The two men burst from the ice-crusted street into the warm cavern of a taqueria, shaking snow off puffed jackets and adjusting the brims of ball caps. They’d ventured into the Chicago night only because we’d arranged to meet. Otherwise, like many immigrants across the country, they’ve been sticking close to home.
The elder of the two Mexican men, 49-year-old Aldair Mata, is strapping and ebullient, an unflinching man with a quick laugh. He’s worked every imaginable restaurant job since crossing the border in 1993. He also taught himself English, became a U.S. citizen and fathered nine children, one of whom went to Stanford on scholarship.
His friend, Jose, is younger, and newer to this country. He asked that his last name not be published because he and his family are now hiding from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Jose hasn’t learned much English or acquired any working papers since crossing the border 10 years ago with his wife and then-baby, but he’s built a life: He and his wife found work, enrolled their eldest in school and welcomed a second child, who is now the only U.S. citizen in the family.
Jose has been whipped into quiet panic this winter by President Trump’s threats of mass deportations. He’s still turning up for his shifts at a wood-finishing factory — he can’t afford not to — but most of his co-workers have stopped coming. His wife is afraid to go to her factory job, and they’re keeping the 11-year-old home from school. Jose was nervous in the restaurant, curling his posture inward and eying the street outside.
Mr. Mata pulled out his phone to show Jose a couple of Spanish language news clips that were going viral that night: ICE agents using tear gas on a Texas home to force the family to open the door. Plainclothes federal agents in Tennessee marching food truck employees off apparently without a warrant. Mr. Mata and Jose watched grimly. “They can do whatever they want,” Jose said, and rubbed his face anxiously.
One more detail about these friends: They are both fans of Donald Trump. Mr. Mata voted for Trump, and though Jose can’t vote, he tells me that Mr. Trump “has courage.”
The men’s approval is striking when you consider that Mr. Trump has made their lives much harder. Even Mr. Mata, a citizen, now avoids going out, carries a photo of his passport in case he gets questioned and frets over his siblings, both of whom are undocumented immigrants. As for Jose, he’s afraid his family will get pulled apart, especially since the kids have different citizenships. He and his wife debate returning to Mexico or perhaps leaving Jose to work here alone while she takes the children over the border.
“If it keeps on like this,” he told me, “we can’t stay.”
But Jose doesn’t hold Mr. Trump responsible. Neither does Mr. Mata. They both blame “the Venezuelans,” which is shorthand for the more than 50,000 migrants (about 30,000 of them Venezuelan) who’ve poured into Chicago since 2022. Most of them came by bus from the Mexican border, dispatched by Republican officials eager to teach the sanctimonious sanctuary cities a lesson. Jose complains that “nothing matters” to the migrants, that some of them commit crimes and receive coveted work permits despite being “lazy.”
“If they hadn’t come,” he said darkly, “none of this would have happened.”
The migrant buses were not just a meanspirited stunt. They worked magnificently well — better, I suspect, than the plan’s architects could have hoped. Wave upon wave of disoriented, often traumatized migrants were unceremoniously deposited in the city, costing Chicago a fortune (nearly $640 million since 2022), infuriating Black and Latino residents who already felt neglected and sowing community resentment that ultimately moved votes.
Many people in Chicago name the buses as the single outstanding factor inspiring record numbers of the city’s Latinos — including those who sneaked across the border themselves or who count undocumented immigrants as their nearest and dearest — to vote for Mr. Trump.
I met Mr. Mata and Jose in Little Village, a neighborhood known as the Mexico of the Midwest. Votes for Mr. Trump more than doubled in the surrounding precincts, to 32 percent in 2024 from 13 percent in 2020. In Chicago’s most heavily Latino wards, 27 percent to 41 percent of the voters chose Mr. Trump.
If this seems confusing, it’s worth remembering that in Chicago, and the rest of the country, a vast underclass of law-abiding, taxpaying, undocumented immigrants shore up the economy while muddling along without work authorization, Social Security and other advantages. More than half of Illinois’s undocumented immigrants have been here 15 years or more. Chicago’s business owners — a not-insignificant number of whom are immigrants themselves — admit they rely on undocumented labor.
