Teacher's union leaders including AFT President Randi Weingarten and Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates march in Chicago on Labor Day. Photo: @rweingarten/X.
With an ICE crackdown poised to begin this weekend and a massive raid already carried out in Georgia, grassroots activists are mobilizing to resist
Residents living in the greater Chicago area are bracing for an influx of federal forces, including immigration enforcement agents, following statements by US President Donald Trump on Tuesday. Trump vowed on September 2 to send federal troops, including National Guard forces, into Chicago to combat what he called rising crime, warning: “We’re going in. I didn’t say when, but we’re going in.”
Illinois officials have been told the National Guard will be in place by Friday and ready to act Saturday, coinciding with an anticipated immigration enforcement surge, but the Trump administration has not informed the state of its plans, Democratic Illinois Governor JB Pritzker said Wednesday.
If federal forces are indeed deployed to the midwestern city in the coming days, it will become the second US city to experience a federal takeover after Trump declared a national crime emergency and sent roughly 800 troops to Washington, DC.
Looming ICE crackdown in Chicago suburbs
In a letter on Tuesday, the mayor of suburban Broadview in the Greater Chicago Area, the site of an ICE detention processing center, alerted neighbors that “federal officials have informed us that a large-scale enforcement campaign will soon be underway.” According to Broadview Mayor Katrina Thompson’s letter, the operation is slated to run daily for roughly 45 days, with the Broadview immigration facility serving as the “primary processing location.”
230 agents, at least some of whom work for US Customs and Border Protection, are coming from Los Angeles to Naval Station Great Lakes near North Chicago to be part of the operation.
Sources said about 140 unmarked vehicles for the operation have arrived at the base, the Navy’s largest training hub and the state’s biggest military site. Officials are also seeking a no-fly zone to keep out news helicopters and drones.
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker said Wednesday, September 3, that ICE agents are expected to be “assembled, ready to go on Friday,” with enforcement set to begin “on Saturday or over the weekend.”
The looming crackdown is part of the escalated immigration enforcement which has characterized the second Trump administration. On Thursday, federal agents carried out a massive immigration sweep at a Hyundai facility in Georgia, detaining 475 people accused of living and working in the US without legal status.
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Grassroots activists mobilize
“The President is threatening to occupy our Black-led city with federal troops,” wrote the Chicago Teachers Union on X. “We already have ICE and CPD in our neighborhoods, now Black and Brown families face the possibility of even more policing,” the labor union wrote, while providing information on civil rights to Chicago residents.
Organizers with the ANSWER Coalition and the Party for Socialism and Liberation are planning a protest this Saturday against the “federal crackdown on Chicago”, declaring that “ICE and National Guard are not welcome here!”
Kamran Siddiqi, who has organized in Chicago for a decade, is working with other organizers to provide “direct support to individuals and communities affected by raids or deportations,” including by getting together a rapid response network to alert Chicago residents of ICE raids. Siddiqi and others are gearing up to resist “Los Angeles style militarized raids” and demanding that ICE leave the Greater Chicago Area.
“The Trump administration knows that they cannot carry out their campaign of mass deportations without encountering resistance,” Siddiqi told Peoples Dispatch.
