Trump Escalates Tyranny in Chicago
Having a common enemy sometimes unifies people, whether an unhoused Venezuelan migrant in Bronzeville or a mother in a South Shore apartment.
by Natalie Y. Moore
A U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent detains a protester in East Side, Chicago, Oct. 14, 2025. Photograph by Anthony Vazquez/Chicago Sun-Times, via AP.
Caryl R. West had just arrived at work at Bright Star Community Development Corporation on Oct. 1 when his phone rang at 9:21 a.m. His boss told him U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had bumrushed the Chicago homeless shelter they manage four minutes earlier and to get there right away. West met his colleague Nichole Carter on the stairs, and they quickly drove to the South Side shelter.
When they pulled up, vehicles were blocking the street and at least 25 masked individuals wearing tan fatigues were in the middle of a surprise immigration raid. Federal officers chased 20 people, a mix of current and former shelter residents. Some had been en route to the bus stop for work; others were enjoying the unusually warm autumn weekday.
“It was disturbing because we tried to create a space of peace and shelter for our residents, and it felt like that space had been invaded,” said West, executive director of Bright Star CDC. He said masked agents never communicated what they wanted or showed any documents, much less a warrant. They did not try to enter the shelter and sped off after 30 minutes. Armed agents snatched two Latino residents and eventually released them after they showed proper paperwork — an unusually happy ending.
“It was very surreal,” said Carter, director of community strategy and partnerships.
West asked, “What does this mean for our residents? How do we make them feel safe?”
Located in a former charter school, the city-funded 260-bed shelter transitioned last year from exclusively housing migrants to offering a place for anyone experiencing homelessness. The CDC, an arm of Bright Star Church, stepped in to run the facility in June. Today approximately 105 occupants are migrants.
Bright Star serves the historic Bronzeville community, the first stop for Black Southerners who journeyed to the city during the 20th century’s Great Migration. Both the descendants of Southern migrants and migrants from the global south came to Chicago in search of better economic and housing opportunities. But racial segregation divides the city, sowing distrust and resentment.
We got here in part because of a GOP maneuver in 2022 when Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas started busing migrants from his state to Chicago, a political ploy to protest the Democratic city’s sanctuary policies. Migrants and asylum seekers, mostly from Venezuela, found themselves sleeping outside police stations because they had no place to go. Mothers kept babies close to their chest, begging for food. For two years, the crisis tested the political mettle and compassion of elected officials and residents. The city spent more than $600 million to care for and resettle 51,000 new arrivals. Underresourced communities raised legitimate gripes about spending priorities and anti-Black sentiments among immigrant communities. Disdain toward migrants couldn’t be ignored either. The city struggled with the emergency of new arrivals, who had never seen snow and were inhumanely shuttled to temporary shelters across Chicago. A group of Black residents sued the city, arguing that housing migrants in public buildings was a nuisance. When migrants were briefly moved into a closed public school, old wounds surfaced in the Black neighborhood, where residents had hoped the building would be turned into a community center, even though there was nothing luxurious about sheltering there. Balancing immediate migrant needs with systemic disinvestment in Black communities led to finger-pointing when the true culprits were white supremacy and capitalism.
For the Black managers of the Bronzeville shelter, ensuring that everyone felt at home — even in a temporary location with makeshift bedrooms — was tough in the beginning. The poor Black unhoused residents “felt like an afterthought,” said Carter, explaining that some city services “really did focus a little bit more heavily on the migrant population. If two residents needed a bus card, one would get it, and one would not, depending on where the funding came from. So we had to begin to level that playing field and have conversations that you can’t do that, because then you’re pitting residents against each other.”
After the federal mass-deportation initiative dubbed “Operation Midway Blitz” hit the shelter, a meeting was held the next day. Black residents affirmed they stood with Latino residents and the raid impacted everyone. Afterward folks were less divided by race, spending time together and offering nods of acknowledgment.
ICE’s operation began tormenting neighborhoods all over the city in September. Black Chicago didn’t expect to be awakened by Black Hawk helicopters in the middle of the night. The day before the Bronzeville raid, on Sept. 30, hundreds of federal agents swooped in on an apartment building in the majority-Black South Shore neighborhood. FBI, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and ATF agents terrorized residents with weapons drawn, ransacking apartments and scaring children. The Department of Homeland Security said that some of the 37 people arrested had ties to gangs and criminal activity. No proof of gang connections was offered, and U.S. citizenship didn’t prevent Black tenants from agents’ handcuffs.
Chicago is on edge.
Agents arrested and roughed up a City Council alderperson. Federal agents killed a Mexican father in the suburbs. They shot a woman five times who they said had boxed them in with a car, but bodycam footage is inconsistent with their claims. Immigrant families fear walking their children to school. Abducted street vendors are forced to abandon their vehicles and livelihoods. A pepper-spray or tear-gas attack could be around the corner. Residents are resisting by taking to the streets in the form of demonstrations, mutual aid, and tracking ICE activity.