In Chicago and other sanctuary cities, the migrants bused en masse from the border — unlike the local workers subsisting in precarious illegality for years — enjoyed legal protection. They’d been processed by federal agents at the border and then released, having sought asylum, obligating the United States to hear their cases or having received humanitarian parole under Biden administration policies.
I’ve written before about America’s disingenuous mismanagement of its refugee system. The scale of that failure is demonstrated by this confounding fact: Chicago has thrived and grown strong on illegal immigration. It was legal immigration that destabilized the city.
Talking to people around Chicago, I heard the word “resentment” over and over. Latinos whose own families never got any particular help — many of whom, on the contrary, endured abuse and exploitation as they found their footing here — were now watching the local government fall over itself to assist the new arrivals. And all of it, from federal immigration policy to shelters, was unfolding under Democrats. If Mr. Trump has one outstanding political talent, it’s his ability to turn all manner of resentment to his advantage.
There is a senselessness to all of this — Mr. Trump is responding to problems that don’t actually exist (murderous hordes of undocumented immigrant criminals) rather than problems that do (the struggles of countless undocumented workers already woven into the fabric of our communities). Given how badly we need workers, it’s hard to understand why we talk about deportations rather than amnesty or pathways to citizenship. There are far more job openings than unemployed Americans, and, given our aging population, that gap is expected to grow. This is hardly the first time American nationalism has targeted and kicked out immigrants, but most of our previous impulses to deport had discernible economic underpinnings.
Forced removal has often coincided with economic woes, from the banishments and, eventually, deportations of impoverished Irish immigrants carried out by Massachusetts during the early decades of the Republic to the first mass deportation of Mexicans during the Great Depression. Even when economic unease wasn’t the cause (the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts and the 1919-20 Palmer Raids were driven by fear of politically hostile infiltration), the United States has not generally deported people against its own economic interests.
If Mr. Trump deports 11 million people, as per his threats, he’ll make history with an unforced error of stupendous scale.
***
The more migrants came, the more scandalized Mr. Mata became. Venezuelan women approached him at the supermarket, he says, offering to pay for his groceries on prepaid cards they’d been given if he’d pay them half the price in cash. Mr. Mata understood this as evidence of outsize, unnecessary public largess.
He also came to think that — just as Mr. Trump says — the new arrivals were driving up crime. This perception is contradicted by statistics indicating that crime has fallen in Chicago. But Mr. Mata heard stories of late-night train robberies, of Venezuelan women who danced with men at the Mexican bars and then stole their money and phones, of street fights erupting in gunfire.
These anecdotes may or may not be true, but a large majority of Chicago’s migrants haven’t committed any crimes. They are keen to work and are being absorbed into the economy like every preceding wave of immigrants. True, they got plenty of help settling down: hotel rooms, meals, health care, cellphones and, most significantly, work permits — in stark contrast to many Mexican immigrants who still lack legal status even after quietly working, paying taxes and obeying the law for decades.
Andre Vasquez, an alderman who is chair of the City Council’s committee on immigrant and refugee rights, explained how that played to Mr. Trump’s advantage. “If you feel as a citizen that neither party is serving your benefit — well, Republicans may not line up with you ideologically,” he said, “but there are people in dire straits, in pain, disenfranchisement. They’ll take a gamble on a carnival ride.”
Mr. Trump foreshadowed some of this in 2019, threatening to move immigrants into sanctuary cities, perhaps planting the seeds for the busing program later undertaken by his staunch ally, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas. Back then, Mr. Trump’s critics mocked the suggestion that an influx of asylum seekers would prove to be anything but a benefit to sanctuary cities.
Sitting with Mr. Mata and Jose, hearing their confidence in Mr. Trump mingled with fear of his project, it feels something like a trap. The men are correct — the hardships faced by Mexican immigrants, compared with the support given to asylum seekers, feels painfully unfair. They are right, too, that the Democrats failed to articulate a coherent theory on immigration or an effective counter to Mr. Trump. Now they’ve found themselves cheering for a leader who might get their families kicked out of the country. They believe Mr. Trump is right to deport people — so long as it’s the right people.
