Chicago has increasingly emerged as the flashpoint in Trump’s war against immigrants. In the past month, over 1,000 undocumented immigrants and immigrants with temporary legal residency, as well as a considerable number of U.S. citizens, have been arrested and detained by federal authorities, and one person was killed when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents pulled over his car and shot him. And on October 8, his administration deployed over 300 Texas and 100 Illinois National Guard troops to the Chicago area, fulfilling Trump’s clear intent to militarize his attack against immigrants on both the local and national level.

On October 10, a Federal Appeals Court ruled that the troops cannot be deployed for at least the next two weeks, although they can remain at the U.S. Army Reserve Center in Elmwood, southwest of Chicago. The judge ruled that the administration’s claim that they are needed to suppress “the danger of rebellion” is without merit. The administration will surely appeal the decision, which will soon enough make its way to the Supreme Court. It will most likely allow the deployment to go forward, as it has already done in cases involving other states through one of its unsigned Emergency (or “shadow”) Dockets.

This crisis is not going to be resolved at the judicial level. It will take massive and sustained mass mobilization, which has already begun to emerge in the Chicago area. Dozens of protests and picket lines have sprung up in neighborhoods around the city and surrounding suburbs, and numerous rallies have been held downtown—the most recent being a march of 7,000 on October 8. More actions are planned in the coming days.

ICE agents are targeting workers, students, and residents who look Latinx. They are arresting people in impoverished parts of town as well as in relatively affluent ones. And they are not limiting themselves to the city limits—many arrests occur in the suburbs, some of which have a considerable number of recent immigrants. ICE agents often arrive in the dead of night in unmarked cars with no uniform while wearing ski-masks, and without court-sanctioned warrants. In other occasions, they detain people in the full light of day, in front of schools, restaurants, libraries, etc. ICE is making use of the recent Supreme Court ruling that racial profiling is permissible for apprehending immigrants.

The most sustained protests have occurred in Broadview, a suburb 13 miles west of downtown Chicago, where a detention center is located that processes immigrants for deportation. Almost daily, picket lines and protests have been held there for well over a month. Village officials have launched three separate criminal investigations into abusive behavior by federal agents, who have repeatedly used rubber bullets, tear-gas, pepper spray, and stun grenades against protesters. All this occurred before the National Guard was deployed to the Chicago area.

After Broadview Mayor Katrina Thompson asked ICE agents to stop such practices, they informed the Broadview Police Department that there would be “a shit show in Broadview today.” They proceeded to make even more arrests. Steve Held, a journalist with Unraveled Press, was among those arrested; an associate of his, Raven Geary, was shot in the face with a pepper ball. “We have never witnessed anything like what ICE has unleashed on our communities this week,” Unraveled stated in response. A week later, Reverend David Black, a Presbyterian minister who was conducting a prayer at a protest at the same facility, was injured when shot in the head with a pepper ball.

Illinois Governor J.D. Pritzer and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson have strongly condemned the strong-armed tactics of ICE and the deployment of the National Guard, citing the Illinois Trust Act, which restricts state and local police from enforcing federal immigration restrictions that can lead to deportation. However, the Act allows police to “assist in ensuring public safety” at protests and gatherings, which state troopers have made use of to arrest anti-ICE protesters. Likewise, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has signed an executive order forbidding ICE from using city-owned property in their operations. But it remains to be seen if the federal authorities will respect this—and it is unclear what Johnson can do to enforce it if they choose not to.

The most violent action so far was the killing of Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, a 38-year-old father of two, on September 12 during a traffic stop after dropping off his two children at daycare in the suburb of Franklin Park. The Department of Homeland Security claims he resisted arrest and dragged an agent with his car, but the ICE storm-troopers were not wearing body cameras, and video by onlookers shows he was instead driving away to escape being apprehended.

Here are just a few of the many recent transgressions by ICE and DHS in Chicago:

• On October 3, ICE agents handcuffed and threatened to arrest a member of the Chicago City Council, Jessie Fuentes, when she asked if they had a valid warrant for arresting a patient in a hospital who had hurt himself while being chased by them.

• On October 7, 30-year-old Marimar Martinez was shot and badly wounded by ICE in Chicago’s Brighton Park neighborhood. The agents claim she tried to ram one of their vehicles, but body camera footage shows an officer saying, “Do something, bitch,” before opening fire.

