Law and Justice: Two Months of ICE Terror in Chicago
A dispatch from my city, where ICE has disrupted lives and protesters are fighting back
by Emma Janssen
October 22, 2025
CHICAGO – It’s been nearly two months since Chicago became the main target of President Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) regime in what the government calls Operation Midway Blitz. Since then, one person has died, agents have fired tear gas at peaceful protesters, and over 1,000 people have been arrested and, often, functionally disappeared from their communities and lawyers. We’ve seen apartment raids. Propaganda videos. Children in zip ties. Aggression, anger, and resistance.
Chicago is a notoriously segregated city, which means that some neighborhoods have been completely transformed by ICE’s presence, while in non-Latino neighborhoods, it’s mostly been business as usual.
But the response to the federal incursion knows no boundaries. Regardless of where in the city Chicagoans live, they have mobilized. Activists have started “migra watch” group chats on the secure messaging app Signal, where they monitor ICE sightings, share resources, and plan protest campaigns. Each chat has hundreds of participants, and my phone rarely goes more than five minutes without a buzzing notification.
Others have taken to the streets en masse. An estimated 250,000 people marched through downtown on October 18 for the latest No Kings protest, more than three times as many as the first protest in June. ICE’s main processing facility in Broadview, a suburb outside of Chicago, has been the site of protests every Friday for months, amid tear gas and violence from officers. And smaller confrontations are a near-daily occurrence in South and West Side locations,
as residents alert neighbors to ICE’s presence
https://prospect.org/2025/10/22/two-months-of-ice-terror-in-chicago/