“A lot of innocent people are going to end up in Mexico for other people’s fault,” Mr. Mata conceded. “That’s what hurts me. People who pay taxes, who work. Very good people.”
***
This is a city of confluence — of waterways, then rail lines, then interstate highways, and of people from all corners of the world who flocked here to work in industry, transport, meatpacking and other sectors. More than 400,000 undocumented immigrants live in Illinois, primarily concentrated in Chicago and its suburbs. More than half of them are Mexican.
Now Chicago dangles on a fine thread, waiting to see how far Mr. Trump will go, whether mass deportations are a real plan or just another way to whip up the public. Half-information and lurid sensationalism have created a vacuum easily filled by dark fears and, perhaps, unrealistic hope.
Immigration advocates have been working furiously to prepare people to face ICE. One night, I joined the crowd at a “know your rights” seminar to hear immigration lawyers carefully explain, in Spanish, some of the new ICE practices and suggestions for legally responding. Anyone without legal status could be arrested, one of the lawyers explained to the crowd. If you’ve been here less than two years, she added, you can be deported without even seeing a judge.
You don’t have to open the door for ICE agents unless they have a warrant signed by a judge. If you’re a passenger in a car, and not the driver, you don’t have to say where you were born. Memorize a phone number in case you are detained, because they will take away your phone.
Since becoming a sanctuary city in 1985, Chicago has endeavored to treat immigrants like anyone else, with local authorities carefully distancing themselves from the vagaries of federal immigration enforcement.
Police arrest, detain and release suspects according to local laws, with a deliberate blinder over the question of immigration status. This is supposed to make the city safer and more functional — allowing people to report crime, come forward as witnesses and seek medical care without fearing trouble over their immigration status.
Cook County doesn’t allow ICE to use its jails — there is no immigration detention center in all of Illinois — and won’t keep people in jail longer than their own policies require, even if they’re identified in national databases as potentially deportable.
Given the bitter sparring between Chicago and the Trump administration, it was little surprise when the so-called border czar, Tom Homan, declared the city “ground zero” for the coming wave of deportations.
In his Inaugural Address, Mr. Trump blustered that he would deport “millions and millions of criminal aliens.” But that can’t be true, simply because millions of criminal aliens don’t exist. A great majority of the people deported last year were removed because of immigration violations that can be a civil administrative offense, not a crime. It was the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, who finally put it plainly. Any foreign national who illegally enters the United States, she said, is “by definition, a criminal.”
***
Luciana Diaz is an outspoken activist on behalf of the newly arrived asylum seekers. She helps people settle in, defuses fistfights between job seekers in the Home Depot parking lot, coaches people on job interview etiquette. Many of the asylum seekers are her compatriots — Ms. Diaz came from Venezuela a decade ago on a student visa, then fell in love and married a local woman.
She’s something of an accidental activist — the group chat she created in college to arrange hangouts with a handful of Venezuelan students ended up swelling to 4,000 members and turned into a vital community hub. “That’s why politicians are afraid of me,” she said, chuckling. The day we met she had a fresh arm tattoo still wrapped in cling film and wore a Bulls jersey and a “South Park” hoodie.
Ms. Diaz is gratified to see more Venezuelans in Chicago, and she’s determined they should succeed. That doesn’t mean, however, that she approves of how it all happened. She was critical of both the federal and local governments for insufficient planning and organization, and she witnessed up close the resulting political tensions.
When the first buses rolled into town in 2022, Ms. Diaz helped translate. The new arrivals, she noticed, tended to be young, relatively uneducated and traumatized by the journey they’d just undertaken, speaking painfully about the dead bodies they’d seen crossing the Darien Gap.
When Ms. Diaz was called over to help figure out why one teenager carried identification cards with different names, she prodded the young man to explain. He admitted that he’d been a criminal in Venezuela, Ms. Diaz said, involved with drug dealing and kidnapping. He’d gone through elaborate steps to try to hide his identity, including buying a forged death certificate bearing his true name back in Venezuela in an effort to legally disappear.
