HAMMER AND HOPE: A Magazine of Black politics and culture
NO. 9
Winter 2025
The immigrant catchers, faces covered, chase the workers down the street in broad daylight. The enemy is the landscaper, the day laborer, the high school student born in Mexico, Honduras, Venezuela. In the masks and guns of the federal agents, we see the riot gear of the Ferguson cops, the billy clubs of the Alabama state troopers, the Klansman’s hood. And in the brave crowds who gather to confront them, we see the power of solidarity.
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Ashley Gilbertson/VII for Hammer & Hope
War at Home
Ashley Gilbertson
& Hammer & Hope
A record of ICE’s assault on immigrants and the people’s resistance.
War at Home
A record of ICE’s assault on immigrants and the people’s resistance.
Assistant Chief Patrol Agent David Kim runs down an alleyway after a caravan of federal agents pulled up on people in southwest Chicago, Nov. 6, 2025. Photographs by Ashley Gilbertson/VII for Hammer & Hope.
The immigrant catchers, faces covered, chase the workers down the street in broad daylight. They are armed and dressed in camo, like soldiers. This is a war involving only one army. The enemy is the landscaper, the day laborer, the high school student born in Mexico, Honduras, Venezuela.
In this special issue, Hammer & Hope commissioned the photojournalist Ashley Gilbertson to show us the Trump administration’s arrest and deportation campaign. He followed federal immigration agents in Chicago, New Orleans, and New York City as they cased parking lots and tree-lined streets and occupied court buildings, rounding people up.
Gilbertson has photographed conflict and migration around the world. In Chicago, two agents said that they recognized him from war zones in West Africa and Iraq. He recognized them, too — not as individuals, but as soldiers treating a city as a battlefield.
In these pictures, a familiar dynamic: Here is law enforcement, armed and faceless, and here is a young man with a rose on his sweatshirt and a furrowed brow. Here is the self-assured state actor who is empowered to destroy lives, and beside him, the civilian who must decide, breath to breath, what to do in response. In the masks and guns of the federal agents, we also see the riot gear of the Ferguson cops, the helmets and billy clubs of the Alabama state troopers, the Klansman’s hood. People hide as the troops come, stores lock up, fearsome quiet. Children run for home. Neighbors blow whistles, film, yell.
Wherever the agents appear, even when they lean idly, chatting, we see the cold threat of violence and the fragility of freedom. And in the brave crowds who gather to confront them, scrambling their illusion of total control, we see the power of solidarity, shining with human warmth.
Federal agents transfer a man to a detention vehicle near their patrol area in Niles, a suburb outside Chicago, Oct. 31, 2025.
In Chicago, in an otherwise empty parking lot in an industrial area not far outside the city limits, an innocuous-looking van was tucked out of sight. A driver sat up front, straw hat on the dash, not looking much different from the half-dozen Latino men sitting motionless behind him. As I got closer, I saw that he wore a mask and sunglasses. Everyone behind him was zip-tied.
In Iraq or Afghanistan, the military would call this a “detainee collection point.” Like many moments I observed during Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol operations, it reminded me of other times in combat zones. In fact, a lot of the agents’ tactics appear to come from military training: aggressive tactical driving on city streets to block roads and create a bubble of space around their caravan, often leading to accidents; shooting so-called less lethal projectiles such as pepper balls; grabbing people off the street; creating perimeters and pointing weapons at crowds.
When police officers escort a suspect, they tend to hold the handcuffs or the suspect’s arm; I regularly saw federal immigration agents grab their suspects by their coats near their necks, providing a little more control and a lot more humiliation. While some believe these agents are poorly prepared, I saw behavior that suggested combat experience — a hunch confirmed when I was approached by two agents who said they recognized me from war zones in West Africa and Iraq, where at least one of them said he had spent time with Joint Special Operations Command.
Federal agents detain a man in Chicago, Oct. 31, 2025.
A Border Patrol agent transfers a man to a detention vehicle that was stationed near their patrol area in Niles, Oct. 31, 2025.
A landscaper sits in shock next to an abandoned leaf blower after federal immigration agents detained his co-worker during a patrol around Chicago with senior U.S. Customs and Border Protection official Gregory Bovino, Oct. 28, 2025.
On Oct. 28, I watched as a caravan of federal agents driving through Chicago stopped at a parking lot. Armed men in fatigues leaped out and ran toward two landscapers. The masked men scaled a fence and grabbed one of the landscapers, zip-cuffed him, put him into a vehicle, and — with barely a word spoken — drove away.
