Editor’s note: This article, which appears in the December/January 2025-2026 issue of The Progressive, was written in October 2025. One month later, Operation Midway Blitz began winding down in Chicago as Immigration and Customs Enforcement turned its attention to other cities, including Charlotte, North Carolina, and New Orleans, Louisiana. Still, federal immigration officers remain active in Chicago, as do the neighborhood ICE watch networks working to protect the community.
The big orange ones are the best—easier to spot from a distance—but any color, size, or material will do the trick. You can buy a whole pack of them for cheap online or at the dollar store, if your neighborhood coffee shop, church, or local government office isn’t already handing them out. But if you don’t have your whistle on hand when you see them coming, you can always just shout instead: “ICE! ICE!”
In the months since the Trump Administration began its ongoing campaign of terror throughout Chicago, Illinois, I have been somewhat preoccupied with appearances, as what might have once struck me as paranoid behavior has quickly become a daily matter of practicality. When I see someone standing on a nearby street corner, I search instinctively for a whistle around their neck; I don’t leave my apartment without mine, and I’ve started carrying extras for passersby who stop to ask where they can get one. After a local news producer was partially stripped in the middle of the street while being violently detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, I began wearing bike shorts and a tank top under my clothes while on watch. I have now seen enough Black Hawk helicopters overhead to identify them by sight, and I run each passing car on the street through the mental checklist of telltale signs of an ICE vehicle with a mantra-like routine: black SUV . . . white SUV . . . out-of-state plates . . . tinted windows . . . .
Since its launch in early September, the federal campaign known as Operation Midway Blitz has taken more than 3,000 of our neighbors across the Chicago area. Now that the Trump Administration has revoked the policy that had prohibited ICE agents from entering schools, hospitals, churches, courts, and other “sensitive locations,” every facet of public life presents imminent dangers for our undocumented residents.
In my neighborhood on the far North Side, a racially and economically diverse area home to many immigrant communities, the constant threat of siege has torn holes through the fabric of daily life. Every time ICE rears its head in a neighborhood, my teacher friends have told me, school attendance plummets. When nearby reports of federal agent sightings make their way through our group chats and social media pages, the neighborhood shuts down, as each immigrant-owned business along our main commercial corridors locks its doors. One restaurant has been operating as takeout only for weeks now; another one sends a staff member to unlock the door each time a customer arrives. The raids operate on a dizzying scale; I have received three different text alerts for possible ICE sightings within a mile or two of my home in the time it took to type this paragraph.
The horrors of Midway Blitz—or, as we say within the eye of the storm, “what is happening here”—are unspeakable. Before dawn on September 30, ICE agents rappelled out of Black Hawks onto the roof of a South Side apartment complex, destroying everything in their wake as they zip-tied children, some of them nearly naked, and marched them into U-Hauls. The military tactics that have been frequently used against protesters outside the ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois, have begun creeping into the city block by block—I write this a week after the Feds deployed tear gas on a residential street in a quiet area near Wrigley Field. A few days before that, ICE agents pointed a gun at my state representative, who later told the Chicago Sun-Times he feared they would shoot him if he pulled out his phone to record the assault. No amount of recorded evidence seems to dissuade the agents from denying the abuses they commit in broad daylight; they put out press releases baselessly accusing their victims of committing crimes, then move on to a new target.
In the quiet moments between sieges, we say to one another what we can’t stop thinking, louder and with less hesitancy each time: It feels like we’re living in Nazi Germany. A few weeks ago, I lamented to an organizing pal that I felt frustrated by the extent to which some of my friends appear to have made little if any change in their daily lives in the face of this, if they are even more than passingly aware of it. He gently pointed out that ICE has terrorized immigrants in this country for decades, since long before President Donald Trump declared his war on Chicago—I, too, had internalized this willful ignorance and helplessness while growing up in a deeply racist community.
Indeed, we are not wholly defenseless against the American Gestapo, much as they might like us to think otherwise. As the routine of the terror campaign has taken shape across the city, a decentralized infrastructure for volunteer, civilian-led community protection has emerged in response, its ranks growing with each passing week. The movement has been spearheaded by advocacy groups like the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, which has lobbied tirelessly on behalf of our immigrant communities for forty years, but it includes a multitude of other community organizations, too, as well as concerned neighbors who are unaffiliated with any organization. As seemingly impossible as the macro-level logistics are to map out, it’s often pretty simple on the ground. People get word of an ICE sighting from a friend, or they hear whistles on their block; they step outside; they look for the helpers; they ask what they can do; and they grab a whistle to blow if they spot agents.
Illustration by Pete Ryan
My first ICE watch location, to which I have since returned several times, was a bilingual Catholic church in the neighborhood next to my own. Some days are tense; the community has become a hotspot for ICE surges, and several neighbors have been taken in the last month. It’s hard not to feel helpless in certain moments as you survey your assigned street corner and check each passing car model and license plate against the list of suspected federal agents, knowing that your only defense against them is to stand there, blow your whistle, and hold the line.
But it is also impossible to escape the beauty in this work. People of all backgrounds participate in ICE watch, across race, gender, class, age, and faith. We know before even learning one another’s names that we are willing to put our bodies on the line for each other, and that we share in common a commitment to something bigger than ourselves. When Mass lets out, we stand along the curb to form a barrier between the street and the sidewalk as the parishioners begin to exit. Parents greet us with smiles as they shepherd their children down the block. I usually smile back, and wish them a restful weekend. But when I saw a parent carrying a baby in a baptismal gown one day, I looked away before anyone could see tears in my eyes. I’m not sure if I can feel joy and fear fully separate from each other anymore.
The neighborhood surrounding the church is a dense, working-class community that reflects the racial diversity of Chicago more than any other neighborhood in the city. It’s known for its many sweeping murals along the sides of buildings, rock walls, and train stations. It’s a cultural haven for queer and transgender people, and a longtime hub for community organizing and activism. Since 2020, a group of activists and other community members have maintained a public memorial for Black victims of police violence, complete with hundreds of individual remembrances and an altar where flowers are laid out year-round. Its beaches along Lake Michigan are quieter than the ones farther south; along the horizon, you can see the edge of the city sprawling out for miles.
When you walk through this neighborhood, you are never far from the obvious scars of devastation wrought by poverty, racism, and social abandonment, and the tensions that arise out of grief and frustration amid these circumstances. And you are never far, either, from what blooms in the cracks of resilient community: older folks holding court outside the jazz bar; teenagers skipping rocks along the lake; a rapidly escalating arms race for the most spectacular holiday display; couples, or maybe friends, huddled close under the Red Line station heat lamps as they wait in the cold for a train that’s inevitably delayed; the unmanned cart of a tamale vendor whose neighbors bought out her entire supply so she could stay home until it’s safe for her to go outside again. Our community is as vast and vibrant an illustration of what this country can be as has ever existed, and for this, the Trump Administration has chosen to punish and make an example of us through a terror campaign.
So let Chicago serve as an example, wherever you are. We will not back down, regardless of Trump’s threats. We are here, on every street corner, checking license plates, handing out training materials, looking out for each other as best we can. We wear whistles—and so can you.