“Our neighbors are living in fear. And that’s what the administration wants. They want people to be scared. So, we’re combating that by bringing the neighborhood together and saying, ‘You’re not going to frighten us into complicity; you’re not going to frighten us into hiding; we’re one neighborhood, regardless of anyone’s immigration status, and we’re going to stay one neighborhood.'”
That is how Gabe Gonzalez, an organizer in Rogers Park, described how his neighborhood has responded to Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown both during his first administration and throughout the first months of his current one.
On Martin Luther King Day this year, I gave the keynote at the Rainbow PUSH Coalition’s annual Martin Luther King Jr breakfast. It was Inauguration Day. The contrast between the hope in that room and the fear outside — especially among Chicago’s immigrant communities — was sharp. Reports had already confirmed that Trump’s new administration would make Chicago “ground zero” for an intense national sweep by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Raids were imminent.
The mass Day One sweep did not materialize quite as advertised by Trump’s border czar Tom Homan. But thousands of people were still swept up across the country that first week of the current administration. The fear these actions are still creating is very real. And for good reason.
Since then, the administration’s deportation campaign has spread. What started in Chicago has become a national scourge. Families are being separated from Denver to Worcester. Parents arrested in front of their children. Kids coming home from school to find their homes ransacked and caregivers gone.
When armed agents grab someone without a warrant, haul them away from their family and disappear without explanation — that is not just cruel. It is lawless. That is why community groups like Gonzalez’s have set up rapid response teams, legal observers and know-your-rights trainings. In some cases, their efforts have stopped ICE in its tracks.
The cruelty of these raids is matched only by their chaos. ICE has arrested green card holders. Detained U.S. citizens. Deported people who know the U.S. as their only real home to countries they barely remember — or had fled for safety. All of this is meant to send a message: No one is safe.
The message is loud. And so is the silence that often follows it.
People are afraid to report wage theft or unsafe working conditions. Parents fear school pickups or taking their kids to church on Sunday. Victims of domestic violence stay silent, worried that asking for help will get them deported. And even documented immigrants live in fear.
This is not security. It is terror. And it is why so-called “sanctuary cities” like Chicago — and “sanctuary states” like Illinois have put policies in place making it illegal for local law enforcement to participate in immigration crackdowns. Police already face enough trust barriers with many of the communities they work in. That makes their job harder. Being part of Trump’s anti-immigrant terror campaign would in some cases make it virtually impossible.
It also could be about to get even more dangerous. The Republican budget bill moving through Congress would supercharge ICE with $80 billion in new funding. More agents. Fewer guardrails. And a leadership culture that seems more interested in punishment than justice.
And the strategy is broader than immigration. This is a movement that spreads fear, then exploits that fear to divide us — Black from Brown, citizen from immigrant, neighbor from neighbor. But as Gonzales and other organizers in Chicago have shown, solidarity still wins.
This fight is about more than policy. It is about who we are. It is about remembering that every person — no matter where they were born — deserves dignity. Deserves due process. Deserves safety.
The poem engraved on the base of the Statue of Liberty reads, “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” It makes no mention of any race, religion or country of origin. It speaks to immigration making our country what it is. Making us stronger. Making us what Frederick Douglass called the most “perfect national illustration of the unity and dignity of the human family that the world has ever seen.”
That is the American Way.
Back in January, at Rainbow PUSH, I said that when a nation is divided, we stop seeing our own reflections in our neighbors. But our neighbors are still there. They are helping care for our kids, growing our food, rebuilding our towns after floods and fires. They are us.
So, all of us must respond as if it were happening to us, because one day, it could be.
That means fighting the cruelty with clarity. Standing shoulder to shoulder with immigrant communities — and sometimes, in front of them. Supporting Congress to pass good bills and reject bad ones that undermine due process.
Organizing non-violently. Voting. Showing up for our neighbors and the rule of law.
And it means calling this what it is — immoral, unjust and defiantly at odds with the real American Way.
Ben Jealous is executive director of the Sierra Club and a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania.
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