During the two weeks I spent in Chicago observing ICE operations, I witnessed many detentions like this one.
On another day, on the city’s South Side, I watched as government immigration vehicles slowed as they passed an older Latino man, only to speed up again when they spotted two other Latino men a block away. The two — a father and son, it would turn out — were conducting maintenance on a building, and the father made a run for it before surrendering to the agents. He was searched and arrested as his son stood watching, slumped and silent.
After the ICE agents put the father in a vehicle, one agent walked over to the son and handed him a set of car keys taken from his father’s pocket.
“Hope you have a good day,” the agent said. Through the mask, I couldn’t tell if he was smiling.
The man above was being processed in a parking lot after he was detained by federal agents. After he was fingerprinted, agents took photographs of his face. Like the detentions, this feels similar to what I witnessed in Iraq and other combat zones, where civilians and suspects were forced to submit to biometric scans.
The police and federal immigration agents on Chicago’s streets were heavily armed.
Gregory Bovino (center) and other federal agents stop in a gas station in Niles, Ill., Oct. 31, 2025.
Senior U.S. Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino is a rising star in MAGA circles. In charge of immigration enforcement operations in Los Angeles, Chicago, North Carolina, and now New Orleans, he calls himself a “sanctuary buster.”
“There are no sanctuaries,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press. “There will be no sanctuaries.”
In Albany Park, on the city’s northwest side, a woman peers out from a shop after federal immigration agents stormed the street.
The first sign that federal forces are active in an area is businesses closed during normal hours. Supermarkets lock their doors, beauty salons draw their shutters, empanada stalls on street corners stand abandoned. Anyone at risk runs for cover.
One supermarket that I visited after a raid nearby had locked its doors shut, and a producer I was traveling with asked to use the bathroom. After identifying ourselves with press IDs, we were allowed entry, and back in the storeroom, the producer saw a staff member up in the rafters, hiding on top of a huge pile of empty pallets. Of course that doesn’t mean he was undocumented. The fear that ICE has stoked in immigrant communities goes beyond immigration status — from what I saw, anyone who’s brown could be a target.
An hour later, we arrived at another supermarket that had closed, asking customers on social media not to visit. According to customers, agents had tried to grab a man selling chips outside but let him go.
Everything appears random. It doesn’t matter if you’re a citizen, a legal resident, or undocumented. I watched one afternoon as a child around 10 years old walked home from school. When a Border Patrol vehicle, packed with armed men in masks, drove by, he sprinted toward his home, where his mother held the door open for him, slamming it closed after he crossed the threshold.
Residents react to the presence of federal forces in the Little Village, a majority Latino neighborhood in Chicago, Nov. 6, 2025.
A man walking his dog looks at Border Patrol agents, Chicago, Oct. 28, 2025.
Community members protest federal immigration agents in Cicero, Ill., Nov. 8, 2025.
Watching a war play out in innocuous, everyday places is jarring. The new battlefields are places like a Sam’s Club parking lot in Cicero, a majority Latino town just over the city line, where community members, at enormous risk to themselves, protested as heavily armed ICE agents pointed weapons at the crowds.
The community responded with tremendous courage in the face of a deadly threat. During their Chicago operation, federal agents shot two people. One man, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico named Silverio Villegas González, was killed; Marimar Martinez, a U.S. citizen, was shot five times and somehow survived.
Border Patrol Agent Charles Exum, who shot Martinez, later bragged on text, “I’m up for another round of fuck around and find out.” Exum wrote to agents on Signal: “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys,” according to court records.
A crowd gathered in Little Village.
In Park City, a suburb about an hour north of Chicago, I saw the aftermath of a collision between an ICE vehicle and another belonging to rapid responders. The two men in the car fled, chased by agents, who eventually emerged from an alleyway with a Latino man trying desperately to break free from their grip. It was unclear if he was connected to the accident.
As they zip-cuffed his hands behind his back, a crowd formed, shouting for the man to be released between insults directed at the officers. Again and again, I saw similar reactions to ICE in communities like this — absolute fury from the residents who would emerge from their homes to defend their neighbors and berate ICE agents.
A member of the Little Village community is detained in a Sam’s Club parking lot in Cicero, Nov. 8, 2025.
Federal agents apprehend a man, Park City, Ill., Nov. 7, 2025. As he struggled, a masked agent shouted, “Get the fuck in, or we’ll make you get in,” while a Border Patrol photographer took pictures.
