A calm has settled over the Chicago area this spring after months of chaos last fall, when masked federal immigration agents roamed neighborhoods, often deploying tear gas and other aggressive tactics while arresting people.
Groups of U.S. Border Patrol agents no longer are making surprise visits to Michigan Avenue or marching through Little Village, Back of the Yards and other neighborhoods.
But immigration enforcement hasn’t ended. A WBEZ/Chicago Sun-Times analysis of data from the Deportation Data Project, a collective of lawyers and academics, has found that 580 people have been detained in the Chicago area from Jan.1 through mid-March.
Organizers and other rapid-responders who try to warn people about immigration enforcement activity say they remain on high alert and are shifting tactics.
“This is going to be the new normal at least for the next couple years, and we just have to be always ready and always prepared,” said Mimi Guiracocha, a lead organizer with Pilsen Unidos por Ñuestro Orgullo, known by the acronym PUÑO, a rapid-response coalition based in the Lower West Side community.
Guiracocha is planning training sessions and deploying volunteer responders to verify immigration enforcement when she receives an alert. She and other organizers say they aim to be better prepared if large numbers of agents return to Chicago.
Building on lessons learned from last year in Chicago and Minneapolis, these new strategies include tapping new dispatch systems to speed responses when agents are spotted and encouraging block-by-block, hyperlocal communication. Also, some groups are training people to prepare for more aggressive enforcement tactics and to deal with the obstacles that immigrants might face if they are detained.
Faster alert system
Community leaders and rapid-responders say they are seeing more targeted arrests rather than the large, highly visible sweeps seen last fall.
Cristóbal Cavazos, executive director of Casa DuPage Workers Center, an organization that documents immigration enforcement in the west suburbs, said the shift makes it harder for volunteers to track enforcement operations and get there quickly when they hear of them.
Cavazos said he’s seen as many as seven agents trying to arrest one person. That means people who weren’t the original targets but are nearby might also get arrested.
Last year, Cavazos said he helped organize about 300 volunteer rapid-responders, who patrolled in Elgin, Villa Park and other suburbs. He said they used WhatsApp and then Signal messages to send people alerts about immigration enforcement. Those tools were helpful but not as practical when federal agents were spotted and rapid-responders needed to sound the alarm in real time, according to Cavazos, who said that, at times, the chats had too many comments, which slowed response times.
To alert people more quickly, Cavazos said his team is moving to a dispatch system using cellphone apps. Responders use the apps to provide live updates from their location, aiming to cut response times from the current 10 to 15 minutes to as few as five.
Cavazos got the idea for the dispatch system from the time he spent volunteering as a rapid-responder in Minneapolis in January.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents “would be there, and people would be [on location] within one or two minutes,” Cavazos said. “They were just all over ICE like a cheap suit. That’s community power.”
Some rapid-responders also are focusing on a narrower, block-by-block strategy to speed their responses to reports of immigration enforcement. Guiracocha said the aim is to use hyperlocal text chains and group chats for people to instantly alert their neighbors.
More training
“Migra watch” and “know your rights” training sessions have been around for years, but such sessions grew in popularity and evolved as federal enforcement escalated last fall.
Previously, a lot of the focus had been on showing people how to document an arrest or to ask for a warrant. Now, the training also includes planning for what to do after someone is arrested and taken to a detention center.
Data analyzed by WBEZ and the Sun-Times shows 1,341 people who were detained in the Chicago area from the start of Operation Midway Blitz through mid-March voluntarily agreed to self-deport.
Cavazos said he wants people to know they don’t have to self-deport.
“Don’t talk, don’t sign, ask to speak to a lawyer,” is the advice Cavazos gives. His training sessions cover habeas corpus petitions, a legal process used to challenge the legality of a detention.
Participants also learn about the Castañon-Nava case, a 2022 settlement restricting federal immigration agents’ authority to make warrantless arrests in Illinois and five other states. Agents are supposed to have probable cause that someone is in the country unlawfully and provide evidence that the person is a flight risk. Recent violations of this court order led a federal judge to order the release of immigrants who were illegally detained and 343 people have benefited from the case.
“Even up to now, people are getting released,” Guiracocha said. “We see those stories, and we put them in the training to say, this is why this matters.”
Training to face aggressive tactics
Organizers said they try to convey the level of violence that immigrants and activists could face by role playing difficult arrest scenarios and teaching new deescalation tactics.
Those “really shifted from ‘these are the things that you can do if you see ICE’ to ‘ICE is unpredictable, and your safety is the No. 1 priority,’ ” said Rey Wences, senior director of deportation defense for the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.
Wences said participants in training are told to follow protocols if shots are fired. They also learn how to protect themselves against chemical agents like tear gas and pepper spray, with an emphasis on using personal protective equipment. The training also shows people how to create an emergency plan in case they get hurt, arrested or deported.
During simulations, role-play participants act as agents and shout aggressive remarks to test a volunteer’s ability to remain firm without escalating the situation.
Some trainers describe the sessions as a “taste” of reality because it mirrors the chaos and crises that unfold when immigrants are being arrested. The sessions conclude with volunteers talking about their mental and emotional reactions to foster awareness and help people stay focused in case they find themselves facing aggressive tactics.
“There is no limit [to] the violence that these agents and this administration has on the community,” Guiracocha said. “I think [that] has been an awful lesson for us to learn but something that we can now use to prepare to equip ourselves.”
Contributing: Lauren FitzPatrick, Alden Loury