Chicago Sun-Times photojournalist talks about his viral images of federal agents tear-gassing protesters

As immigration enforcement has ramped up around the Chicago area, photojournalists have seen it all up close. Sometimes, they’re even caught in the middle.

Chicago Sun-Times photojournalist Anthony Vazquez was on the scene this week when federal immigration agents tear-gassed protesters and Chicago police officers on the city’s Far Southeast Side. The images he captured — of federal agents restraining and menacing protesters — have stirred viewers around the world, including a federal judge and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who wrote that Trump administration officials “need to answer for their unchecked attacks on Chicago residents. … The images from the Sun-Times today speak for themselves.”

Vazquez brings a particular kind of experience to covering protests like these: He served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 2010 to 2014, including in Afghanistan.

“I’m calm under stressful situations is the best way to put it,” he told WBEZ’s Melba Lara. (Click the Listen button above to hear their full conversation.) Part of that comes from his training in the military, which included mock situations of being bombarded with loud noises. With the Trump administration’s “Operation Midway Blitz” now in its second month in Chicago, Vazquez has had plenty of practice at protest sites like the U.S Customs and Immigration Enforcement center in suburban Broadview, where he was struck by nonlethal projectiles.

On Tuesday, Vazquez went on assignment to Chicago’s East Side neighborhood on the Indiana state line, where a dramatic car chase between federal agents and their targets had ended in a crash and a confrontation.

“I was there for about 10 minutes, you know, getting photographs. And then something flew towards the ICE agents,” he said. “I don’t know what it was, but something sparked that little confrontation between ICE agents and protesters. Then I saw one ICE agent rush into the crowd of protesters, so I just chased after him, because I knew something’s going to happen.”

What came next involved a series of close observations and quick decisions from Vazquez. On his left, federal agents had pinned down a protester who turned out to be a 15-year-old boy; on his right, agents were confronting another protester, pointing a crowd-control weapon at his chest.

“I didn’t know which one was going to escalate,” Vazquez said. “It’s a split-second decision whether or not he decides to pull the trigger.”

The chaos settled soon after he captured both images, as other protesters chanted demands for the detained individuals to be released. As the federal agents left the scene, Vazquez said they threw tear gas to disperse the crowd.

“And then it was like a weird eerie feeling afterwards,” he said. “It was kind of like a weird silence of like, ‘what just happened happened, and now we’re moving on’ kind of thing. People were kind of still in shock, you know?”

Capturing these moments requires discipline and situational awareness. “Things can go pretty bad pretty quickly,” Vazquez said. “You just have to be ready to either decide to stay or run, just for your own safety.”

That said, he believes we’re likely to see more of these intimate moments of confrontation. “In the past, it’s been [journalists] standing on the periphery, because we’ve been a little bit afraid of getting too close to what’s actually happening,” he said. When people see “a 15-year-old boy pinned down to the ground and then others with their hands up … seeing it up close is different. Seeing the fear in the protesters’ eyes, you know, is different.”