Donald Trump is waging an authoritarian assault on neighborhoods across Chicago right now. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers are violently snatching Chicagoans off our streets, engulfing our neighborhoods and schools with clouds of tear gas, and brutalizing those who speak up against them. As the city council member representing the city’s Thirty-Fifth Ward on the Northwest Side, I’ve watched this dark period in Chicago’s and the United States’ history with horror. But across the city, neighbors are organizing to defend immigrant families.
In the Northwest Side neighborhoods of Humboldt Park, Belmont Cragin, Logan Square, Avondale, Albany Park, Hermosa, and Irving Park, residents are distributing “Know Your Rights” information and our regional ICE-sighting hotline number through door-to-door canvassing. Our Northwest Side Rapid Response group, a coalition of neighborhood-based organizations, elected officials, and area residents, has formed patrols and teams that monitor and respond to immigration enforcement activity in our neighborhoods.
Trump wants to terrify Chicagoans into submission. We aren’t having it.
Our recent immigrant defense organizing began in November 2024, two weeks after the presidential election. Our coalition of progressive and democratic socialist elected officials at every level of government on Chicago’s northwest side — from Congress, to the state legislature, the county board, and the city council — organized a postelection debrief town hall that drew over six hundred residents in response to the widespread fears of what a new Trump administration would mean for our communities. We talked about the need to build a broad grassroots coalition committed to fighting for a working-class political agenda and to protect our immigrant communities from a new era of immigration enforcement.
We knew what was coming: heightened racial profiling, terrorizing raids, violent arrests, and…
Auteur: Anthony Joel Quezada