An anti-ICE protest on an I-94 overpass north of Chicago, Nov. 7, 2025.
One afternoon, as I followed a caravan of federal agents conducting raids, we drove under a protest on a freeway overpass, where residents had affixed posters opposing ICE’s invasion.
As members of the press, we were tasked with finding ICE agents and holding them accountable with our photographs. Chasing ICE is difficult, and we would spend days on end trying to find them. We’d monitor community chat groups on social media and messaging apps; we’d drive around looking for particular models of SUVs — Denalis and Wagoneers were popular — and we’d look for telltale signs like heavily tinted windows and out-of-state plates. “Chasing ghosts” is what my colleagues called it, because we would hear a report, get there quickly, and the agents would be gone. When we did manage to find them, we’d have about 30 seconds to work before they drove away.
In conflict, armed agents generally don’t want the media around. These agents recognize that the work we produce is evidence, a testimony to their actions, a historical record. Chicago felt reminiscent of the war zones I’ve worked in, where photographers arrive wearing gas masks and bulletproof vests, and the armed agents do their best to prevent us from making photographs.
Federal agents had been driving around this neighborhood in Niles for hours, stopping and grabbing landscapers and construction workers, while people emerged from their homes to film the agents and shout in protest.
Whistles are the soundtrack to ICE’s operation in Chicago and the tool carried by rapid responders. They are worn as necklaces, stuffed into purses and pockets, kept in cars — a symbol of resistance. The whistles are distributed door to door by activists and available for free at many small businesses throughout a city under siege; they often come with a pamphlet that reads “Form a crowd, stay loud.” The pamphlet provides simple instructions: “CODE 1: ICE NEARBY / BLOW IN A BROKEN RHYTHM. / CODE 2: CODE RED / BLOW IN A CONTINUOUS, STEADY RHYTHM / ICE IS DETAINING SOMEONE.”
Everywhere I went in Chicago, there were community members patrolling streets, following government agents, warning victims, and pushing back any way they could — and always, the whistles around their necks, the sign you’re around allies.
“That was my neighbor!” the woman screamed through tears at federal agents. “He’s just my neighbor!”
I tried to talk to the woman pictured above. She gave me permission to use her photograph, but she didn’t want to provide her name. Like so many people around ICE, she’s scared. Usually the stories I work on are filled with quotes, but the feds won’t talk to the press, and neither will anyone else.
In December, Trump launched a major new immigration operation named Catahoula Crunch, with the aim of rounding up 5,000 people in Louisiana and Mississippi for deportation. For the first two weeks of December, I chased federal agents around New Orleans and surrounding areas.
I didn’t see the kind of community response that had been a hallmark of my time in Chicago; maybe that’s because reports of ICE sightings were rare. When I did come across officers, they were often sitting in vehicles for long stretches or walking through the streets of Kenner, a nearby city with a growing Latino population.
Bovino regularly rolled through the streets with his caravan, as I saw agents photograph vehicle license plates. Members of the press who had traveled from around the country to cover the operation, including me, photographed Bovino talking to people who claimed to support the immigration crackdown. It felt like a public relations operation, so I stopped photographing.
The federal presence did cause a distinct sense of fear. Some restaurants shut down altogether, while others struggled to find staff to cover for workers who didn’t come in.
On my final day, rapid responders appeared to be finding their feet. I joined a protest in Slidell, across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, as a caravan snaked its way through the streets. Responders patrolled trailer parks and supermarkets. I came across agents on Pine Street, where I heard, for the first time since I’d arrived, the sound of a whistle warning that ICE was present.
By the time I left, on Dec. 11, DHS had announced 111 arrests, compared with 400 in the first week of operations in Charlotte, N.C.
Government agents walk through a residential neighborhood in Slidell, La., northeast of New Orleans, Dec. 11, 2025.
Anti-ICE demonstrators in Kenner, La., Dec. 7, 2025.
The anti-ICE protests led to dozens of arrests outside 26 Federal Plaza, New York City, June 11, 2025.
Masked federal agents outside the immigration court at 26 Federal Plaza, New York City, November 2025.
Every morning outside this building, hundreds of asylum seekers and immigrants wait in line, knowing that masked, armed ICE agents with a list of targets are lying in wait upstairs, in waiting rooms and corridors. Usually we see them on the 12th and 14th floors, peering into courtrooms.
