents got back into their white SUV. There was Gregory Bovino, standing next to an agent in a gas mask holding a weapon with a tear gas canister. “Don’t do it! Don’t do it, Bovino.” Overhead, a helicopter buzzed. “ICE go home. ICE go home.” Chicago police formed a line as the feds retreated behind them. The people clustered at an intersection. Someone wore an inflatable pink axolotl costume, Mexican and American flags flew, whistles were distributed. I was still on the train when Baltazar, streaming on Facebook, asked some people to walk with him to another neighborhood to patrol—“Gage Park,” he said, where Lucy and I had just been—and logged off. It was hard to reconcile the violence on the live stream 15 minutes away and the quiet around us. No one was taken from any street we passed. It could feel like nothing happened, except for all the people we saw as we were watching, watching, too.
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