Creative Commons
"Immigrants and refugees welcome" sign in Chicago, Illinois
In the nine months since Donald Trump took office, he’s been a source of fear at Chicago’s Sullivan High School. As soon as his term began, the “Forty-fifth,” as Chad Adams, the high school’s principal, calls him, started a campaign to reduce the number of immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers entering the United States. Shortly after Trump’s Inauguration in January 2017, he announced a travel ban barring citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the country.
The President pushed to allot $18 billion toward building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and prioritized the prosecution of criminal immigrant violations such as illegal entry. Chad knows that such rhetoric could shake students living in already tenuous circumstances. There are a lot of such kids at Sullivan: more than half of the school’s students came to the United States as immigrants or refugees.
In recent years, Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood, like much of the city, has turned into a complicated mix of block-level gang territories.
At 7:30 a.m., students start to pour into the hallways. Groups of girls in hijabs squeal as they greet one another. Congolese mothers, clad in bright Liputa dresses, admonish their children to stay nearby. Boys from the football team arrive in packs, their shouts to one another cutting across the wall of sounds.
In many ways, Sullivan, which is small by Chicago public school standards, operates like several mini-schools within the same building. Immigrant and refugee students tend to stick together and to classrooms in the north wing of the school. Their U.S.-born classmates, by contrast, tribe up based on sports teams, school clubs, grade levels, and academic tracks such as the medical and business programs, and the Reserve Officer’ Training Corps.
On Friday, October 13, a Sullivan sophomore named Belenge, a Congolese refugee, starts his school day at the glass bus shelter on the intersection of Birchwood Avenue and Clark Street. He waits for a few of the other Congolese refugee students to meet at the corner before the group makes its daily trek the 1.2 miles south to Sullivan. The street is both busy and deserted.
The corner is bounded by largely empty parking lots, one for a generic strip mall with off-price clothing stores, a big athletic shoe shop, and a discount makeup store. Another lot is for a national bank. Beyond that is a string of rubble-strewn lots left empty by demolitions. The landscape is a familiar one in Chicago, a city where entire neighborhoods can go underserved and overlooked for decades on end. Chronic disenfranchisement propels rates of poverty, trauma, and crime, too.
Belenge is uneasy. Idling there even for just a few minutes at seven in the morning, he feels unsafe after being confronted and intimidated by a group of boys just a week before. Felix and Asani, two other students from Sullivan, arrive and flank Belenge as they head to school. The boys spend much of their time together, especially now that Belenge and his three younger siblings sleep next door at Felix’s family’s apartment most nights.
During his first six months in Chicago, Belenge was in charge of his younger siblings. His eldest brother had moved north to Wisconsin, where he worked at a meatpacking facility outside of Green Bay. During those months, Belenge would pick up the three youngest children from school and scrounge a dinner from whatever he found in the kitchen cabinets. Most of their food was donated by RefugeeOne resettlement agency or U.S. co-sponsors.
A few blocks from Sullivan, Belenge passes the McDonald’s on the west side of Clark Street. There’s always a long line of cars waiting in the drive-through. Belenge can still recall the first time he stepped inside a McDonald’s. Standing in front of the cashier, neck craned upward, Belenge froze. Before coming to Chicago, Belenge knew little about the United States and the information he did possess stemmed mostly from movies and music.
As a result, Belenge’s impression of U.S. culture was formed by songs like 50 Cent’s single “In da Club” and testosterone-fueled movies like Rambo and Commando. They left him with a narrow and often problematic understanding of his new country. None of the action movies included a wall of monitors filled with a tiled pattern of what looked like the same image: a hamburger and fries.
This morning, the group passes McDonald’s just before 7:30 a.m. If the boys pick up their pace, they can still make it to Sullivan for the free breakfast. Belenge and his friends are among the 90 percent of Sullivan students whose family incomes are low enough to qualify them for free or reduced-cost school meals.
