'Trump's Gestapo': Chicago Marches to Resist ICE, National Guard Deployment

President Donald Trump and his allies have been relentlessly pushing the narrative that the aim of the White House's deployment of federal immigration agents and hundreds of National Guard members to Chicago is to protect the public in what Trump has called "a war zone."

But hundreds of people who marched through the city on Wednesday evening were clear about who is wreaking havoc in their communities.

"No ICE, no fear, immigrants are welcome here!" residents of the nation's third-largest city chanted, demanding that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents leave Chicago and its surrounding suburbs.

Signs at the rally read, "ICE Is Trump's Gestapo," "Stop ripping families apart," and "They blame immigrants so you won't blame billionaires."

The demonstration was organized soon after about 300 troops with the Illinois National Guard and 200 Texas National Guard members arrived in the city over the vehement objections of Mayor Brandon Johnson and Gov. JB Pritzker, Democrats who have condemned Trump for deploying masked, armed ICE agents to the city for the past month.

While Trump has claimed that "Operation Midway Blitz" is aimed at protecting the public from undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes, US citizens have been targeted in raids and with violence perpetrated by immigration agents, who have shot pepper balls at a priest and a journalist, fatally shot a man during a traffic stop, and "deliberately" attacked peaceful protesters, according to a lawsuit filed this week.

The president has continued pushing the claim that protesters and immigrants are responsible for the chaos unfolding in Chicago and has suggested he could invoke the Insurrection Act, empowering him to order a larger military force to the city, if court cases filed against the administration halt the deployment of the National Guard.

At the protest Wednesday, one man told Sky News he is "concerned the US is slipping away from democracy to authoritarianism."

Joely King, who is running to represent Illinois' 1st Congressional District, told The Columbia Chronicle that attending the protest was "like standing up to a bully."

“The thing with authoritarians, which is what we’re dealing with with the Trump administration, is that they need people to comply in advance to have any power, because it really is a weak movement, it does not support the people,” King said. “So showing up and saying no, you don’t actually have the popular support, you don’t have the power—it shows them that we will not give them what they want and just let them roll us over.”

Dozens of people also gathered Wednesday in "free speech zones" that have been designated outside the ICE facility in Broadview where agents have been taking people they've detained, and more assembled for a candlelight vigil in Joliet, where Texas troops were stationed before heading to Broadview.

“To people who are scared, who are detained, we are fighting for you,” Meredith Shoemaker, a 19-year-old Loyola University Chicago student who marched downtown, told the Chicago Sun-Times. “We don’t support what is happening.”

On Thursday, Judge April M. Perry in the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois heard arguments for and against the National Guard deployment. Illinois officials filed a lawsuit to block the forces from coming to Chicago—a move that prompted Trump to say that Pritzker should be imprisoned for "failing to protect ICE officers."

Perry, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, declined to rule on the case earlier this week, saying she wanted to hear arguments in a hearing.

At the march on Wednesday evening, another Chicago resident, Jinah Yun-Mitchell, told the Sun-Times that many in the city are determined to "stand up for people that can’t stand up for themselves" as Trump intensifies Operation Midway Blitz, in which more than 1,000 people have been arrested so far.

“The rule of law is falling apart," said Yun-Mitchell, "so we all need to do something to make sure that it doesn’t keep going in this direction.”