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immigrants
ICE in Chicago: First They Came for the Immigrants
This is an invasion, not by some foreign enemy but by the US government and Donald Trump himself. If we don't defend our neighbors and join our hands together, who will be left when they come for us—as they surely will.
Oct 09, 2025
“Then they came for me . . .”
I can only begin here, at the emotional knifepoint of the ongoing ICE news. ICE in Chicago!
“More than 1,000 immigrants have been arrested since an immigration crackdown started last month in the Chicago area. The Trump administration has also vowed to deploy National Guard troops in its agenda to boost deportations.
“But U.S. citizens, immigrants with legal status and children have been among detained in increasingly brazen and aggressive encounters which pop up daily across neighborhoods in the city of 2.7 million and its many suburbs.”
I read this AP news fragment with particular shock and outrage because I lived in Chicago for 50 years. Today I live 200 miles north of it, in Appleton, Wisconsin, but the city is still me, in a psychological and no doubt spiritual sense. So when I read, for instance:
“Agents used unmarked trucks and a helicopter to surround the five-story apartment building, according to bystander videos and NewsNation, which was invited to observe the operation. The outlet reported agents ‘rappelled from Black Hawk helicopters.’
“Agents then went door to door, woke up residents and used zip ties to restrain them, including parents and children. . . .”
There’s no way I can pull myself back from these words and turn what they’re saying into an abstraction. As Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker put it, this is an invasion, not by some foreign enemy but by the US government and Donald Trump himself. And while, yes, there’s far worse hell happening right now across the planet, my personal connection to Chicago brings the “invasion” to life. And it brings Martin Niemoller in as well.
“First they came for the socialists and I did not speak out – because I am not a socialist . . .
“Then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out, because I am not a Jew.
“Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me.”
This is another way of saying: We are all one. This should be humanity’s moral starting point. It should be our political starting point. The need to speak out for this is never-ending. Why – why? – are we so obsessed with borders? And by “obsessed,” I mean spiritually brain dead about them.
Yes, life is full of “borders,” beginning with me. I’m not you and you are not me. We need a sense of self. We need definition and clarity in our lives. “This” is not “that.” English is not Spanish. The United States is not Mexico and on and on and on. But that’s not the entirety of the matter. Division and separation are only part of what and who we are.
Dig into the soil. Our roots are connected. They are one. We are all Planet Earth – a living and evolving entity. We need each other – which is simply another way of saying: We need to understand, and learn from, each other. That should be our collective effort, rather than fortifying and violently defending our ignorance of one another.
I say this knowing that this can be a deeply complex and difficult process—but, oh God, what if this, rather than militarism, were our political focal point? Indeed, it is the focal point of many institutions and millions, maybe billions, of people. But power – can you believe? – corrupts, and those in power, far too often, focus primarily on keeping what they have, which includes their uninterrupted ignorance of everything beyond themselves.
All of which leads me back to one flickering moment from ICE’s ongoing invasion of Chicago. Jessie Fuentes, an alderperson representing the city’s 26th Ward, confronted ICE at a local hospital. Someone, presumably a constituent, had broken his leg while being chased by ICE agents. He was taken to the emergency room but remained under ICE arrest. Fuentes demanded to see a warrant for his arrest. They ignored her. But she persisted.
And then, suddenly, one of the ICE guys had enough of her questioning and grabbed her, pulling her around and slapping handcuffs on her. Take that, bitch! The moment was caught on video.
Fuentes was arrested for “impeding” ICE–that is, demanding an answer to a legitimate, constitutionally crucial question. She was released a short while later, but nonetheless, that video remains stuck in my head. The look on the agent’s face showed total irritation and loss of patience. He had the authority–the power–to do what he was doing and nothing else mattered.
Any questions?
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Immigrant or US-Born, We’re All in the Same Boat
Politicians divide us, but all workers share the same struggles. Only together can we demand dignity and safety at work.
Sep 01, 2025
Every morning, my dad laces up his work boots knowing there’s a chance he won’t come home. A skilled carpenter, he has worked in Los Angeles’ construction industry since our family moved to the US when I was 3. Through years of backbreaking labor, his boss praised his skill, reliability, and loyalty. He not only built this city but also a life for our family in LA. Now, that life is in jeopardy—because like so many undocumented workers, when my dad needed protection from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he was treated like he didn’t matter.
After 15 years of loyalty, my dad asked for a few days off at the height of the LA ICE raids out of concern for his safety. In response, his boss gave him an ultimatum: Show up to work and risk being taken by ICE or stay home. His employer threatened to replace him with someone “willing to do the job.”
His concern was not unfounded. Since then, ICE has raided my dad’s job site twice as part of the surge in raids across LA and the country. Our family lives in fear of the third time.
Behind these attacks is deliberate policy. The construction industry has become an easy target for the administration’s mass abduction efforts—according to a Stateline analysis this industry employs the most immigrant laborers. And Stephen Miller, a senior White House aide and the architect behind much of ICE’s siege on our cities, explicitly ordered ICE to conduct raids against working families, demanding at least 3,000 people be disappeared a day.
