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On a cold morning in January 2025, parents and teachers gathered outside a South Side Chicago school, outfitted in orange armbands and whistles. Across the street, a nondescript van rolled slowly through the neighbourhood. Inside, ICE agents were preparing to detain alleged undocumented students and parents. Within minutes, community members had assembled — filming, confronting, and pressuring the agents to retreat.
Sharmain Siddiqui is a medical student and farmer in Chicago. She is invested in community and labour organizing and the fight for universal healthcare.
Annie Raccuglia is an organizer, cultural worker, student, and aspiring nurse in Chicago.
The raids in Chicago, videos of which have gone viral on social media around the world, are part of a nationwide crackdown that accelerated in 2025 under the second Trump administration. These are not isolated acts of law enforcement gone rogue, but deliberate operations aimed at expanding the apparatus of deportation, normalizing violence against migrants, and manufacturing consent for hybrid imperialist warfare on both sides of the border — as illustrated by the brazen illegal abduction of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro in early January this year. Across the country, federal and local forces act in symbiosis, deploying ICE agents, federal law enforcement, and militarized tactics.
Chicago has emerged as a leader of the resistance to Trump’s immigration raids because of its unique demographic and political landscape. The city’s Broadview ICE Detention Center has functioned as an “immigration processing center” for the past 20 years with bipartisan support. Broadview is located right outside the city of Chicago, just 16 kilometres north of Bridgeview, also known as “Little Palestine”, and 11 kilometres northwest of the Chicago Portage National Historical Site, where European settlers expropriated the canal that had long been an important pathway of trade for Indigenous nations. Broadview is also 17 kilometres west of the birthplace of George Jackson, a revolutionary communist and New Afrikan, in the Chicago meatpacking district — a notorious stretch of the city Jackson referred to as “part ghetto-residential, part factory”.
Chicago also has the third-largest Latino population, the largest Palestinian diaspora, the third-largest urban population of Indigenous people, and the second-largest population of Black people in the country. Entangled geographies of displacement, labour exploitation, and state violence have produced the political conditions in which Chicago’s history of resistance are rooted.
A Heritage of Resistance
Since its founding, the settler-colonial, capitalist US state has repeatedly gone to war with populations it deems surplus, and treated various groups as a reserve army of labour. In equal measure, those groups have resisted that war.
In 1969, the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, the Puerto Rican-led Young Lords, and the working-class white Appalachian migrants of the Young Patriots Organization came together to form the Rainbow Coalition, a socialist, internationalist alliance rooted in class solidarity. In a city structured by segregation and police brutality, this alliance rejected the boundaries imposed by race and geography and instead built common ground around issues like poverty, police housing insecurity, and health disparities. They were joined by the American Indian Movement (AIM), Brown Berets, Red Guard Party, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and Rising Up Angry.
The Coalition built “survival programs” including free breakfasts for children, food pantries, health clinics, and community daycare. These programs met the immediate needs of community members and embodied the political principle of class unity over racial and ethnic isolation. Although the original Rainbow Coalition was torn apart by the FBI’s targeted assassination of prominent leaders like Fred Hampton, its legacy endures, leaving behind a blueprint for community organizing rooted in internationalist, working-class solidarity.
Chicago’s social movement scaffolding, owing much to the work of the Rainbow Coalition, created the conditions for the election of Chicago’s first Black mayor, Harold Washington. At the time, Ronald Reagan’s policies of deregulation, weakening of trade unions, and gutting of domestic industrial production were expanding the deportation machinery that would later define the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. In response, Mayor Harold Washington issued a sanctuary city executive order prohibiting city employees from enforcing federal immigration laws in 1985. Nevertheless, being a sanctuary city has proven sufficient to insulate Chicago from the broader architecture of US border militarization, which has seen 3,000 people were taken from their homes in 2025 alone.
Networks of Self-Defence
Taking diverse forms from school patrols and rapid response defence networks to direct confrontations with ICE, it is against this backdrop, where domestic policing and neocolonialism operate as two faces of the same imperial project, that resistance to ICE in Chicago has developed. Each tactic has achieved varying degrees of success, yet all unfold on political terrain shaped by decades of multi-racial, working-class internationalist struggle. The contemporary Chicago organizing model must be understood in the context of this counter-insurgent force. As the connective tissue of our struggle calcifies, grounded analysis is needed to transform this potential united front against ICE into a sustained and militant working-class movement.