Agents detain a Russian family, Oct. 22, 2025. The little girl was consoled by her mother as she stared at the masked men, who escorted the family to another floor “to ask a few questions.”
A woman cries outside the immigration court at 26 Federal Plaza, New York City, Nov. 25, 2025. Next to her is a volunteer detention-aid coordinator for a church.
The woman above arrived with her family from Venezuela three years ago. At New York City’s immigration court, ICE agents detained her son, a 20-year-old high school student. He was eventually released after community outcry and the help of legal volunteers. But the shock lingered. “They didn’t explain anything,” his mother told me later. “They just grabbed my son and took him away.
Is This Who Trump Meant by the ‘Worst of the Worst’?
TRANSCRIPT:
Is This Who Trump Meant by the ‘Worst of the Worst’?
The columnist Jamelle Bouie argues that the Trump administration’s immigration policy has more in common with ethnic cleansing than actual immigration enforcement.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement is obviously and technically an immigration enforcement agency. But when you look at what’s happening in Minnesota and across the country, this doesn’t look like immigration enforcement. “Can I go check a pulse?” “This is a school.” Immigration enforcement is largely an administrative issue. And so why do we have these paramilitaries on the streets taking children and using them as bait to get their parents? That’s essentially what happened in Columbia Heights, Minn., where a 5-year-old prekindergartner, Liam Conejo Ramos, and his father were taken and sent to a detention facility in Texas. They are legal immigrants. They have a valid asylum claim, but that doesn’t matter to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Why is it, in fact, the status of the people in question is irrelevant to ICE agents, and why is it that the architect of these policies, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, is so obsessed with the number of removals? “A minimum of 3,000 arrests for ICE every day.” If you think, as I think many Americans thought, when they voted for Trump in 2024, that immigration enforcement primarily means removing people who have committed some kind of criminal offense, then you’ll never reach 3,000 people a day. “I’m a U.S. citizen.” “I was born and raised here.” The only way you’ll reach 3,000 people a day is if you’re yanking people from their communities. “We’re going to come back for your whole family.” “These are kids. What’s wrong with you?” “Where is your warrant?” Is if you’re taking people who are legally here, or who have valid claims to be here. If you are destroying communities, trying to root out whoever happens to look wrong in your eyes. “Were you born here?” We do know that ICE is utilizing people’s race, ethnicity and language to determine if they’re going to be detained. This is in part thanks to an opinion by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, which allowed for this kind of behavior. “The color of my skin was the reason I was assaulted that day.” “C.B.P. officers yelled at me, saying: Get him. He’s Mexican.” Essentially describing it as an acceptable cost of immigration enforcement. Thank you, Justice Kavanaugh. in any case, this obsession with numbers, with arresting as many people as possible, makes communities less safe, both in a very literal way. You do not feel safe when there are armed, masked men roaming the streets looking for people to detain. And it takes the focus on the potential criminals who might need to be removed from the country. The answer to all of this is that what ICE is doing, what the administration is pushing, is not immigration enforcement. It has much more in common with ethnic cleansing, with trying to change the overall ethnic and racial mix of the country. There are campaigns of indiscriminate mass deportations that targets anyone who authorities believe simply does not belong, And their belief that these people do not belong rests on a racialized idea of what an American is. “We only take people from [EXPLETIVE] countries.” “We’re under invasion from within.” “I mean, we’re taking people from Somalia. Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden? Just a few.” And if that doesn’t persuade you of what is actually happening here, Imagine this is happening in another country and another place that isn’t the United States. Imagine you see political leaders in some other nation talking like our president does, talking like Stephen Miller does, sending masked armed paramilitaries through the streets to go door to door looking for various ethnic and racial minorities. Would you call it ethnic cleansing then? I think you might. We have to defend that culture and rediscover the spirit that lifted the West from the depths of the Dark Ages. Why are they taking people with legal status? People who are naturalized citizens, people who are natural-born citizens, and treating them as if they could be potentially deported to where? I do not know, because these are, again, citizens and legal residents. And here, you don’t need to take my word for it. Just listen to the president of the United States, who describes any number of different immigrant groups as essentially unable to be American, Filthy, dirty. Disgusting. Ridden with crime. Do we have any individuals from Somalia? Integral. Please raise your hand. These are low IQ people. How do they go into Minnesota and steal all that money? So in Somalia, the Somalians, you know what they’re good at, that’s about the only thing they’re good at is they’re good at pirating ships I Fox. don’t know. it. Yeah! Oh, You’re hurting your community. You’re an orphan...
