Last Sunday, at a Spanish-language mass at St. Paul’s Catholic Church in Pilsen, on the Lower West Side of Chicago, Father Arturo Pérez spoke of our moment. “Nobody is more important than anyone else,” he said. “What happens to one happens to all of us. What one suffers we all suffer.” Outside, ICE raids had begun. They were hardly secret. The Drug Enforcement Agency had announced on X that they were conducting raids in Chicago in partnership with the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security. Phil McGraw, better known as Dr. Phil, was embedded with the border czar, Tom Homan, in a command center at an undisclosed location and in the neighborhoods where the raids were conducted, covering them live on Merit TV, his new conservative media platform.
In a segment called “Behind Closed Borders” McGraw displayed a map of Chicago that showed where targets were thought to be situated, and read aloud the various crimes that they had been convicted of. To hear McGraw and Homan talk about it, ICE was only after sex offenders, gang members, and murderers. In other media appearances, however, Homan had seemed to allow for the possibility of wider sweeps. Suggesting that anyone who had entered the country illegally could get arrested, he told ABC News, “If you’re in the country illegally, you got a problem.” He has talked about the possibility of “collateral arrests,” which could happen if an undocumented immigrant was with one of ICE’s targets at the time of arrest. And he has also stated that, over time, ICE will “open the aperture” of their operations. The Administration echoed Homan. When the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, was asked how many of the thirty-five hundred undocumented immigrants arrested by ICE in the past week have criminal records, she responded, “All of them, because they illegally broke our nation’s laws.” (Entering the country without inspection or admission can be a misdemeanor or felony, but being undocumented in the U.S. is not by itself a crime. Many undocumented immigrants enter the country legally but then violate the terms of their visas, and most immigration cases are heard in civil rather than criminal courts.)
The raids in Chicago were expected to begin the day after Trump’s Inauguration. In the outlying town of Cicero and the southwest neighborhood of Little Village, businesses catering to the Latino community were open—restaurants, grocery stores, Western Unions—but the streets were relatively empty. It was hard to say if this was more a result of ICE or the subzero temperatures. Some parents kept their kids home from school, or had friends who are U.S. citizens pick them up. Some adults stayed home from work. For the sake of children who might return from school to find that their families had been taken, one undocumented parent told the Chicago Tribune, “All we can do is take all precautions and stay home as long as we can.”
Local news and social media lit up when federal agents attempted to enter a public elementary school in the Back of the Yards neighborhood,