Tensions between Black and brown communities are real, but organizers are working to forge ties between them as the threat to everyone grows. Actions targeting one group might be the rehearsal for something more sinister and all-encompassing: martial law.
Wadsworth Elementary School closed in 2013, one of 50 public schools shut down by Rahm Emanuel, then the mayor. After years of vacancy, it was converted into a migrant shelter under Mayor Lori Lightfoot. Photograph by Carlos Javier Ortiz for Hammer & Hope.
U.S. Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino was among the agents in tactical gear walking down Michigan Avenue on a sunny Sunday in September. He casually referred to arresting people based on how they look, textbook racial profiling now supported by cover from the U.S. Supreme Court. The ease with which they showed up — like gawking tourists or fans tailgating at a Bears game — is part of the Trump administration’s strategy of normalizing urban invasions. In early October, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem bragged that the agency had arrested 1,000 people within a month. ICE officials didn’t respond to a request for an interview.
For now, a judge has blocked Trump from deploying the National Guard to Chicago, citing no credible evidence of danger or rebellion.
For 10 years, Trump has tweeted snarling threats to the City of Big Shoulders, not least because it is where Barack Obama rose as a politician. In 2016, protesters led Trump’s team to cancel his campaign event. More recently, the president posted a meme that said, “I love the smell of deportations in the morning,” illustrated with an uncharacteristically fit and buff Trump squatting on the banks of Lake Michigan as helicopters swirl around the skyline and fire rages in the background. “Chicago is about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR,” he added. FBI Director Kash Patel, Noem, and Bovino all use Chicago for photo ops. Cracking down on both immigration and crime in what Trump calls the “most dangerous city inof the world” are the twin goals. Trump erroneously claimed 4,000 people were killed in “a very short period of time,” never mind that Chicago actually has experienced declines in violent crime.
One afternoon I spoke with Juliet de Jesus Alejandre, executive director of Palenque Logan Square Neighborhood Association, a community group on the northwest side of the city. “Today was our turn,” she said. “All of it is violent and all of it is awful. We didn’t see tear gas today. What we saw were very quick abductions, within three minutes. It feels faster today.”
She is part of a rapid response team of 40 to 50 people carrying whistles as they walk the streets. They don’t try to stop ICE but act as eyes on the street, documenting kidnappings and getting contact information for a loved one from the person shoved into a federal vehicle. That day volunteers witnessed 10 arrests. The first three men detained were day laborers posted up at a gas station. Another man had just walked out of a grocery store when agents snatched him up and threw away his bags, she said.
As much as the multiracial coalition showing up to face down ICE is heartening, the crisis is teaching a hard lesson, said de Jesus Alejandre, a daughter of immigrants.
“I would say for Latinos, the understanding that they don’t matter to this government — that’s clear. That’s the clarity that Black Americans have had forever,” she said. “And so if you do not believe in the American dream, what is left is solidarity” — and that, she said, “is now replacing the American dream.”
A few days later on a Saturday in October, 30 people, mostly Black, sat in folding chairs at the Westside Justice Center for a know-your-rights training.
Matthew Harvey, from the Black-led social justice group Equity and Transformation, or EAT, led the room in chants: “We keep us safe.” He advised: If detained, exercise the right to remain silent after asking for a lawyer. Do not open your door unless a valid warrant is shown through the window. He quizzed the room on their rights. Then he had people break into small groups and imagine how they would spend $1.6 million a day on safety, the same amount it would cost to deploy the National Guard. While folks in the room radically dreamed, I asked Harvey how he educates Black people to understand that ICE is not just an immigrant issue.
“You hear it all the time — people blaming the circumstances of our neighborhoods on the migrants, or feeling a type of way because they feel like they got benefits that people who are already citizens here deserved or need,” he told me. “There’s definitely this uphill battle where people are kind of low-key happy. You get some people that are actively like saying that it’s a good thing that ICE is abducting folks from their homes, deporting people.”
An incident a block away revealed again why Black Chicagoans aren’t immune. A viral video showed a Black man hemmed in by the feds, who then put him in a chokehold. Harvey uses that footage to tell naysayers, “ICE is just another one of the alphabet boys,” like the FBI, CIA, and DEA, which Black people know all too well.
“The lie they’re telling us is that it’s a Venezuelan that’s in the way of your prosperity,” Harvey said. These conversations are just a start, he explained, but “you want them to at least get that hitch in their thought.”
“You don’t want to press too hard on it because then you make them feel like they stupid. People are not stupid. People have been misled. You’ve got to give them that space to sit with that.”
The inaugural know-your-rights teach-in at St. Michael Missionary Baptist Church on the West Side of Chicago, Sept. 6, 2025. Photograph courtesy of Equity and Transformation (EAT).
The Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights offered some of its materials for the EAT training. The two groups had solidified a working relationship in response to the trafficking of migrants to the city. They and other groups like them helped push the city government to create a single system for the unhoused instead of separating migrants from other Chicagoans. When the feds showed up this fall, allies didn’t have to forge new ties with cold calls.
