Rey was just doing his job — cleaning up a yard in Rogers Park at the end of October — when a group of masked men, wielding weapons, appeared out of nowhere and dragged him away.
News spread quickly.
“I was heading downtown with my husband,” said his boss, Kristen Hulne, owner of Patch Landscaping, with her husband Patrick, a newly-retired Chicago firefighter. “We get a call from a guy in the office: ‘ICE just picked up Rey.’ My other employee ran away and hid. The customer called and said, ‘I’m sorry this happened; I took all your equipment off your truck and put it somewhere safe.'”
It’s hard enough to operate a small business. Never mind a landscaping business in a city as weather-scoured as Chicago. The federal government’s war on immigrants these past few months made that task even harder for landscapers here, a “cat and mouse game” Hulne calls it, trying to both rake leaves and avoid capture.
“It’s such an incredible burden on this industry,” said Marisa Gora, owner of Kemora Landscapes, adding that ICE withdrawing recently is of limited comfort. “We don’t know if they’re going to come back in the spring.”
“As landscaping contractors, we’re a targeted community,” said Lisa Willis, owner of MINDSpace, “Our industry associations really haven’t spoken up about it. It was really disappointing.”
The executive director of Landscape Illinois declined comment beyond, “we need to keep a low profile to protect as many of our workers as possible from additional enforcement.”
A worry everyone I spoke with raised — if I exercise my right as an American citizen, will our increasingly-vindictive government come after me or my business? It’s like living in Russia.
When a worker was abducted, everything else stops — for Hulne, it took time to locate the terrified worker who fled. The abandoned truck and equipment had to be collected. An increasingly Kafkaesque police state confronted.
“We got a lawyer that day,” Hulne said. “Before I could turn around, Rey’s wife was in my office crying. Fifteen minutes after that I had a call from our alderman — ‘Oh my God I just heard what happened….’ There was this immediate mobilization of the neighborhood. It was incredible.”
As grim as the ICE raids have been, the community reaction had been heartening.
“All of a sudden I had these complete strangers willing to give up their free time to stand in front of my crews with whistles,” said Hulne. “I love this city, I love Rogers Park. I’m so proud of us, and so sad for us.”
Rey — a nickname, I’m omitting his full name to protect him from retribution — was taken to a Detroit detention facility.
“He’s been with me since 2015,” Hulne said. “He’s a father of three. His youngest son is autistic. He’s the sole provider for his family. His wife is a U.S. citizen. He has no criminal record. Not even a parking ticket. He doesn’t even swear. He’s a good man, accused of the crime of working.”
The strain over the past months has been difficult.
“It’s affected mental health, physical health, it’s affected the bottom line,” said Hulne. “If ICE was here through the winter I’d be out of business for sure.”
The plight of landscapers in all this came on my radar after landscape company owner Larry Asimow gathered some friends and drove their trucks around the Broadview facility in protest.
“I’m not a very political person,” Asimow said. “The last time I publicly protested something, I was a teenager at an ant-nuke demonstration. For me, the number one thing was to speak out in support of my employees and their families. I have a group of employees who have supported me, day in and day out, winter and summer, for the past 25 years. They show up. They are the most incredible people — generous, loyal. I could no longer sit on my hands and hope this was going to pass.”
Patrick Hulne, a 20 year veteran of the Chicago Fire Department who retired this week, will be devoting more time to his landscaping business. One of his first tasks — he hopes — will be to drive up to Detroit this weekend.
“I think we got good news from our lawyer,” said Hulne, who compared the ICE raids to Germany “rounding up Jews” in the 1930s. Persecuting innocent people on false pretexts.
“He’s married to an American citizen. He’s got three American kids, born here — I’m the godfather to one of them,” said Hulne. “My whole family was at his wedding. My employees are very important to me. You know how the firehouse is a second family? These guys are my second family. This guy doesn’t have a parking ticket and you’re grabbing him off the street like he’s an animal. It’s stupid.”