The largest single display of numbers came with Chicago’s participation in the national “No Kings” mobilization, a nationwide protest against Trump. Over 250,000 people took to the streets in Chicago. Although the protest attained critical mass in numbers, it revealed a recurring contradiction between mobilization and organization: the march attracted institutions, organizations, and individuals from a broad spectrum, but with no shared ideological framework beyond opposing Trump. The protest functioned as both a high-water mark and a harbinger: an outpouring of public outrage, but far from a united front with a shared analysis of the situation, let alone strategy. More nefariously, it was an example of the readiness of the Democratic Party and NGOs to obscure the systemic problem and to absorb and coopt the energy of mass dissent.
In a city with a rich labour history, the fragmented union response underscores a broader challenge of coordinating class power that defined earlier eras of multi-racial labour militancy or the vision of the Rainbow Coalition.
Within this broad mobilization, the non-profit sector, particularly the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR), Organized Communities Against Deportation (OCAD), and the Brighton Park Neighborhood Council (BPNC) quickly emerged as the most immediately functional. These organizations activated within hours of the first major raids, issuing statements, deploying rapid-response volunteers, and hosting emergency trainings. Decades of institutional memory allowed them to scale quickly: they had bilingual legal aid networks, staff who could train volunteers in constitutional rights, and relationships with schools, churches, and neighbourhood associations. For many Chicagoans, these not-for-profits were the entry point into anti-ICE organizing, most often through Zoom trainings or church-basement workshops that walked people through how to safely film ICE encounters, document badge numbers, and identify what constitutes a lawful detainment.
At the same time, nonprofits also have structural limits. They are donor-dependent and legally constrained from endorsing tactics that resemble direct confrontation with state apparatus. While they seeded the early wave of activism, non-profits cannot escalate on their own. Thus, much of the subsequent organizing did not grow out of nonprofits so much as from, around, and beyond them.
Parallel to non-profit activation, Chicago’s trade unions also joined migrant defence efforts. Chicago is a union town, and organized labour has historically been central to protecting immigrants’ rights, from the meatpacking strikes around the turn of the century to the multiracial industrial unions of the mid-twentieth century. During this current wave of ICE activity, rank-and-file educators in the Chicago Teachers Union pushed for sanctuary policies in schools, coordinated safety protocols for students with undocumented family members, and in many cases directly notified rapid response networks when ICE was spotted near school grounds. SEIU and UNITE HERE locals issued public condemnations of raids and joined in the peoples’ demonstrations.
Still, union engagement in the broader struggle to defend immigrants remains uneven. While some locals mobilized heavily, others remained hesitant. The absence of a united, militant labour front limited the scale at which unions were able to intervene, especially given that many workplaces targeted by raids were unorganized. In a city with a rich labour history, the fragmented union response underscores a broader challenge of coordinating class power that defined earlier eras of multi-racial labour militancy or the vision of the Rainbow Coalition.
Communities in Struggle
Many struggles stemming from the contradictions of settler-capitalist land relations have continued to coalesce. Activists engaging in mutual aid for unhoused encampments, for example, have rallied around the dual threats of freezing temperatures and raids against vulnerable residents of the encampments, many of whom were Venezuela and Mexican migrants. In the fall of this year, ICE agents raided an apartment building in the South Shore neighbourhood of Chicago, allegedly — and of course falsely — targeting members of a Venezuelan gang. The Department of Homeland security used it as racist propaganda in what they framed as a military operation to capture drug dealers and gang members. Reports of residents, including children, zip-tied and detained sparked outrage city-wide. The building was already in slum conditions, which tenants had reported on numerous occasions. After being ordered to evacuate the building within just over two weeks, tenants formed a union and began fighting back.