And the administration isn’t stopping there. With the Big Ugly Bill now signed into law, immigration enforcement will receive an unprecedented $170 billion surge to ramp up these mass abductions. This money is being taken directly from our taxpayer wallets and cut from the things we all rely on, like healthcare and education. Whether you migrated here or were born here, we are all being attacked by deadly policies meant to keep us in a cycle of suffering.
While my dad is irreplaceable to my family, it has never been more clear to me that his life, and the lives of all working people, are viewed as disposable in this country. Workers like my dad power this country. But for far too long, politicians have benefited from keeping working people divided, selling the lie that immigrants and US-born workers are on different sides—when in truth, we’ve always been in the same boat.
If you’re a vulnerable worker like my dad and don’t come to work because ICE is there, they’ll replace you. If you’re a US-born worker demanding better pay, they’ll fire you and exploit an undocumented person instead to do the job for even less than they paid you. All workers lose, while massive companies walk away making a buck no matter what.
Now, as we stare down the barrel of a bill that will usher in the largest transfer of wealth to the ultra rich, working families face a choice: Do we come together to build unified labor power or do we let greedy billionaires and politicians divide us?
The path forward is clear. It’s time for workers to band together. We must break the cycle that has long used immigrants like my dad as a cudgel to keep us divided and see that by joining forces, we can unite our demands and grow our power. From demanding no ICE on construction sites to demanding safer working conditions for all employees, it has always been working people who hold the power, not them.
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Watching The Trump Administration Violate Basic Human Rights with Impunity
How long it will be before the U.S. does not simply “do deals” with Bukele’s El Salvador, but become Bukele’s El Salvador on a much grander scale?
Jul 23, 2025
“Immigrants at Florida Detention Facilities Faced Life-Threatening Delays, Report Says,” reports the HuffPost.
“Report Finds ‘Dehumanizing’ Conditions in Florida Immigration Centers,” reports the Miami Herald.
“Migrants at ICE Jail in Miami Made to Kneel to ‘Eat Like Dogs,’ Report Alleges,” reports The Guardian.
Pick your headline from yesterday’s news. The story is the same. Every day, the Trump administration is transforming the U.S. government into more and more of a police state. And Human Rights Watch, a long-respected NGO that monitors the most egregious human rights violations throughout the world, from Darfur to Teheran to Gaza to Florida, has just published a carefully documented and judiciously written 98-page report, ’You Feel Like Your Life Is Over’: Abusive Practices at Three Florida Immigration Detention Centers Since January 2025. The report’s summary is worth quoting:
Between January and June 2025, thousands were held in immigration detention at the Krome North Service Processing Center (Krome), the Broward Transitional Center (BTC), and the Federal Detention Center (FDC), in Florida, under conditions that flagrantly violate international human rights standards and the United States government’s own immigration detention standards. By March, the number of people in immigration detention at Krome had increased 249% from the levels before the January inauguration. At times in March, the facility detained more than three times its operational capacity of inmates. As of June 20, 2025, the number of people in immigration detention at the three facilities was at 111% from the levels before the inauguration.
The change was qualitative as well as quantitative. Detainees in three Florida facilities told Human Rights Watch that ICE detention officers and private contractor guards treated them in a degrading and dehumanizing manner. Some were detained shackled for prolonged periods on buses without food, water, or functioning toilets; there was extreme overcrowding in freezing holding cells where detainees were forced to sleep on cold concrete floors under constant fluorescent lighting; and many were denied access to basic hygiene and medical care.
Based on extensive interviews, the report also draws on a number of other sources, including a 2020 ACLU Report, done in collaboration with HRW and National Immigrant Justice Center, entitled Justice-Free Zones: U.S. Immigration Detention Under the Trump Administration, and an April 2025 report on immigrant detention abuses done by Americans for Immigrant Justice. It notes that two of the three Florida facilities investigated are operated by private contractors under Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) supervision; that all three operate under the public radar and without any regular public oversight; and that all three refused to comment on the extensive abuses outlined in the report.
Human Rights Watch, as its website notes, began, in 1978, as “Helsinki Watch.” Originally centered on human rights abuses in the Soviet bloc—whose countries had all signed on to the 1975 Helsinki Accords yet routinely violated its human rights provisions—the NGO eventually extended its remit to document human rights abuses across the globe, establishing “watch” committees in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
Does there exist an organized political force capable of resisting the dehumanization and repression that is spreading before our eyes?
I first encountered the organization in connection with its first offshoot “watch” committee, America’s Watch, which was established in 1981 to document the extensive human rights violations by Central and South American regimes that were strongly backed by the Reagan administration. During those years I assiduously read the organization’s reports on Salvadoran and Guatemalan imprisonment and torture of dissidents, and on the police-and-military-linked death squads that regularly assassinated peasants, workers, Catholic nuns and priests, and solidarity workers. A young assistant professor at Fordham University, I taught courses on the human rights violations in Central America and the Caribbean, and on Reagan-administration support for violent rebel groups seeking to overthrow the very new Sandinista government that has just overthrown the repressive Somoza regime in Nicaragua. And together with a handful of other junior colleagues, I helped to organize teach-ins and special lectures on the atrocious human rights violations regularly documented and publicized by America’s Watch.
