ICE’s crackdown in Chicago reflects a deeper reshaping of the immigration system toward a singular focus: removing people with little or no review.
By Jamiles Lartey and Geoff Hing
The Marshal Project
https://www.themarshallproject.org/
A federal judge ruled that ICE’s detention of Ruben Torres Maldonado was illegal. In an order signed Oct. 24, the judge ordered a bond hearing for Torres Maldonado.
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In Chicago this week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents allegedly pointed a gun at a state representative and his staff on the city’s North Side. The next day, raids in the heavily Latino neighborhood of Little Village, in the city, and Cicero, a western suburb, led to arrests of two American citizens — staffers of a city alderman. One local leader called the raids a “brutal escalation” of the Trump administration’s ongoing immigration enforcement.
Nearly two months into ICE’s campaign in Chicago, disruptive, chaotic scenes like this are hardly surprising anymore. In recent weeks, agents have rappelled into an apartment building from a Black Hawk helicopter, fired pepper balls at peaceful protesters, and allegedly zip-tied the hands of children. ICE and the Department of Homeland Security have not commented in some of these instances, or they have said the officers’ actions were justified.
This spectacle of enforcement isn’t merely incidental. Part of the rationale for the administration’s intense posture has always been to terrify people into self-deportation, ProPublica noted in a report this week. The Chicago effort has included cinematic promotional videos of the aggressive, militarized campaign. An AFP fact check found that at least one White House video promoting the Chicago operation included footage from earlier enforcement across the country.
Meanwhile, in communities across Chicago, people are creating their own kind of commotion to slow down ICE. The sounds of whistles have periodically blanketed neighborhoods, as people monitor enforcement activity and alert others that agents are in the area. Those efforts have come alongside rapid response protests and court battles over whether agents have used excessive force on demonstrators.
Beneath all the commotion, though, the work of hardening the immigration system has been methodical. According to ICE, federal officers made more than 1,000 arrests over roughly the first month of the operation, sweeping up both new arrivals and long-time Chicagoans. Calls to Chicago-area legal assistance hotlines by families of people arrested by immigration authorities have “skyrocketed”. Many of those detained have been transferred to facilities in Louisiana and Texas, far from their families and lawyers, and without hope for release while their immigration case is pending.
According to immigration lawyers, these outcomes reflect a deeper reshaping of the machinery of detention and deportation away from discretion and toward a singular focus: getting people out of the country as rapidly as possible, by any means necessary.
Historically, ICE agents at a local field office could consider the individual circumstances of a case — for example, whether an immigrant was a nursing mother or had serious medical conditions — in deciding whether to make them a priority for arrest.
“That discretion has totally evaporated,” said Sarah Cockrum, the supervising attorney at Beyond Legal Aid, a Chicago legal services organization representing people in immigration court. Now, Cockrum said, “there are children with cancer who are in detention — just really awful things.”
In fact, not only were agents previously allowed to consider such factors — under a memo issued at the beginning of the Biden Administration, they were required to consider all facts and circumstances in making arrest decisions. The memo stated that the “overriding question” in deciding whether to make an arrest was whether a noncitizen presented a public safety risk.
