Matthew Kaplan/Block Club ChicagoAmong the measures expected to be considered by the City Council on Thursday is a resolution to investigate “every instance of potential misconduct” by federal agents in Chicago amid the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement blitz.
This story was originally published in Block Club Chicago, a nonprofit newsroom focused on Chicago’s neighborhoods. Sign up for its free daily newsletter.
CHICAGO — The City Council’s immigration committee passed three resolutions Wednesday aimed at countering federal agents’ actions during the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement surge in Chicago.
A measure aimed at investigating misconduct by federal agents was among the trio of resolutions that will now go before the full City Council for a vote Thursday. Also included is a resolution condemning the endangering of children during recent immigration raids and calls for support of “immigrant communities, racial justice and constitutional freedoms and opposition of military presence in Chicago.”
“Fascism is here,” said Ald. Andre Vasquez (40th), who leads the council’s Committee on Immigrant and Refugee Rights. “We are watching a federal government weaponizing itself against its own people. We are watching unidentified agents with masks on kidnapping people off the street.”
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The resolutions come as the Trump administration’s large-scale immigration operations — ICE’s Midway Blitz and Border Patrol’s At Large — enter their second month. More than 1,000 people have been arrested during Operation Midway Blitz, Russell Hott, ICE field director in Chicago, told Block Club earlier this month.
Neighbors and community leaders voiced concerns about the operations during Wednesday’s meeting, saying people in Chicago are fearing for their neighbors.
“What’s going on in this country is very heartbreaking,” neighbor Wendy Zanabria said during the meeting. “It’s the fear that we all live in. Not knowing — who is going to come home? … Who are we going to mourn next?”
Also Wednesday, Vaughn Bryant, Metropolitan Peace Initiatives’ executive director, drew attention to the disconnect between President Donald Trump’s claims, without evidence, that Chicago is a crime-infested “hellhole” and “murder capital of the world.” Such claims were previously used by the administration to justify the prospect of sending federal troops to the city.
Bryant cited violence intervention efforts as instead helping promote a drop in violent crime that’s been reflected in law enforcement data.
“We don’t think that we’re the main reason. But we are part of the reason [violent crime is down]. And we think that the civilian infrastructure for public safety that we’ve established over the years is contributing to a historic summer, that we’ve had the best summer since the ’60s,” Bryant said.
City Council should consider earmarking money for more data-based, alternative policing programs like the kind Metropolitan Peace Initiatives is involved in to continue that trend, Bryant said.
“The idea of using military force against the people of Chicago is not just dangerous, it is fundamentally un-American,” said Ald. Michael Rodriguez (22nd). “The threat by President Trump to ‘straighten out our city’ with military occupation was not about safety. It was about power. It was an attempt to intimidate, to criminalize and to divide us.”
Last week, U.S. District Judge April Perry expressed doubt over the “credibility and assessment” of federal authorities who have since sought to deploy the National Guard to the Chicago area, saying it’s needed to protect immigration agents and facilities.
A Homeland Security spokesperson did not immediately return a request for comment.
“We are watching a president — slash dictator, slash authoritarian — forcibly occupying the city of Chicago because of ideological differences. Seeking to create chaos and disorder, to record it, televise it and use that narrative to justify further escalation,” Vasquez said. “We saw it just occur yesterday. We’ve seen it happen for the past number of weeks.”
Over the past month, federal agents in Chicago have shot at least two people, killing one; repeatedly tear-gassed protesters and first responders; shot rubber bullets at protesters; detained U.S. citizens, including children; handcuffed a Chicago alderperson in a hospital; smoke-bombed and tear-gassed people in Logan Square, Albany Park and East Side; fired a chemical weapon at a TV reporter and detained a journalist, among other incidents.
“We will not look away when migrants, refugees and asylees and others are hoarded off at gunpoint and persecuted in this great nation, echoing the terrors they sought refugee from,” Ahmed Rehab, executive director of the Council of American Islamic Relations’ Chicago branch, said at the meeting.
These actions by federal immigration agents are because Trump has sent an “army of under-qualified” and “undertrained” people who are acting like “bounty hunters” roving the Chicago area looking for “Brown people” to pick up, Rehab said.
A series of court orders last week directed agents to stop deploying riot-control weapons against journalists and peaceful protesters and to hold off on using the National Guard. A federal judge on Thursday also ordered the immediate removal of the fence erected in September around an ICE processing facility in Broadview. The fence was removed Wednesday, the Sun-Times reported.
Chicagoans have sought ways to resist the federal operations, like blowing whistles to alert neighbors that agents are near, recording agents in the field and putting up signs in businesses informing agents they are not welcome.
“It has been 37 days straight of day laborers, street food vendors and other vulnerable folks being targeted through Operation Midway Blitz. Under the pretense of targeting the ‘worst of the worst,’ we have instead seen indiscriminate and vile targeting of community members in Black and Brown communities across all of Chicago,” said Geovanni Celaya, an organizer with Latino Union of Chicago.
Celaya said agents have been detaining day laborers at hardware store parking lots without due process, instead focusing on the language they speak as a pretense to detain them. These detentions hurt the person arrested and their networks of family, friends, coworkers and neighbors, Celaya said.
“It is not a good feeling having to map in your head how your family will have to survive with the main form of income gone,” Celaya said.
During Wednesday’s meeting, Rehab read a passage from “The Diary of a Young Girl” by Anne Frank that he said was relevant to what Chicago is experiencing. That’s because — like Nazi Germany in the 1940s — the United States government is turning against its own people, he said.
“‘Terrible things are happening outside,’” Rehab said, quoting the famous diary. “‘Poor, helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart. Men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared.’”
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