A conservative social media personality with a history of confrontations over immigration has returned to Chicago and is riding along with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers as they make arrests.
As immigration enforcement is expected to ramp up under President Donald Trump’s “Operation Midway Blitz,” Ben Bergquam posted a series of Instagram videos about ICE activity in Chicago and residents protesting federal agents’ actions.
In one video, Bergquam films agents handcuffing a man and putting him in an unmarked vehicle. Another car approaches and a man gives Bergquam the middle finger, saying, “You guys are f—ing up our community, man.”
A woman in the car asks: “What if it was your mom? What if it was your dad?”
Bergquam replies: “If they’re criminals, they gotta go. They’re criminals, they’re criminals.”
Bergquam, a correspondent for the right-wing news channel Real America’s Voice, has more than 177,000 followers on Instagram. He didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Jeff Tischauser — a senior research analyst with the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization that studies hate groups — said Bergquam is part of the bridge from more establishment MAGA believers to those like Proud Boy and frequent collaborator Terry Newsome.
Bergquam’s show has peddled the great replacement theory, which falsely states that Democrats promote pro-immigration policies to dilute the white population. Bergquam often appears alongside Trump adviser and far-right leader Steve Bannon.
“Ben Bergquam is part of this slippery slope that ties together the far right with more legitimate powerful political people,” Tischauser told the Sun-Times. “To have a far-right influencer embedded with ICE, we know who their audience is, and we know now they’re directing this content for very specific audiences.”
“Operation Midway Blitz” was launched Monday and ICE has made multiple arrests in the past several days, with more expected. It’s unclear if the National Guard will be deployed to Chicago as Trump has suggested.
In another video on Bergquam’s Instagram page, a group of anti-ICE protesters gathered, recording and disrupting the internet personality, who referred to immigrants without legal status as violent criminals that pose a threat to their neighbors.
The caption of the video reads: “These are the enemies within our founders warned us about!”
“How many criminals do you want to keep? Rapists? Murderers?” Bergquam said. “How many criminals do you want in your neighborhood? Are you okay with rapists? Are you okay with murderers? These guys are trying to take criminals out of your neighborhood.”
Numerous studies have found no connection between immigration and crime trends. An October 2024 study by the American Immigration Council found that “no association existed between state-level undocumented immigrant concentrations and homicide, robbery, or assault.”
Trump has called Chicago a “killing field,” and Bergquam said the city has “crime statistics that are like third-world countries.” However, Chicago has experienced a significant drop in crime in recent years, and recently saw the lowest number of summer murders since 1965.
One exchange Bergquam had with a bystander grew so contentious that a Chicago police officer intervened, telling Bergquam to back away.
It’s not the first time he has showed up in Chicago and clashed with residents.
In 2019, Bergquam led a group of Trump supporters in MAGA hats who targeted and harassed Emma Lozano, a pastor and head of the immigration advocacy group Centro Sin Fronteras in Pilsen. The Trump supporters accused Lozano of “training illegal aliens in Central America and Mexico to break into America,” Block Club Chicago reported at the time.
Lozano declined to comment on Bergquam’s return to Chicago.
“The best thing to do is to ignore him,” she said.
The same year, ICE raids were anticipated in the city, drawing thousands to protest, but widespread immigration enforcement never materialized.
This isn’t Bergquam’s first go-around with federal law enforcement either. He embedded with ICE in July to get videos of deportation flights leaving Gary, Indiana, though he has appeared in Chicago and Los Angeles many times before to spread anti-migrant hate unrelated to any federal operation.
Bergquam’s video work has always leaned on some sort of “trolling” or agitation, according to Tischauser, which raises concerns about whether his presence could further inflame situations, such as immigration arrests, that have left communities at a boiling point.
“Some of these videos end very poorly for the people who are antagonizing, and sometimes the person who is doing the trolling will escalate to violence,” Tischauser said. “So there’s always a worry when you see someone like him on the ground that things could go bad.”