loading . . . ICE Is Bringing the Violence to Chicago Trump has manufactured a crisis of violent crime in the Windy City, siccing masked ICE agents on immigrants and their defenders. And the mainstream media is both-sides-ing the story.
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Allison Hantschel Nov 11, 2025
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Inside St. Jerome Catholic Church in Chicagoâs Rogers Park neighborhood on a recent Sunday, incense wafted through the air as prayers in Spanish rose upward. The service was to honor friends and loved ones whoâd recently died, as was customary, but it was also for the missing.
Dozens of people have been kidnapped by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the working-class, largely Hispanic community in the previous weeks. Parents kept their children home from school, community organizations cancelled outdoor activities, and soccer games were forfeited.
ICE agents swarmed surrounding streets during Sunday Masses, trying to intimidate the heavily Roman Catholic community during their weekly worship services. Every time the church doors opened, people inside turned in the pews to see who had entered.
As parishioners gathered within, outside people patrolled, orange whistles around their necks, looking twice at every unfamiliar car, every strange face. They said, loudly and clearly, good morning â _ÂĄBuenos dĂas! â_ making eye contact, making sure everyone saw that this place had protection, however homegrown. Text chains connected them to activists who watched for SUVs with darkened windows, out-of-state plates, that drove too slowly or stopped too long.
If they saw something suspicious, theyâd blow those whistles to alert people that there was danger ahead â warning people to stay inside, to get away.
The church should have been a place of safety, of protection. The act of prayer should have felt sacred. But in Chicago and its surrounding suburbs, there is no such thing as sanctuary.
Since late September, President Donald Trump has made good on his campaign promise to attack immigrants in Democratic-led cities across the country. In Los Angeles, New York City, and Portland, Oregon, masked and anonymous men attacked anyone with brown skin, detaining documented immigrants with no criminal records, legal residents, and even U.S. citizens.
Even as those cities fought back, Trump directed the Department of Homeland Security to expand his attacks to Chicago, which has always been a target of Trumpâs particular ire.
Students at the University of Illinois-Chicago chased him out of town during his first campaign, shutting down a MAGA rally on campus and forcing him to cancel his appearance. Former President Barack Obamaâs hometown reminds Trump of his nemesis, and of Obamaâs continuing popularity in the community.
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Trump has verbally attacked Chicago for more than ten years, painting its Black and Hispanic residents as criminals, echoing age-old Republican stereotypes of people of color as violent gang members not fit to govern themselves. He called Chicago âworse than Afghanistanâ and described crime as âcarnageâ and âanarchy.â
> The national narrative in political reporting on Trump vs. Chicago is one of a president intervening in a city that was already a war zone.
Those charges were picked up and repeated endlessly by Republican media, framing Trump, especially in his second presidential campaign, as a crime-fighter intent on cleaning up dangerous city streets. After he took office on the back of a MAGA movement promising âmass deportations,â Trump and his advisor Stephen Miller spun up a campaign of terror here, aimed not at deporting illegal immigrants but at causing chaos among his political enemies.
ICE agents attacked a Halloween parade in the Old Irving Park community on the cityâs north side, tear-gassing outraged parents who tried to defend their costumed kids. They broke car windows and dragged people out at elementary school pickups in Humboldt Park to the west, ran into a city park and snatched a family with their young children in tow in the downtown Chicago Loop. They didnât check anyoneâs citizenship or verify anyoneâs immigration status. They just shoved people into their cars and drove away.
In west suburban Broadview, ICE officials set up a detention center against city leadersâ wishes, and violently assaulted clergy who tried to bring communion to the imprisoned people there. They shot a pastor in the face with a ball of pepper spray, threw a congressional candidate to the ground, handcuffed a sitting alderwoman, all to demonstrate that they respected no opposition whatsoever.
Governor J.B. Pritzker, who became a thorn in Trumpâs side after opposing the presidentâs attacks on transgender people, called for ICE to back off and encouraged residents to film ICE and fight back. A federal judge ordered ICE to stop tear-gassing and pepper-spraying ordinary peopleâs houses. Local mayors, township trustees, state representatives, all tried to intervene. Trumpâs ICE forces mocked the local politicians, disobeyed the court orders, and escalated their violence further.
A judge ordered ICE officers to wear identifying clothing instead of a hodgepodge of tactical and camouflage gear and to take off the masks they wore to conceal their identities. ICE agents wrote nonsensical letters and numbers on pieces of tape and put them on their uniforms, and left the masks on. The judge asked that officers stop using tear gas in residential neighborhoods; Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino threw a canister himself, on camera.