Two tenant unions of the All-Chicago Tenant Alliance (ACTA), Fuerzas Activas De La Damen (FAD) and Fuerzas Inquilinos de Broadway y Cuyler (FIBC), have since gone on rent strike. ACTA called for an eviction moratorium for the city of Chicago during Operation Midway Blitz, the government’s official term for its crackdown, a call which went unanswered by the city government. Even so, the formation of tenant unions has been a positive development in terms of both protecting vulnerable populations and organizing around the root contradictions facing workers in the imperial core.
Further protests were organized in response to the murder of Silverio Villegas González, a 38-year-old father of two, who ICE agents attempted to stop as part of their deportation operation and subsequently shot. Mexican Independence Day celebrations doubled as protests of his murder.
Local Filipino solidarity organizations including Anakbayan and Tanggol Migrante, meanwhile, foregrounded the Free Tita Rebecca campaign. Tita Rebecca is 71-year-old Filipino green card holder, grandmother, and 42-year resident of the US who was detained in North Carolina, has been transferred to various detention centres in different states, and has faced medical neglect, sexual harassment, and grossly inhumane conditions since her abduction.
Local Fights and Challenges
The most robust form of resistance crystallized as the rapid-response ecosystem, consisting of an improvised and decentralized landscape of encrypted Signal chats, neighbourhood text threads, and WhatsApp group chats. These networks are able to mobilize small crowds within minutes. As someone sees ICE assemble near a Home Depot or outside a laundromat, for example, they post a photo or geographic coordinates to a Signal thread and within 15 minutes, 20 people might arrive to film, disrupt, or create enough pressure that ICE backs off. This “community interference” strategy has become a signature tactic in Chicago.
Individuals and groups tailgate ICE vehicles on bikes or in their cars, slowing their movement through neighbourhoods. Others form roving observation squads trained in copwatch principles, filming ICE interactions to ensure visibility and accountability. Some simply show up to make detentions materially harder. Yet this decentralization comes with obvious fragility. The Signal chats ballooned in size, sometimes into the thousands, which diluted trust and increased chaos. Misinformation spread easily. Alerts were duplicated or mistimed. Overwhelmed organizers struggled to verify sightings. The sheer volume of alerts also contributed in generating confusion and burnout.
This mode of mobilizing is not sufficient to stop agents. Although there have been instances of successful de-arrests, it does create, in organizers’ words, a “non-permissive environment”. ICE agents are snatching people to fill quotas, and rapid response creates barriers of inefficiency in that process.
Aime Cesaire’s ‘imperial boomerang’ — the notion that repression abroad will sooner or later be deployed at home — has been on full display in recent months, as White House officials invoke the Monroe Doctrine, a relic of US foreign policy from the nineteenth century.
One of the most locally rooted and effective forms of resistance emerged in Chicago Public Schools with community-led school patrols. Drawing from the legacy of the Young Lords’ and Black Panthers’ community defence programs, parents, teachers, youth organizers, and neighbourhood volunteers formed informal patrols around schools with large immigrant populations. Members monitor for unmarked federal vehicles, escort children to and from school, support families during morning drop-off, and provide hotlines for parents fearing workplace or home raids. It has become normal, especially during school drop-off and pick-up hours, to see everyday people wearing orange arm bands and a whistle stationed at intersections, monitoring for ICE presence.
These patrols have filled a void left by the limitations of Chicago’s sanctuary city policy. While Chicago law prohibits school personnel from collaborating with ICE, it cannot prevent agents from targeting the public space around schools. Patrols act as human shields against that vulnerability. They have become centres of political education, where families learn about their rights, children practice what to do in the event of a raid, and teachers serve not just as protectors but as organizers. School patrols demonstrate what Chicago has historically excelled at: neighbourhood-level, deeply relational organizing grounded in trust.
While neighbourhood defence has unfolded across the city, Broadview, the main local detention and processing facility, has become a steady front line. Every morning, activists gather outside to bear witness, hold vigils, chant, pray, and directly confront the violent machinery of deportation. Conditions at Broadview vary from day to day. Some mornings resemble vigils, while others escalate into tense standoffs with police forming barricades and activists attempting to block buses. There have been arrests, instances of physical force, and repeated moments of police and federal agents escalating minor actions into brutally violent encounters.
