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During an Oct. 15 press conference at the White House, President Donald Trump claimed that the people of Chicago, most notably “beautiful Black women,” are walking around the city in MAGA hats, begging for federal forces to rid the city of crime. “Please let the president in and we don’t care how he does it … National Guard, Army, Navy, bring in the Marines,” he imagined these people saying, especially, in his view, “because of the success that we had in D.C.”
Trump has continued to allege that Black women in MAGA hats are “all over the place” in Chicago. “They don’t want to be mugged and shot and everything else,” he said earlier this week, going on to bash Democrats for claiming a federal invasion of the nation’s third-largest city is an unnecessary and illegal intimidation stunt.
Since Trump returned to office, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have swarmed the nation, conducting raids, as well as kidnapping, detaining, and tear-gassing residents of predominantly Democratic cities. The president has sent the National Guard into Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., while repeatedly pushing to do the same in Chicago as ICE terrorizes its communities. The immigration crackdown in Chicago has grown so intense that on Oct. 16, U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis ordered all immigration officers in the city to wear body cameras, noting that she’s been “startled“ by television footage of ICE’s violent conduct.
Trump is justifying the force by framing Chicago as a “war zone” in need of federal intervention, along with the oft-repeated yarn about people of color pleading for the United States military to occupy their neighborhoods.
Local officials have been pushing back on the president’s absurd narrative. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker explained to Politico that in reality, crime is down substantially in Chicago, and that Trump just wants to “show off that he is in fact an authoritarian and can do whatever it is that he wants.” Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson echoed this sentiment, telling Fox 32 Chicago that what the Trump administration is doing is “unconstitutional” and “absolutely abhorrent,” and that “Chicago’s gonna stand firm.”
The resistance has been working so far, at least as far as keeping the National Guard out of the city. On Wednesday, a federal judge indefinitely extended an order preventing federal forces from entering Chicago. U.S. District Judge April Perry initially instituted the order on Oct. 9, ruling that the troops can remain in the state, but can’t be sent to Chicago because, as she asserts, there’s no “danger of rebellion” by citizens.
Chicago’s residents may not be staging a rebel uprising to the point that sending in the National Guard is actually warranted, but they’re also not flooding the streets in MAGA hats pleading for Trump to liberate the city. What they are doing is working to protect the vulnerable people in their communities as ICE sweeps through the city.
Rolling Stone spoke to several activists who have organized to create protective systems for Chicagoans. One of them is “Lucy,” a member of one of Chicago’s rapid response teams who wishes to remain anonymous, and who helps lend aid to immigrants being detained by ICE. “They are snatching people off the street that they perceive to be easy targets,” she says.
Organizers fighting Trump’s deportation agenda have created a community hotline, where people can leave tips of upcoming raids or call in to get support for those actively being detained. “We are a network of volunteers who cover every neighborhood in Chicago, we collect information on agents and those being detained, and we send that over to a network of lawyers and legal support,” Lucy says. “The only accountability is coming from the community. Chicago is well-connected and organized, we are able to show up in minutes.”
There’s been plenty to respond to.
On Sept. 12, ICE agents fatally shot Silverio Villegas Gonzalez in Franklin Park, Illinois. The Department of Homeland Security claimed that Gonzalez drove his car toward agents and later crashed into a delivery truck. But body camera footage revealed that the truck driver, Josue Hernandez-Rodriguez, told authorities that Gonzalez “was trying to escape from them.”
On Oct. 4, 30-year-old Marimar Martinez was shot and charged with forcibly assaulting, impeding, and interfering with a federal law enforcement officer after immigration officers claimed she and 21-year-old Anthony Ian Santos Ruiz rammed their cars into a car carrying U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers; Martinez’s lawyers have called out inconsistencies in the officers’ stories and court documents.
ICE has deployed tear gas numerous times against protesters, including during an Oct. 3 incident in the Logan Square neighborhood that forced students at a nearby elementary school to run back into the building. They’ve also used pepper balls, and on Sept. 19 even shot a pastor in the head with one at an anti-ICE protest in the suburb of Broadview.
The hardest hit have been people of color living in disadvantaged neighborhoods. “The cheaper neighborhoods are not the white ones,” says Dixon Romeo, executive director of Chicago-based community organization Southside Together, noting that those looking for the most affordable housing “live close to or within a Black or Latino neighborhood,” which are the neighborhoods that ICE is occupying.
