Mandy Tovar, a 39-year-old Forest Park resident, arrived to march alongside more than 350 people Tuesday with bruises from flash bang grenades and pepper ball rounds fired by federal agents still covering her right side.
She had spent the last two weekends in Broadview protesting the ICE facility just a few minutes drive from her home.
But Tuesday night, she joined protesters taking up the northbound lanes of Michigan Avenue as they walked from Wacker Drive to Water Tower Place chanting “No Trump, no ICE, no Troops” after the Department of Homeland Security requested 100 military troops be sent to Illinois to protect ICE agents.
“It’s all optics, that’s what this administration has been about,” Tovar said of federal agents marching down the same street days earlier, making arrests as they went. “This is our optics. Let the world see we’re marching down the streets peacefully.”
A day before a CBS reporter was fired on by a federal agent with pepper balls, Tovar said her car was shot while there were no protesters around; the weekend before, she was hospitalized after being hit in the chest with a flashbang grenade.
“Something needs to change. A revolution needs to happen,” Tovar, a teacher and descendant of Mexican immigrants, said. And “nothing ever happened without people doing what we’re doing now. It’s scary, and this moment takes bravery. … [But] this is not the America I want my daughter to grow up in.”
Kevin Ryan, a Marine Corps veteran who served in Afghanistan and at the Pentagon, also attended Tuesday’s march.
“This is not what our service members sign up for. It’s not how they should be used,” the 33-year-old Lake View resident said. “The Trump administration is trying to politicize our military so he can militarize our cities. … If you harness that power against your own people, we no longer have a democracy.”
Ryan said he felt terrible about the deployment both as a civilian and veteran, though he couldn’t imagine how active service members felt. He urged current members of the military to stay to mitigate the damage and avoid the “purge” of nonloyal service members he said Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are trying to enact.
“We need veterans to stand up and speak out,” Ryan said. “Remember, you took an oath to the Constitution and not any one person or president.”
Before the group took to the streets, Jill Manrique Calderón Castillo — executive director of Chicago Jobs with Justice, one of the dozens of organizations supporting the protest — asked the crowd: “Are we going to take this manufactured chaos?”
The response was a resounding “Hell no!” from the hundreds in attendance.
Castillo said the current federal encroachment on the city was part of a long imperial history, including the ongoing genocide in Gaza and decades of oppression faced by minorities globally.
“There’s no way to sit here and let this go away,” she said. “It’s not going to, and has been here for a while. … We need solidarity we’ve never seen, the solidarity Fred Hampton talked about, the solidarity Assata Shakur should’ve seen. An injury to one is an injury to all.”