ICE continued as they had because they feared no real consequences and were unconstrained by the law. They obviously arenât deterred by documentation of their actions. ICE and Border Patrol officers attacked journalists as indiscriminately as they did protesters, beating them with batons and shooting âless lethalâ rounds of rubber projectiles up close, into the crowds.
At risk to their own safety, outlets like Unraveled Press, Block Club, the Triibe and many courageous freelancers sounded the alarm before anyone outside of Chicago took an interest in what was happening here.
However, the national press continues to parrot the administrationâs lies that the ICE invasion of Chicago is some sort of crime-fighting initiative. Headlines and lead paragraphs and the first ten minutes of news broadcasts use Trumpâs language: Operation Midway Blitz. Crackdown. Crime wave. The targets are described as âillegalâ immigrants and âillegal aliens,â even though dozens of people arrested have no criminal record at all.
Television news programs aired Trump administration lies about Chicago, including that it was a âhellholeâ (CNN) and that Chicago and other cities needed the National Guard deployed to ârestore law and orderâ (NBC News). Fox News chyrons blared that Trump had âvowedâ to save the city âfrom violent crime.â
Local TV news affiliates have provided better coverage, but the national narrative in political reporting on Trump vs. Chicago is one of a president intervening in a city that was already a war zone. In truth, crime in Chicago is declining, as is violent crime nationwide. But when credulous discussion of ICEâs actions and Trumpâs intent airs over images of police lights flashing on poor or non-white people, those images are presumed to be evidence of rampant crime.
The _New York Times_ described ICE agents âclashingâ with people in the neighborhoods they stormed into, as though a half-dozen masked, body-armored men screaming hostilities and carrying machine guns were anything close to the equivalent of a local dad, in his pajama pants, telling them to leave his friends alone:
In Albany Park, on Chicagoâs Northwest Side, Border Patrol agents on Friday morning arrested at least two people who had physically confronted them, witnesses said.
What the national press is missing is this: Those physical confrontations arenât protests. Theyâre a community organizing itself against its own government. In the absence of help from the courts, parents are forming brigades to watch schools during pickup and dropoff. Mutual aid networks established during the pandemic or earlier now serve as broadcast channels for ICE information: How many cars, how many agents, where and what are they doing.
A father on my own block organized work-from-home parents to monitor roofers and landscapers, who are targeted when their employers arenât home, early in the morning or late in the afternoon. People are paying house cleaners to stay home, or escorting them to and from their cars so theyâre not harassed. Residents have stopped grocery delivery after ICE began taking drivers from nearby food stores. Volunteers are putting up anti-ICE signs and telling local businesses not to let ICE park in their lots or eat at their restaurants.
The pressure hangs over everyone: We have to protect one another, because no one else is coming to save us. We have to save each other.
The time and energy and attention devoted to this project is enormous, each day spent tracking assaults and watching our phones, trying to scramble to address new dangers every minute. Itâs relentless in its demoralization, which is the point.
Itâs a siege of the presidentâs making, on purpose, for no other reason than to make everyone panic. No one feels safe anywhere. Immigrant neighborhoods are harder hit than white areas, but ICEâs campaign targets affluent areas as well as poorer ones. North side, south side, city and suburbs. Theyâre looking for day laborers at building supply stores and patients in hospital beds. There are no safe places for anyone to retreat to, to regroup, to rest.
Even inside a church, there is no consecrated ground.
Outside St. Jerome last Sunday, after the final blessing and dismissal, worshippers touched holy water to their foreheads and left through the front door. The sign announcing Mass times in English and Spanish was covered with black plastic, hastily taped up.
Most people walked quickly back to the parking lot, nodding soberly at their protectors with their bright orange whistles. Some lingered inside the churchâs iron-fenced courtyard, having coffee and croissants. It wasnât entirely safe to stay, or entirely safe to leave. In Donald Trumpâs America, the Chicago heâs attacking, itâs not safe anywhere, for anyone.
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Pressing Matters ICE Chicago
> ## About the Author
>
> Allison Hantschel publishes the 13-year-old journalism and politics blog First Draft and is the author and editor of five books, including IT DOESN'T END WITH US, the story of the groundbreaking college newspaper The Daily Cardinal. Her work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and many other publications. Follow her on Twitter: @Athenae
>
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https://www.damemagazine.com/2025/11/11/ice-is-bringing-the-violence-to-chicago/