“The truth is the south side of Chicago has been under attack by the federal government for decades,” Romeo says. “From redlining to cutting federal funding that hurts housing in the neighborhood, which makes things unaffordable. They are creating the war zone and then calling it a ‘war zone.’ It was not that before. If you want to really help folks in Chicago, we need resources, not boots on the ground in terms of ICE.”
Romeo calls Southside Together a “community group that organizes around making sure that housing, health justice, and environmental justice are prevalent in our neighborhoods.” The group fights for ordinances throughout Chicago, including in the South Shore neighborhood, which he calls the “eviction capital” of the city. Romeo says that ICE’s presence is akin to “a second attack” on residents of the impoverished neighborhood. “We already got these issues that we’ve been dealing with that are systemic, that are connected to the city and state prioritizing Chicago Bears stadium and quantum centers [over] putting money in our schools and making stuff affordable. So it is another layer to the pressure that folks already feel day to day.”
Romeo points to the Sept. 30 ICE raid of a 130-unit South Shore apartment complex populated largely by undocumented Venezuelan immigrants. ICE detained almost everyone in the building — including children and babies. Romeo empathizes with the immigrants who were there, noting how Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has been sending migrants to Chicago in buses since 2022. “You send a bunch of people here in flip-flops and shorts in the dead of winter, no coordination with the city … folks may or may not get housed,” Romeo says. “Then you send [ICE] up here to come get ’em. It just feels like a very nasty game to play with people’s lives.”
A few hours following the raid, Maira Khwaja, a community journalist with the Invisible Institute, took a walk through the South Shore apartments. “The level of neglect was unthinkable. Mattresses were flipped over and all people’s belongings were pulled off; you could tell there was no respect for the people or their stuff,” she says. To make matters worse, residents were already living in alarming conditions. The building’s elevator doors were broken, and years of water damage resulted in a strong smell of mold. “Just really abusive and inhumane housing conditions,” Khwaja says. “Police prey on the poorest among us, so of course they did it in a neighborhood and building where they thought no one would care.”
Khwaja says significantly fewer people remained in the complex. “It’s 130 units in the building; I would estimate only 20 are still occupied.” As far as everyone else? “I assume they’re homeless or left if they could. But everyone that got arrested, their stuff was thrown away.”
The crackdown in Chicago comes as ICE’s siege has intensified across the country, and as Trump has pushed to use the might of the military to intimidate Democratic cities, while casting his opponents as the “enemy within.” The president just in the past week has vowed to send troops into San Francisco, before pulling back on the plan, while continuing to cast Portland, Oregon, as “burning to the ground” and in need of federal intervention — a total invention. The National Guard late last month deployed to Memphis, another city where crime is declining. Trump has floated cities like New York and Baltimore as potential targets, as well.
Trump seems to view the federal occupation of D.C. this summer as a model for a nationwide intimidation campaign — as he noted during his story about Black women in MAGA hats clamoring for troops to invade Chicago.
Trump ordered the emergency occupation of D.C. by the National Guard in August, calling it an effort to “rescue the nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor.” Never mind that violent crime is at a 30-year-low in the city, despite a spike in 2023.
Abel Nuñez, executive director of D.C.-based immigrant advocacy organization Carecen, says the operation merely allowed National Guardsmen and the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) to aid ICE agents in their ongoing effort to detain and deport undocumented people.
“When you look at the numbers, over half of the arrests are immigration related with no other criminal act attached to it. [CBS News reports that 40 percent are immigration-related.] A lot of the other agencies were there to do immigration enforcement.” Nuñez says that the bulk of ICE’s presence has been in D.C.’s heavily Latino and Hispanic communities, including Mount Pleasant, several residents of which spoke to Rolling Stone about their horrific experience amid the emergency order.
Among them were “Stephanie,” a 19-year-old who wished to remain anonymous, and whose father was detained by ICE on his way to work. Neighbors alerted her on a summer morning that an unknown car was parked outside their apartment complex. The first-generation Salvadoran American went downstairs and saw a blue Nissan Rogue with tinted windows and New York license plates, and she realized that it fit the telltale signs of an ICE vehicle. She informed her father about the car, but he insisted that he needed to leave anyway and get to work. After walking him to his car, Stephanie says the vehicle followed her father down the block and arrested him.