• On October 9, ICE agents threw tear gas canisters outside Funston Elementary School in Logan Square after a teacher blew a whistle to alert students that ICE was near.

• On October 10, ICE raided a rideshare parking lot at O’Hare Airport, arresting 12.

• On October 10, a video editor for Chicago TV station WGN, Debbie Brockman, was violently forced to the ground by two agents and arrested for filming them making arrests.

• A disturbing number of reports have surfaced of citizens being swept up in the arrests, only to be released after spending time in custody. I have spoken to students who were traumatized by the experience.

ICE agents are desperately trying to meet their arrest quotas handed down by Washington and have apprehended those “who look like immigrants” in train stations, places of employment, outside of schools and libraries, or randomly on the streets. Several Latinx social service organizations and day schools have temporarily closed their doors in response. The days of knocking on doors are over—more often than not, ICE agents force their way into homes without any prior announcement.

Among the most egregious acts occurred on October 1, when ICE agents rappelling from Black Hawk helicopters broke down doors at apartments at 2:00 AM and arrested several dozen people in South Shore, a predominantly African American neighborhood. Most of those arrested were Venezuelan, but some were from Colombia and Nigeria. The action involved 300 agents who used charges to blow the hinges off doors and stun grenades to clear the apartments. Lawrence Benito of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights reported, “They knocked down every door and took almost every person in that building, regardless of citizenship status. There were children. There were mothers. All were taken, all were zip-tied, with no real communication about what they were there for or no real transparency whether they had warrants to do what they did or not.”

The DHS claims they targeted those with connections to the Tren de Aragua gang from Venezuela. This is part and parcel of Trump’s efforts to demonize immigrants—and not only from Venezuela—as a “criminal element” undeserving of any kind of legal protection. He has invoked, through an Executive Order, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, used only three times in U.S. history (during full-scale wars declared by Congress) to end what he calls the “foreign invasion” of immigrants threatening the U.S. In fact, the number of unauthorized border crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border has fallen from 200,000 a month in early 2024 to less than 6,000 today. Needless to say, the vast majority of those crossing before and after 2024 have no connection to organized crime, let alone Tren de Aragua.

Tren de Aragua first emerged in a penitentiary in the town of Tocorón, Venezuela, in 2014 and is responsible for violent crimes there and elsewhere in South America. However, since the Venezuelan military stormed the prison in which it was headquartered in early 2023, the gang has been dispersed, is not centrally organized, and has no clear political goals. The claim that it serves as a tool of the Venezuelan government is without basis. Today, most of its members are probably in Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. There are no more than a few hundred members of Tren de Tren de Aragua in the U.S. and far fewer in the Chicago area. Insight Crime, which has tracked the gang since its inception, states, “the infamy Tren de Aragua has developed has led to imposters adopting its name as a method of instilling fear and ensuring compliance from their victims, further complicating efforts to establish whether a suspect is a genuine member or not… perceptions of the threat posed by the gang often fail to correspond with reality.”

Trump is meanwhile targeting Venezuela itself, ordering the U.S. military to destroy four boats that he claimed (without evidence) were transporting drugs, killing 21 in the process. And he is now ramping up efforts to overthrow the regime of Nicolás Maduro in favor of installing the far-Rightist pro-Trump accolade Maria Corina Machado as President (that she has just been awarded the Nobel “Peace” Prize is surely Orwellian, given that she has often called for military action on the part of the U.S. to overthrow Maduro).

Trump’s attacks on Venezuela have nothing to do with concern about drug-running. It too is about his central and overriding concern—demonizing non-white immigrants as a sub-human criminal element. Every authoritarian knows that to physically eliminate a group of people it is first of all necessary to convince the masses of people that they are less than human, that they represent a kind of non-being that threatens our own.

Fortunately, what the last several weeks show in Chicago is that large numbers of people totally reject this agenda. Almost every day, some kind of support activity, protest, or mutual aid effort is being held in support of immigrants. People are not waiting for some central organization or leadership to call for such actions—many are taking actions in their neighborhoods, in small ways and large, by themselves. This gives us hope that this relentless militarization of American society, of which we have so far seen only the beginning, will translate into a movement to remake the world from the mess being left by capitalism.