ICE Escalates Brutality in Chicago

Neighbors, mayors, and candidates get treated like enemies of the state.

THEY CAME WITH THEIR SIGNS, their chants, and that stubborn Chicago mix of grit and hope. A hundred or so people, teachers and retirees, a congressional candidate or two, a mayor with a Twitter account, all standing in front of a concrete box where ICE turns the gears on human lives.

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Then the feds answered with gas. Tear gas. Pepper balls. The whole parade of hardware they use when they want to remind you who’s boss. The crowd scattered, coughing, eyes on fire. That’s how America talks to its citizens now.

Daniel Biss, the mayor of Evanston, was there. He’s running for Congress next year, which means he’s supposed to be out shaking hands and kissing babies. Instead, he was gagging on government-issued gas. “Terrifying,” he called it, and he’s right. What else do you call a country that gasses its own elected officials because they don’t like the way people stand in the street?

Illinois Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton showed up too, looking for answers from the feds. She didn’t get any. Nobody tells Springfield anything anymore. ICE just rolls up the vans, boards up the windows, and calls it Operation Midway Blitz — like it’s some kind of football game instead of a war on neighborhoods.

Kat Abughazaleh, another candidate, got knocked to the ground. She called it minor. What’s minor about being shoved around by a man in body armor who works for your government? She said the real crime is what happens inside Broadview — people held for days in a place that was supposed to be for hours.

The Department of Homeland Security said a few protesters got locked up. Said somebody slashed a tire. Said it was about “criminal illegal aliens.” They always say that. Then they toss in a murderer or kidnapper to make the press release sound clean. Never mind the DACA kids they’ve got inside, never mind the families waiting outside the fence.

Gov. JB Pritzker called it what it is: scare tactics. But the feds don’t care what a governor says. They’ve got their orders, and their orders are to terrify.

By the afternoon, the signs were still up — America was built by immigrants — chalk scrawled on the sidewalk that the rain will wash away. The gas will clear too. But the memory sticks. People here will remember the sting in their throats, the boarded-up doors, the black SUVs, the masks. They’ll remember what it feels like when your own government treats you like the enemy.

Outrage is the word the politicians use. Brutality is the word the people use.

And Broadview? Broadview is just another dot on the map now, another place where America showed what it thinks of its own.

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