“It’s been hard,” the only child said in September as her father awaited a hearing while detained in Richmond. “Never in a million years [did I think] my father will be detained. We’re super careful going outside. So for me, for me, this is a dream. My mom can’t do anything. I’m the one who’s moving around. Of course, the Mount Pleasant community [helps], I’m not alone, but the pressure is on me.”
“Dana,” a Mount Pleasant mother of two who also wished to remain anonymous, said the area is “among the most well-organized neighborhoods I’ve lived in,” with residents communicating with each other about ICE sightings and escorting undocumented people around the neighborhood. Fellow resident and activist Ryan O’Leary concurs, noting that in the midst of the occupation order, he saw residents stopping to film ICE agents while they roamed the neighborhood, and in one instance heckled them out of the community.
In both D.C. and Chicago, residents have banded together in various ways to withstand the raids, including information sharing. O’Leary notes some of the ways “you can just tell” when someone is an ICE agent, from cars with tinted windows and out-of-state plates, to how they dress, to their watch face “on the back of the wrist instead of the front.” Romeo says that ICE agents have the same look in Chicago, noting sometimes they’re in U-Haul trucks and dressed in plainclothes. “They’re trying to sneak up and surprise people,” he says.
Advocacy groups are also helping educate at-risk residents. Fred Tsao, the senior policy director council at the Illinois Commission for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR), says he’s done multiple presentations for mayors in surrounding Illinois cities, providing information on how to “keep their residents safe” amid the ICE’s incursion. Along with the presentations, the ICIRR conducts “know your rights” training and deploys rapid responders to field the “hundreds” of daily calls they get regarding ICE sightings and raids.
Residents knowing their rights is crucial given the recklessness of ICE’s operations. Trump has dwindled ICE training from 13 weeks to 47 days in an effort to bolster the agency’s force rapidly. And with Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller pumping up arrest quotas, cities are facing the nightmare of poorly trained agents detaining anyone and everyone they think could be undocumented — a racial-profiling disaster. “They figure if we arrest someone that wasn’t supposed to be arrested, it’ll get cleared up upstream in the courts or the detention center,” Nuñez says. Tsao says the “arrest them all, sort ‘em out later” mindset also reigns in Chicago, with residents being targeted because of “the shade of their skin, the way they speak, or how they present themselves.”
Tsao references 60-year-old Salvadoran Rubén Antonio Cruz, who was given a $130 ticket by ICE agents in Chicago for not having his green card on him. He told NBC Chicago, “I was looking at my phone when they got out and asked, ‘Do you have your papers?’ I told them yes, but that they were at home … that I could show them if they wanted, but they said no.”
Chicago, like D.C. in the midst of the emergency order, faces a climate where undocumented people are scared to leave the house, affecting their livelihoods and their children’s schooling. While ICCIR and allied organizations are dropping off groceries and escorting undocumented people around the city, the anxiety remains. Tsao and Nuñez agree that the lasting consequence of ICE’s assault on Black and brown people could further fracture community relations between residents and the government.
“We do, of course, get really worried about the impact of these operations on families, on communities overall,” Tsao says. “But many people are better able to push back, to monitor, to report, to go to rallies, to join rapid response teams, and are doing so. If there’s anything good that’s coming out of that, it’s those people who are trying to be good allies who are standing in solidarity and trying to join in our efforts to protect our folks.”
“From our perspective, Trump and his people have four years of experience in government, and four years of planning,” Nuñez explains. “Project 2025 is something that we knew was going to be implemented, although during the campaign, he said otherwise. Immigrants have been his target from the first announcement of his campaign.” He says Congress bears some of the blame. “This goes to both parties; they kicked the can down the road until you have an executive that not only took advantage of the issue, ran on it, but now is implementing a very cruel, vicious enforcement work that only is there to intimidate communities so that they would leave on their own.”
Trump is justifying the terrorization of these communities with a torrent of misinformation about what’s happening in the affected cities and how their residents are responding to his administration’s actions. It doesn’t seem like the intimidation campaign isn’t going to let up any time soon. “He’s going to do more of them,” an administration official told Rolling Stone following the D.C. occupation, referring to the president using crime as a predicate to send troops into Democratic cities. “He promised he would do this, and now he’s following through on those promises.”
