Chicago Democratic officials refuse to cooperate in Trump-ordered mass immigration raids
Uncertainty paralyzes migrant neighborhoods. ‘Many children have stopped going to school. On the first day of Trump’s term, 400 high school students stayed home,’ says a social worker in Brighton Park
Donald Trump is trying to make Chicago, with its Democratic governor and mayor, the spearhead of his promise to deport undocumented migrants en masse. The operation, which began on Sunday, is expected to be expanded in the coming days, with the presence of several Republican administration officials on the ground to guarantee results. The president’s move, however, has been met with the rejection of local officials, who are refusing to cooperate. It has also generated fear among the residents of predominantly immigrant neighborhoods, such as Brighton Park, where asking for directions from the window of an unfamiliar vehicle causes the few pedestrians walking through the dimly lit streets to speed up.
Although the target of this first phase of the Republican president’s plan is theoretically illegal aliens with criminal records and pending deportation orders, any immigrant in Brighton Park and other suburban Chicago neighborhoods feels affected. “Many children have stopped going to school. On the first day of Trump’s term, 400 high school students stayed home, and since then the absenteeism rate has remained at 30 or 40 a day,” explains a worker, who asks not to be identified, from the Brighton Park Neighborhood Council, an area “with 95% Hispanics and 5% Asians and Poles” next to the airport, and where the few businesses — it is not a thriving area — without exception display advertisements in Spanish.
The Brighton Park Neighborhood Council is one of the organizations that on Saturday sued U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is running the ongoing search and identification operations across the country. Advocacy groups say the raids are retaliation against the city for its status as a sanctuary city open to immigrants.
Indeed, the role of the authorities in Chicago, one of the major cities under Democratic rule to which Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, began sending buses full of migrants in the spring of 2022 to put pressure on Joe Biden’s White House, could prove crucial in the course of the operation. Like the state’s Democratic governor, JB Pritzker, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has declared that the city’s police are not participating in the macro-operation, despite the threat of reprisals against local and state officials who do not cooperate in the raids, and has urged all residents to “know their constitutional rights,” a not-so-veiled way of expressing their resistance to persecution. Johnson’s position is the polar opposite of that of his New York counterpart, Democrat Eric Adams, who is even open to changing the regulations that have made the city a safe haven for migrants for decades.
The support of the mayor’s office does little to allay the fears of migrants, like the elusive figures who avoided visitors in Brighton Park on Monday at nightfall. Or the neighbors of Yorani, who arrived in the United States from Cuba with temporary protection status, in the Archer Heights neighborhood. “They are very restless, those on my floor have not dared to even look out on the landing for days, they do not even go out to buy food. Neither do the children, because schools are no longer a safe place,” she explains, in reference to the elimination of protection guarantees by the new administration in places that until now were inviolable, such as educational centers, hospitals, and churches. Yorani avoids commenting on Trump’s operation: “I don’t get involved in politics, you know? Although the truth is, it hurts me, because the plans for family reunification with my son, who is in Cuba, have been put on hold for the moment.”
The Brighton Park Neighborhood Council has stepped up its advocacy work for immigrants “in the community schools, with in-person and also virtual workshops, to explain to minors, and by extension their parents, what their rights are and how they should act, who to call, in case they are arrested” by ICE agents. But even residents with papers are worried, “because if not them, it’s more than likely that someone in their family could end up in the crosshairs.”
Faced with resistance from municipal and state authorities, Trump’s so-called border czar, Tom Homan, is personally supervising from Chicago the operation to expel illegal immigrants launched Sunday on a large scale in the U.S., which in its first day resulted in 1,000 arrests and interpellations. Of these, 554 people were detained, according to ICE’s X account. On Monday, widespread searches were carried out in New York and New Jersey.
After sporadic operations last week, such as a search of a business in Newark (New Jersey) with three detainees, as well as the first deportation flights, such as those that returned about 170 illegal immigrants to Guatemala, ICE reported Sunday that it had added officials from the Department of Justice (DOJ) — who theoretically do not have responsibility for enforcing immigration laws — to partially alleviate the shortage of immigration police personnel. In addition to the “reinforced selective operations” — the Republican administration’s euphemism for the hunt for migrants — by ICE in Chicago, searches have also been reported in Atlanta, Puerto Rico, Colorado, Los Angeles, and Austin (Texas). In New Mexico and Arizona, Indigenous leaders have raised the alarm over the arrest of 15 members of their communities.
The participation of several federal agencies — including those under the Department of Homeland Security, such as ICE, and those of the Department of Justice — confirms the dimension of the operation, repeatedly promised by Trump during the election campaign and enshrined last Monday in the first executive orders he signed after assuming power. Officials from the various DOJ agencies have been granted additional powers to carry out searches and arrests, due to “threats to public safety and national security,” according to ICE officials, posed by the presence of undocumented immigrants with criminal records on the streets.
It is estimated that 11 million illegal immigrants live in the United States, “and we will deport as many as we can. If you’re in the country illegally, you got a problem,” Homan threatened Sunday. A key question will be how the Republican administration manages the vital presence of thousands of undocumented immigrants who work in agriculture, and on whom the sector’s functionality depends.
Homan has avoided talking about migrants as much as possible, instead referring to criminals who pose a threat to U.S. security. For the border czar, there are no macro-raids underway, but rather a “criminal operation,” he stressed in statements to CNN. He is supported in Chicago by the acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove.
Each ICE precinct in the U.S. — there are 25 across the country — will be required to make at least 75 arrests a day under the new quotas, which would exceed last year’s volume. In the last fiscal year, which ended in September, ICE’s removal department made 113,431 administrative arrests, which equates to about 310 arrests a day in total.
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