A child of the 60s and 70s, during these years I never viewed any aspect of U.S. politics through “rose-colored glasses.” I well understood that the U.S. was plagued by its own forms of injustice. I also understood that much of the U.S. Cold War rhetoric about “human rights” and “defending democracy” was hypocritical, and masked very bad things done both at home and abroad. At the same time, it was clearly abroad—in the American “near abroad,” and well beyond it—that the most egregious human rights abuses were being committed. Groups like Helsinki Watch and its adjuncts, Amnesty International, and others, played an important role in documenting the abuses and in motivating solidarity work intended to end them.
And for Americans, this was primarily a matter of foreign policy.
Obviously, it was never simply a matter of things “foreign.”
Just as obviously, the damage that was done by U.S. foreign policy, especially in the Western Hemisphere, has had enduring effects, for which the U.S. has never assumed responsibility. And the “immigration crisis” at the Southern border is in large part a consequence of the legacies of U.S. foreign policy choices, as millions upon millions of people have fled violent and unjust situations, and headed north, seeking refuge, asylum, and simple opportunity in the U.S. (see the writings of Greg Grandin, especially his 2025 America, America: A New History of the New World; William Connolly has recently underscored the importance of climate change in driving the migration crisis from the South).
And, in a way, what we in the U.S are now experiencing can be viewed as “chickens coming home to roost,” as the awful human rights conditions to our south—the consequence of a combination of U.S. malign intent and benign neglect—are now staring us directly in the face.
And, irony of ironies, the U.S. electorate has responded to this situation by returning to office a man, President Donald Trump, who emulates foreign dictators and is determined to emulate some of the worst forms of human rights abuse such dictators regularly inflict on their populations:
- The suspension of legal due process.
- The disappearing of thousands of individuals by armed, masked agents of “law enforcement” who operate without proper identification and beyond the law.
- Mass deportation, preceded by mass detention under the most cruel and degrading conditions.
- The deliberate promotion of a climate of intimidation and fear that operates indiscriminately in the society at large, rendering precarious the situation of undocumented immigrants, documented immigrants, naturalized citizens, and indeed all citizens—all human beings who reside within the territorial boundaries of the U.S.
Here are a few of the many recent reports documenting Trump’s repressive measures:
- Amnesty International’s April 30, 2025 report, Chaos & cruelty: 10 Compounding Assaults on Human Rights, a Review of President Trump’s First 100 Days in Office.
- Human Rights Watch report, 100 Human Rights Harms in 100 Days.
- Physicians for Human Rights, The First 100 Days: What Trump’s First Moves Mean for Health and Human Rights.
- Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Trump Administration Civil and Human Rights Rollbacks.
The Trump administration, animated by a White, Christian, ethno-nationalist vision, is currently threatening human rights in every conceivable way.
But at the heart of its authoritarian agenda is the idea that many millions who live among us are “illegals,” rightless individuals whose presence and thus very existence is in question, and that these millions of human beings, and the scores of millions of citizens who offer them sanctuary or support or who merely defend the constitutional rights of all, are under suspicion as “enemies of the people” and haters of “American Greatness.”
How far will this go?
Regarding Trump’s illegal deportation of immigrants to El Salvador, where they have been detained in the country’s maximum security Terrorism Confinement Center, human rights experts recently wrote forThe Guardian that “Trump’s lawlessness is emboldening El Salvador’s brutal regime,” noting that the detention of a leading Salvadoran human rights lawyer “is part of a wave of repression sweeping the country under Nayib Bukele.”
That Trump likes and admires Nayib Bukele, the brutal and autocratic elected president of El Salvador, has long been a matter of grave concern for those who care about human rights and constitutional democracy. That Trump has enthusiastically made “deals” with Bukele to turn El Salvador into an offshore detention facility for “illegals” represents a real synergy of lawlessness that accentuates the concern.
As I read the new Human Rights Watch report about Florida’s ICE facilities, and as I think about Trump’s new “Alligator Alcatraz,” and his so-called “Border Czar’s recent comments on how ICE officers don’t need probable cause to detain people and how he plans to “flood the zone” in “sanctuary cities,” and about the Trump administration’s recent deployment of National Guard troops and active duty Marines to suppress Los Angeles protests, I wonder how long it will be before the U.S. does not simply “do deals” with Bukele’s El Salvador, but become Bukele’s El Salvador on a much grander scale.
Things would of course look and feel very different here in the U.S., given the country’s overall wealth, consumerism, and at least the patina of “democracy.” But how different would it really be, especially in a political sense? Does there exist an organized political force capable of resisting the dehumanization and repression that is spreading before our eyes? Can such a force be mobilized? Will it be mobilized? Or will the U.S. become the El Salvador of the North?
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