Notes from a city under siege
One resident's take on the imminent federal invasion of America's third largest city.
Chicago’s celebration of Mexican Independence Day, held this past Saturday, is usually a raucous affair. There is a colorful parade through Pilsen, the gentrifying near Southwest Side neighborhood that was the city’s initial destination for Mexican in-migration. Cars with billowing Mexican flags stream through city neighborhoods — including the mostly white near North Side — with their horns honking to folks that wave (while others cup their ears).
This past weekend was very different. Attendance at Saturday’s parade, according to news accounts, was down sharply. And, if my near North Side neighborhood along Lake Michigan was any indication, the noisy cars were totally absent.
No one should be surprised. With the possibility of masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arriving at any moment, and the threat of a National Guard invasion looming over the entire city, local Hispanics did the logical thing. They stayed home — a wise move given the Supreme Court’s decision early Monday to legalize ICE agents using racial profiling to make their masked street arrests. Under this patently unconstitutional ruling, anyone with brown skin now faces random stops and possible arrest if they are not carrying proper papers.
ICE agents made four or five arrests over the weekend, according to local news accounts. The targets were “seemingly random, with agents profiling and approaching them on the street,” said Reyna Wences Nájera, who directs deportation defense for the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.
The arrestees included a street vendor selling flowers in Archer Heights, a mostly Hispanic neighborhood on the Southwest Side. Three men wearing vests reading “Police Federal Agent” jumped out of two vehicles, one of which had Missouri plates, according to an eyewitness who filmed the episode.
Reporters for the Tribune interviewed 26-year-old Gissele Garcia, who saw the encounter while driving home from a local grocery store. She pulled over, began filming, and shouted out to the street vendor for his name and any family members she could call. The man didn’t know his relatives’ phone numbers. “It seemed — I don’t know how to put this — like he had given up,” she said.
Economic harm
People in the targeted neighborhoods have also stopped shopping — a severe blow to the locally-owned and immigrant-run businesses that have revived shopping districts throughout the city. Some Hispanic employees have stopped showing up for work, an additional hardship for the countless restaurants, construction sites and light manufacturing plants that depend on Hispanic labor – both legal and illegal.
Foot traffic is down throughout Hispanic neighborhoods, Block Club Chicago reported this morning. That brought a desperate plea from community leaders.
“If you know a neighbor that may be vulnerable at this moment and you’re able to provide a ride or able to go to do that grocery shopping for them, please do,” said Any Huamani, a member of the Southwest Side rapid response network and organizer for the Brighton Park Neighborhood Council. "Be that support system, because only we can take care of each other.”
“If you are a U.S. citizen, please visit our neighborhoods, please go to our restaurants, please do your grocery shopping at our grocery stores, we got really good produce, really good food,” added Ere Rendón, vice president of immigrant justice for The Resurrection Project. “It is really important that we support our businesses.”
About 800,000 of Chicago’s 2.75 million residents or 29% of the local population is Hispanic. The city also houses anywhere from 150,000 to 180,000 undocumented immigrants, the large majority of whom hail from Latin America. Nearly half of children in Chicago’s schools are Hispanic. Many of them are undocumented, too.
Schools vow to protect kids
Among the protesters hitting the streets over the weekend were members of the Chicago Teachers Union, who handed out flyers telling local residents that the schools have vowed to protect children no matter what their legal status. “I know that with the threat of a federal deployment, it’s hard for parents to feel comfortable going through their daily routines, including sending their children to school,” wrote Interim Chicago Public Schools CEO Macquline King in a letter sent to parents late last week.
She emphasized that the district has protocols in place to protect students. “School is still the best, safest place for students, especially in these early weeks of the year,” she wrote. The Chicago Board of Education passed a resolution last fall to protect students regardless of their immigration status.
The CPS communications office has not yet responded to a request for today’s attendance data. But Brenda Rivera, a Chicago Public Schools parent and a parent leader for Kids First Chicago, warned “families will keep their kids at home out of fear for their safety or for them being picked up, whether you know, by mistake or not by mistake.” When asked by ChalkBeat Chicago if she thinks parents will keep their kids at home, Rivera said: “Students will miss out on their school. I have no doubt.”
Blaming a single incident
How has the Department of Homeland Security branded the chaos it has chosen to impose on the city of Chicago? It didn’t name its campaign Chipocalypse like the president of the United States, who posted an AI-generated image of himself in full war regalia a la Apocalypse Now. The trollmaster wrote: “I love the smell of deportations in the morning.”
It named its campaign after Katie Abraham, one of two Illinois college students killed by an alleged drunk driver earlier this year. The perpetrator was an undocumented Guatemalan man with a previous arrest record who fled the scene but was later arrested and charged with vehicular homicide. The incident took place in Urbana, about 135 miles south of Chicago.
As of Monday morning, spokespersons for DHS have not released arrest warrants or previous arrest records for anyone seized by ICE agents over the weekend.
So, to sum up the government’s campaign to date: It has terrorized children being kept out of school by fearful parents; it has imposed a government-created recession on neighborhoods reinvigorated by an influx of immigrants; and it has caused a readily identified sub-population to live in fear under what until this morning was an illegal law enforcement regime based on racial profiling.
If some institution in our society doesn’t put a stop to this madness, the damage will go far beyond the undermining of the economic, social and mental health of one of America’s great cities. It will set the stage for similar actions in other Democratic-run cities and states across the country, and put an end to any pretense that the U.S. is still a democracy.
Whether we know it or not, we're ALL under siege by the fascists. They are the minority, by quite a lot, but they control all the DOj, federal law enforcement, military, and SCOTUS, and that's a pat hand for a tyrant!
What are the chances that ICE will actually pick up any bad guys? These Hispanic neighborhoods would welcome ICE if it meant targeting drug dealers, gangs and guns. My guess is that the bad guys are too smart to stick around and have migrated out to Aurora to lie low until this blows over.