One of the cafeteria workers rolls a mobile cart back toward the industrial kitchen. Belenge doesn’t care much for the free breakfast—usually a limp, lukewarm waffle or an English muffin paired with fruit and a small carton of milk.
At 6 p.m., Felix gets a phone call from Esengo, his friend at Sullivan and fellow Congolese refugee. “Can you help me with a pencil portrait for my art class?” his friend asks, knowing that Felix is a skilled and disciplined artist.
Felix leaves for Esengo’s apartment. The walk north will take him fifteen minutes.
Just past 9 p.m., Felix returns home. Belenge, Felix’s neighbor, sees his friend is frustrated. “Esengo wasn’t home,” Felix says in Swahili, plopping himself into a chair. “I waited for two hours. He never came back.”
Felix explains that he called Esengo when he arrived at his friend’s apartment. Esengo’s sister had let Felix in. He was wet from walking in the rain. When Esengo answered the phone he told Felix that he was headed to Walgreens because his father asked him to get some juice. The pharmacy was only a few blocks from Esengo’s apartment, so Felix figured it wouldn’t take longer than fifteen minutes. “Maybe he went somewhere else,” suggests Belenge.
Later that night, as the boys begin to drift in and out of sleep, Felix’s phone buzzes. He holds it up to his face examining the number. When he answers, Belenge can’t quite decipher his friend’s expression in the glow of his phone screen. Felix is quiet and stoic and doesn’t emote much.
“Felix, this is Joseph, Esengo’s father,” Belenge hears the man explain in Swahili. “Have you seen Esengo? I haven’t heard from him since I sent him to the store earlier today.”
Belenge sits up. He feels pangs of fear punching against his chest. He can hear Joseph crying. “Esengo has never done anything like this before,” he says.
Belenge’s entire body tells him something terrible has happened to Esengo.
In recent years, Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood, like much of the city, has turned into a complicated mix of block-level gang territories run by young men who have splintered off from the long-standing “super” gangs such as Gangster Disciples and Vice Lords. Like all of the city’s neighborhood schools, Sullivan has students who affiliate with local gangs.
Passing periods in the hallways include handshakes and hand symbols, but these are intricate, complicated codes difficult to decipher at first pass. Such gestures also exist among a sea of private languages that unfold inside Sullivan. Each time the bell rings, students stream into the hallways.
Boys race toward the cafeteria as they tug on one another’s backpacks. Young couples find hallway nooks where they whisper private messages in each other’s ears. Class comedians loudly quote snippets from viral videos and employ creative jabs to poke fun at their teachers.
Friends challenge one another to impromptu flossing and Benny Whip dance competitions while others pose for photos, each one meticulously edited to blurred-pore perfection. All while Sullivan’s six full-time security staff belt out “Get to class!” over the crowds.
Later in the morning, a detective from the Chicago Police Department arrives at Sullivan. Tall with blonde hair, she stands inside the school metal detectors beside a security guard who sits at the front desk. She wears a black Chicago Police Department vest with blue jeans. It’s never good when a detective shows up at the doors of a school. She’s arrived from the hospital where she interviewed Esengo.
Once there, she tells Matt Fasana, Sullivan’s assistant principal, what she knows: Esengo was likely shot near Ridge and Touhy Avenue, and Esengo gave descriptions of two black men, one tall and the other short.
The detective also tells Matt she knows Esengo was attacked earlier in the week, and she believes the shooting could be the result of gang recruitment gone awry. The meeting is brief.
Before the detective leaves, she tells Matt she’ll be in touch. Elsewhere in the building, teacher Sarah Quintenz and school social worker Josh Zepeda visit Esengo’s classes. Josh has come up with a simple, scripted version of the events. “Esengo is alive,” he tells the students. “We don’t know what happened to him. He is in the hospital. We are doing everything we can to support him and his family and all of you. And if anyone wants to come talk to me, please do so.”
One student raises his hand, sheepishly, and says, “I didn’t know this happened in America.”