As promised, the Trump administration’s “enhanced immigration enforcement activities” began in Chicago in late January.
ICE’s presence is hyper-visible in some quarters. Dr. Phil, the talk-show host, embedded with federal agents on the first weekend of arrests. His show on Merit TV, a “family-and-faith-based network,” aired conversations with the recently arrested. The migrants stood handcuffed and surrounded by armed ICE agents, who prompted fuller answers: “Hey man, you got a first and last name.” The farce continued for some time before the lead officer at last told them to wrap it up. Elsewhere, it appears that ICE has been manipulating the dates on its archives to flood Google searches with press releases for arrests and “enforcement actions” that happened five, ten, and in some cases fifteen years ago. On X, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s and ICE’s accounts have shared celebratory posts after seemingly every arrest, sharing the names, faces, and mugshots of people picked up across the country.
Local news outlets in and around Chicago have been telling different, and more accurate, stories. They focus less on the arrests and more on the conspicuous absence in city life where immigrants were once present. Business owners in heavily Latine neighborhoods describe a downturn in business, health clinics report an uptick in missed appointments, teachers a dip in attendance—all, the implication is, from people too frightened to leave their homes. Community Facebook groups are full of unverified reports of ICE vehicles—sometimes legitimate, sometimes just a Ford Explorer badly parked in front of the Home Depot.
But if you’re not a teacher or a health worker or someone who watches right-wing media, all you get is this kind of present absence, a noticeable gap in the weave of some, but not necessarily all, communities. For example: I live in a neighborhood tucked up in the northwest corner of Chicago, just off the Edens Expressway. I take that same highway thirty-five miles north to work every morning in Lake Forest, one of the fanciest suburbs of Chicago. My life is largely conducted between two white-flight neighborhoods, one that began as a middle-class enclave, the other as an escape for mid–nineteenth century captain-of-industry types. Both still reflect the conditions of their founding: isolated and sleepy, largely white, introspective and self-satisfied. This life is alternately peaceful and infuriatingly remote. There are kids playing in the street, yes, but there’s also the walk-to-a-bus-to-a-train I must perform to get anywhere worth going on public transit. I have to drive twenty minutes to get to a decent Mexican grocery store. Our community Nextdoor page is full of missing cats, noise complaints, and stray political gripes that have nothing to do with immigration enforcement. Invisible.
I worked in the immigration-justice movement here in Chicago for about four years. From the very beginning, I saw all the ways in which generations of activists and leaders had transformed Chicago into a safer city for immigrants, documented and undocumented alike. While the term “sanctuary city” specifically refers to a place where local police departments are prohibited from collaborating with ICE, Chicago has aimed to be a sanctuary in so many other ways as well. From funds for legal assistance and defense from deportation, to health benefits for undocumented Illinoisans, to a Know Your Rights culture so robust that border czar Tom Homan complained about it on the news a few weeks ago, Chicago has felt like a place with an expansive sense of who belonged here. It has felt like a place to build, not a place fighting a continual sense of erosion.
And that has made Chicago an obvious target for conservative politicians. Trump singled it out for threats of raids and increased ICE presence during his first term. Beginning in 2022, Gov. Greg Abbot of Texas began sending buses, and eventually airplanes, of migrants from the Rio Grande Valley to Chicago’s Union Station—a total of over fifty thousand people as of last December.
These actions—Abbot’s especially—made migrants more visible here in the city. This was by design, a media-friendly tactic intended to place stress on sanctuary cities to get them to cave, to sink them into xenophobia. The city more or less rose to the challenge, housing people in shelters, police stations, and tents and providing “warming buses” where people could step in from the cold. In the face of inadequate food and shelter, the population of visibly homeless families in every corner of the city rose. Many of the people I saw day to day had places to sleep at night, but even in my relatively inaccessible neighborhood, families and children would sit outside the grocery store through the muggy Chicago summers and the punishing winters. I’d stop on my way in to ask what I could get them, sometimes buying apple juice, other times filling my cart with ingredients for a full meal.
As intended, this heightened visibility brought tensions. In addition to the predictable pearl-clutching from well-resourced neighborhoods and right-leaning aldermen, resistance to migrant aid also came from the residents of some of Chicago’s less affluent neighborhoods, in part because of the specific ways resources flow through the city. Early on, when government officials were looking for buildings in which to house the increasing numbers of newly arrived migrants, they zeroed in on closed schools and community centers in predominantly Black neighborhoods in the city’s South Side—the same ones that had endured years of disinvestment and underfunding. The feeling, from some residents, was one of bewilderment and anger: there wasn’t enough support or funding to keep that school open, to keep our children in classrooms that were not overcrowded, to provide a center of gravity in our neighborhood around which we could congregate, but suddenly there’s funding to house relative newcomers? The resentment and anger were understandable, even if the racialized expressions some of it took were not.
And then, like all great cities do, Chicago made even these fifty thousand new arrivals feel like assimilated members of the city. They were no longer a burden or a surprise but neighbors like any others, the kinds of people we keep as nodding acquaintances or chat with about the weather, small but nonetheless present parts of our lives.
In his memoir, Children of the Land, the poet Marcelo Hernandez Castillo writes: “When I came undocumented into the United States, I crossed into a threshold of invisibility. Every act of living became an act of trying to remain visible. I was negotiating a simultaneous absence and presence that was begun by the act of my displacement.” Undocumented people must both occupy space in the world—to make a living, to live—and also not. Avoiding undue attention is a survival strategy, a way to keep the ICE agents away from the door for just a little longer.
From 2011 until a few weeks ago, many of the places people went to make themselves visible were protected from the incursion of immigration enforcement agents. The Obama-era sensitive-locations memo prevented ICE from arresting people at places of worship, schools, hospitals, and during demonstrations—places where people go to talk to God and embody their connections with each other and the divine; where they can imagine futures for themselves; where their bodies might be healed of pain; where they might come together with their wider communities to protest injustices against themselves and others. None of these institutions or practices is perfect—each has its own failures, its own ways in which it is beholden to the greater systems of power—but for nearly fifteen years, each was also a rare haven for people. Trump’s abrupt and cruel cancellation of the policy has led to Chicago’s quiet pews and empty classrooms.
This erasure is precisely what the government wants to bring about during these raids. Their goal is not just to terrify migrants in our neighborhoods, churches, health-care centers, and schools, but to separate them from these institutions. The administration wants migrants to be so afraid of living their regular lives that they give them up preemptively, rendering themselves invisible for their own survival.
As for the rest of us—people who love our neighbors, even the sort you nod at from down the street—it’s up to us to make ourselves visible. To take to the streets in protest. To safely intervene in and document ICE activity. To educate ourselves about our rights and how to protect others. To watch kids and share meals, to go a little farther than the head nod, to make other spaces of protection and security outside of our institutions. It’s not perfect, but all we have, for now, is each other.