Ms. Diaz tried to approach this revelation pragmatically. She reminded herself that people can change and that immigration is a chance to start fresh. “I tried to wash his brain in this American way,” she said, encouraging him to take advantage of his new life and opportunities.
Quietly, though, she reeled from alarm. “Did anyone vet these people?” she wondered.
“So you just opened the door. What’s the plan?” she remembers thinking. “These kids, they should go to school. I don’t know — firemen, police, army, something. But there should be a plan.”
***
Sam Sanchez prays every morning that things won’t fall apart. A prominent, politically active restaurateur, Mr. Sanchez defines “falling apart” as mass deportations, workplace raids, separated families. He describes these first 100 days of the Trump administration as a storm that must be weathered — we knew it would be hard, he said ruefully.
Broad windows framed a vista of gray skyscrapers fading into dull sky, but Mr. Sanchez’s office was warm and bustling, walls hung with photos of his restaurants and President Barack Obama, and paintings riffing on the Blackhawks and Cubs. Mr. Sanchez remains hopeful that his wild gamble of voting for Mr. Trump will pay off. “If I didn’t believe it, if I didn’t believe there’s an opportunity there —” he trailed off, then added firmly, “but we see a window.”
Mr. Sanchez has been a registered Democrat since he was an 18-year-old in the 11th Ward, voting dutifully for every candidate on the list his uncles drew up. One by one, family members had made their way from Mexico to Chicago, cleaning boxcars at the railway where Mr. Sanchez’s grandfather first found a job. At 61, Mr. Sanchez owns several restaurants in Chicago; the place that anchors them all, Moe’s Cantina, is known for hosting Democratic fund-raisers.
Mr. Sanchez’s political asks are straightforward: full citizenship rights for undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children, a.k.a. Dreamers. Once that’s done, he wants legal status for essential workers.
He believes both Mr. Obama, with his numerous deportations, and President Joe Biden broke their commitments to Mexican Americans in general, and Dreamers in particular. Mexicans, he points out, run the highest risk of deportation. They’ve watched other groups of immigrants qualify for asylum, protected status, work visas — advantages that most Mexicans have done without.
“Everybody has something that they can protect themselves with and we, who have been here the longest, we have no protection,” he said. “We got skipped over. Got run over! Just got run over.”
Somebody, sooner or later, is going to give Dreamers citizenship, Mr. Sanchez predicted, and “whichever politician does this, they will own the Mexican community.” Mr. Trump, he pointed out, recently said that Dreamers should be allowed to stay. Mr. Sanchez is hopeful that Mr. Trump’s pragmatism — as a business owner who understands the labor market and a politician who grasps the demographic future of American voters — will prevail against the ideologues around him. Listening, I couldn’t help wondering: What if Trump, himself, is an ideologue?
“We actually got a couple things that were really good under Trump,” said Rebecca Shi, the Chicago-based head of the American Business Immigration Coalition. She was referring to pandemic measures: the essential worker designations given to some five million undocumented immigrants and the extension of relief payments to families containing both citizens and noncitizens.
She’s right — still, clinging to Mr. Trump’s fleeting recognition of undocumented labor in the middle of a public health crisis cuts against the basic, anti-immigrant trajectory of his administration’s nativist vision.
But Ms. Shi also believes Mr. Trump has come to a crossroads. She understands how he won Latino support here — but also how he could lose it.
“It’s an advantage Trump took, but it’s also a vulnerability,” she said. “If he doesn’t see the distinction, and he starts deporting the farm workers and the Mexicans? Then, frankly, he’s going to see the shift back.”
Now Chicago waits, and the rest of us wait. Nobody even pretends to grapple with the tangible problem of undocumented workers who deserve legal status. It takes all our attention to see what Mr. Trump will do next — will he delight or disappoint, was it a threat or a promise? We watch our president as if we’re watching a movie, knowing all along that at heart, both the person and the problem are fiction. Whatever he does, however — that part will be real.
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