Chicago’s faith community, which includes the First Presbyterian Church and the Sanctuary Working Group, has long been central to immigrant defence and re-emerged as a moral voice in Broadview. A recent clergy-led action at Broadview drew enormous energy, with leaders from churches, mosques, and synagogues linking arms, praying, chanting, and publicly condemning ICE’s violence. Yet even these faith leaders were not spared repression. Clergy were pushed, tackled, and arrested.
Chicago’s healthcare worker communities also mobilized at Broadview. In the midst of detainments outside of free healthcare clinics and in emergency rooms, physicians, nurses, therapists, and public health professionals gathered to protest the numerous human rights violations at the facility. They demanded entry into the facility to conduct an independent medical evaluation and organized a drop-off of medical supplies, offering medical care to anyone in the facility. Speakers at the action highlighted the health ramifications of Operation Midway Blitz, naming increasing missed appointments due to the climate of fear and targeting of healthcare facilities by ICE. Healthcare workers warned that if these conditions do not change, we risk poor health outcomes and even death of detainees.
The Limits of Decentralization and the Need for Internationalist Strategy
Aime Cesaire’s “imperial boomerang” — the notion that repression abroad will sooner or later be deployed at home — has been on full display in recent months, as White House officials invoke the Monroe Doctrine, a relic of US foreign policy from the nineteenth century. This doctrine functions to suppress sovereigntist movements and international alliances of and with the entire western hemisphere, while asserting control over the productive and material resources of Latin America. Trump’s ICE raids and National Guard deployments are the newest iteration of the state’s long-standing project of criminalizing and disciplining what it deems surplus populations.
The same imperial apparatus that criminalizes migrants in Chicago is also responsible for the conditions that drive migration itself. The US has long armed and trained death squads in Latin America to prevent forces of national liberation, sewing destabilization and feeding forced migration. Migrants who leave for the US are subsequently criminalized, creating a loop of manufactured consent for further American intervention across the hemisphere. Venezuela, for example, has the largest oil reserves in the world — reserves the US has coveted since Hugo Chavez first came to power in 1998, long before Trump’s sabre-rattling.
The contradiction is not a failure of individual activists but a structural limitation of mobilizing without long-term political organization.
Chicago’s current mobilization against ICE sits at the intersection of long histories of state violence and what scholars like Alex Aviña trace as the scaffolding between the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, and the present-day War on Migrants. In that sense, contemporary ICE raids reveal not a break from American governance, but its continuation, inseparable from the American empire’s legacy of settler-colonialism, slavery, capitalism, and imperialism. As the climate crisis accelerates displacement and destabilizes economies across the Global South, the ruling class is showing how it intends to manage those it deems surplus. From Palestine to Venezuela, we are witnessing the boundlessness of the West’s depravity.
Against this architecture of repression stands a grassroots movement defined by courage, creativity, and heart. Neighbours blocking ICE vans with their bodies and alleys with dumpsters, rapid-response networks tracking raids in real time, and faith communities offering sanctuary all extend the revolutionary ethos forged by the Rainbow Coalition. But unlike the Coalition, it has emerged in a political landscape defined by a fragmented Left, financially constrained nonprofits, algorithm-driven communication, and distrust of hierarchy. Taken together, these terrains of resistance reveal a movement full of courage but lacking the organizational infrastructure needed to confront the scale of state violence. The task at hand remains transforming and sustaining current organizing into militant organizations of the working class.
The contradiction is not a failure of individual activists but a structural limitation of mobilizing without long-term political organization. The historical Rainbow Coalition was formed out of shared strategy, political education, and international class analysis. As a coalescence of forces works to push ICE out of Chicago today, that same unity of strategy, political education, and class analysis is needed to turn these mobilizations into sustained political power.
Two hundred border patrol officers were deployed in Chicago as of 16 December 2025, a grotesque but not unprecedented development, as home abductions by ICE tend to ramp up around the holidays. Chicago had about a month of respite from the Midway Blitz, and is now bracing for another wave of escalation. The task at hand for all those involved in the resistance is ultimately transformative: to turn dispersed acts of refusal into durable working-class organization capable of not just contesting power, but building an antisystemic movement.