“If you want to dwell on the darkness, there’s a lot of things to feel helpless and hopeless about,” said Lawrence Benito, executive director of ICIRR. But when he sees “a lot of people that are stepping up,” including “donating money, donating their time, grocery shopping, walking their kids to school,” he added, “I’m hoping that through this people see that the pendulum can swing the other way, because I don’t think we can just simply moderate the activities of ICE. The aggression is not something that can just be changed or modified around corners. I think that people will eventually see that the whole system is rotten and needs to be abolished and replaced with something else.”
Elizabeth Todd-Breland is a historian at the University of Illinois Chicago and studies local social movements. She acknowledged anti-immigrant sentiment in Black communities and anti-Blackness that circulates in Latine communities, but pointed out, “There are such powerful moments and movements in this city based on solidarity. You can think of that in labor organizing,” when workers crossed racial lines to fight for their rights and against capitalism. She said, “One of the big things that comes to mind is the Rainbow Coalition in the 1960s, where the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords and the Young Patriots, white folks from Uptown, were coming together and fighting against poverty.”
She recalled how shared experiences of police brutality and exploitative housing practices brought people together, such as when Harold Washington became the first Black mayor of Chicago in 1983, his election was made possible by solidarity across racial and ethnic lines. She said, “More recently, in the 2010s, the struggles against school closings, against privatization, for a robust vision of schools as publicly funded, robust public entities as community hubs, brought folks together across the city, particularly across Black and brown communities.” She said the current political moment clearly shows that “federal forces occupying our city are the enemy of Black and brown people.”
A friend living in Washington, D.C., currently occupied by the National Guard, jokes that I live in a free state. Blue Illinois, a haven for reproductive rights and the First Amendment, is surrounded by a sea of red. The state has enshrined abortion protections and was the first in the nation to outlaw book bans. Illinois refuted Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s dangerous public health policy by establishing its own vaccination access initiative.
Our billionaire governor JB Pritzker isn’t afraid to stand up to Trump beyond pithy memes (what’s the point of having fuck-you money if you don’t use it?). When Trump recently posted that the governor and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson should be arrested, Pritzker shrugged and retorted, “Come and get me.”
The playbook is: See you in court. Illinois sued over the National Guard deployment. Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul had filed more than a dozen lawsuits three months into Trump’s second presidency. Johnson has signed an “ICE Free Zone” executive order prohibiting federal immigration agents from using any city-owned property during their ongoing operations. Considering this administration does what it pleases, I asked the mayor if his executive orders make a difference.
“We have to send a strong message to the people of Chicago. I don’t think I would have ever imagined that a sitting president would declare war on Chicagoans,” Johnson told me. “It’s incumbent upon all of us at this moment to show strength and resolve to ensure that we’re protecting our democracy as well as our humanity.”
He said the president is interested not in safety but in authoritarianism. At a time when the extreme right refuses to accept the results of the Civil War, here’s the chance for a rematch.
“Now don’t get me wrong — there is more work for us to do to solidify this coalition of working people — Black, brown, white, Asian,” Johnson said. “And the best way I believe for us to secure our democracy and protect our humanity is through the lens of Black liberation.”
When voters elected Trump in 2024, Chicago Public Schools emailed a letter to parents like me reaffirming its commitment never to ask families about their immigration status or coordinate with ICE officials. When the U.S. Department of Education fired off a “Dear colleague” missive threatening to cut funding on race issues earlier this year, it happened to be Black History Month, and my daughter continued her project on the Black artist Margaret Burroughs while parents decorated the doors with legendary Black figures. CPS refused to eliminate its Black student success program, and the feds clawed back millions from the district. There’s no anticipatory obedience here.
Trump was right to highlight our beautiful Third Coast in his vicious meme. My favorite skyline views are from the South Side. The South Shore Cultural Center is a beautiful former country club on Lake Michigan, now run by the Chicago Park District. Hours after sitting in on EAT’s know-your-rights training, I attended a fund-raiser for the Inner-City Muslim Action Network (IMAN) there. For almost three decades, IMAN has worked to build bridges in South Side Black and Arab communities around housing and prison reentry.
Five blocks away from the apartment building raided on Sept. 30, the IMAN executive director, Rami Nashashibi, who is of Palestinian heritage, recounted visiting it in the aftermath. A Black man on the corner told him and other faith leaders, “We see people indifferent to Black pain,” and shoddy conditions had long made the property a source of suffering. Nashashibi said he dapped the brother up for speaking truthfully. Then he closed the night by telling the audience to put love and energy against the forces trying to exploit pain. We can — and should — see ourselves within one another instead.
Chicago is witnessing escalated tyranny. But the people are defending the city. The current political moment clearly shows that having a common enemy sometimes unifies people — whether an unhoused Venezuelan migrant living in Bronzeville or a mother living in a South Shore apartment building.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Natalie Y. Moore is a Chicago-based journalist and the author of The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation.
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