When federal agents storm a South Shore apartment complex by helicopter, deploy chemical agents near a school in Logan Square and handcuff a Chicago City Council member inside a Humboldt Park hospital, something fundamental has gone wrong.
What we are witnessing in Chicago today — the increasingly militarized immigration raids — is not simply a matter of law enforcement. It is a test of conscience.
This is not the first time Chicago has faced such a test.
In 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, compelling cities like ours to help capture and return Black people fleeing slavery. Chicagoans refused. The City Council denounced the law as “cruel and unjust,” ordering police not to assist in its enforcement.
Black residents organized patrols and vigilance committees, meeting at the African Methodist Episcopal Church to protect their neighbors from kidnappers. The city’s leading newspaper, the Chicago Journal, attacked the law as a moral outrage. And when a slave catcher arrived from Missouri that fall, Chicagoans told him plainly his “safety was at risk if he stayed.”
Chicago made a choice. It chose justice over compliance. It chose to defend the humanity of those the federal government deemed “fugitives.” Today, that moral tradition is being called upon again.
The target has changed, but the logic is the same. In 1850, the federal government deputized local officials to enforce slavery. In 2025, it demands cooperation in deportation. Both rest on the idea that some people are not fully human — that their freedom, their families, even their presence in our hospitals, can be treated as criminal.
When 26th Ward Ald. Jessie Fuentes stood inside Humboldt Park Health asking U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents whether they had a judicial warrant, she echoed those who once demanded to see slave catchers’ papers. Her question — “Do you have a warrant?” — is not just legal, it is moral.
The answer, both then and now, exposes a government that overreaches, a bureaucracy that substitutes force for justice.
The arrest of a public official at a hospital is not only an assault on her rights, but an attack on the sanctity of medical care itself. Hospitals must remain sanctuaries — places where human life is protected, not politicized. ICE’s intrusion at Humboldt Park Health violates the most basic covenant of public health — that no one should fear seeking care.
More than a century after the City Council stood firmly against being drafted into the machinery of bondage, Mayor Harold Washington reaffirmed that tradition when he issued Executive Order 85-1, prohibiting city employees from aiding federal immigration agents. That order was an act of civic courage and a declaration that Chicago would not become an instrument of injustice.
That legacy is not ancient history. It is a living promise. When we allow federal agents to turn our neighborhoods into war zones, zip-tie adults and children in their own homes, handcuff elected officials in hospitals, we betray that promise.
Chicago’s health leaders and hospital CEOs must now step forward as their predecessors once did. The arrest of Fuentes should galvanize a united response from the city’s medical community — a declaration that hospitals are sanctuaries, not staging grounds for federal raids.
A model citywide policy is urgently needed to:
- Require judicial warrants before any law enforcement action disrupts care;
- Protect patients, families and staff from harassment or unlawful detention;
- Affirm the dignity and privacy of all individuals under medical care; and
- Rebuild public trust in Chicago’s health institutions as safe havens for all.
As Mayor Brandon Johnson said a few days before he signed an executive order declaring city-owned properties “ICE-free zones,” attempts to silence or intimidate those who document the agency’s actions are “a direct attack on democratic accountability.”
But this is bigger than politics. It is about whether we believe, as our forebears did, that no federal order can compel us to betray our humanity.
When the City Council refused to embrace the Fugitive Slave Act, it wasn’t yet certain how the nation would judge it. City Council members acted not because they knew they would win, but because they knew they were right. They preserved the city’s moral compass when the country’s was spinning wildly.
The question before us in 2025 is the same as in 1850: Will Chicago obey injustice — or resist it?
We know our answer. We have given it before.
Dr. Claudia M. Fegan is the national coordinator for the Physicians for a National Health Program and former chief medical officer of Cook County Health.
Dr. Linda Rae Murray is a faculty member at the University of Illinois Chicago’s School of Public Health. She also previously served as president of the American Public Health Association and chief medical officer of the Cook County Department of Public Health.