Since immigration-enforcement agents began their descent on Chicago, acting with seemingly unprecedented speed and ferocity, Evelyn Vargas and her colleagues at Organized Communities Against Deportation have been in a frenzy. They help run an emergency hotline that refers people who have been detained to immigration lawyers and directs their families to support services such as food pantries, emergency housing, and mental-health care. (On a single day last week, it took 800 calls.) And they oversee a team of 35 “rapid responders” who have been sprinting across the city to film arrests, aiming for at least two to arrive on the scene within 10 minutes.
When training volunteers, OCAD instructs them to stay a safe distance from agents and makes clear that their goal is to observe but not intervene or prevent arrests. They share footage with elected officials and lawyers representing those apprehended, but do not post the videos online. And they emphasize that the safety of everyone involved is their top priority. Despite these precautions, Vargas told me that her colleagues, and others doing similar work in Chicago, have been thrown to the ground, pepper-sprayed, and tailed in their cars by officers in an apparent attempt to intimidate them. A few weeks ago, agents temporarily detained some of their members—all of whom are citizens or legal residents—so Vargas and her colleagues quickly removed them from group chats in case their devices were searched.
To protect themselves and their work, they also keep their office location private and have started to ban phones, laptops, and other devices from meetings. No notes are allowed, except those taken by lawyers, about people who could be targeted by ICE. People interested in joining the group require an invitation and may be asked to participate after attending three meetings, but only if their references check out.
Vargas said she worries about what OCAD’s volunteers will face next. “This feels pretty bad,” she told me. “It’s so hard to not know if the tailing is just an incremental thing, and it’s gonna stop there, or keep going.”
Since Donald Trump and his top aides directed a cavalcade of government agencies and tens of billions of dollars toward their effort to deport immigrants en masse, the advocates defending them have become targets, too. Their ranks span levels of experience, funding, and professionalism, from individual lawyers at long-established firms to parent volunteers who walk immigrant children to school. ICE is facing more aggressive challenges to its work than usual, not all of it from groups with clear safety guidelines. But the administration has begun characterizing virtually any opposition as part of a conspiracy to dox, harm, or even kill ICE agents and upend the rule of law, launching an attack that it promises is just beginning.
House Republicans have demanded financial records from nonprofit groups that they accused of fueling illegal border crossings and training immigrants on how to avoid cooperating with ICE. Trump’s Justice Department has sought monetary sanctions against immigration lawyers, and the Department of Education has dangled the possibility of excluding them from public-service loan-forgiveness programs. The Drug Enforcement Agency and the FBI are investigating the clashes between officers and activists in the streets, and representatives of the Department of Homeland Security say that, along with the IRS, they are tracking “what NGOs, unions, and other individuals may be funding these violent riots.” For those who are interacting with ICE directly, the threats are often physical.
Hours after a bullet casing inscribed with the phrase anti-ICE was discovered near one of the agency’s facilities in Dallas, where two immigrants were killed and one was critically injured last month, Trump declared that criticizing the agency inevitably leads to violence. He then directed the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force to “disrupt and dismantle” activist groups. But the memo is written so broadly as to include people who have opposing views on capitalism, migration, race, and gender.
“Many of these so-called advocates are actually engaging in violent and dangerous behavior,” Tricia McLaughlin, a DHS spokesperson, told me in a statement. She added, in reference to Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker: “From comparisons to the modern-day Nazi gestapo to glorifying rioters, the violent rhetoric of these sanctuary politicians is beyond the pale. This rhetoric is contributing to a more than 1000% surge in assaults of our ICE officers.”
And yet this comes at a time when ICE itself has become more violent toward immigrants, protesters, and unlucky bystanders alike. In recent weeks, agents have shoved to the ground a journalist trying to document an arrest and a woman who was crying because her husband had just been taken into custody. Both were hospitalized. And in Chicago, they shot a woman who they say rammed an agency vehicle—a claim that the woman’s lawyer said body-camera footage disproves. Alongside the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives and the FBI, ICE also stormed an apartment building in the dark of night, breaking down doors and detaining scores of people, including U.S. citizens. Bystanders reported seeing children zip-tied to one another.
The administration has said that officers have no choice but to be aggressive when the public attempts to interfere with their work. “Secretary Noem has a clear message to rioters,” McLaughlin said. “You will not stop or slow us down. ICE and CBP will continue to enforce the law.”
OCAD does not condone violence under any circumstances, but embraces the leftist viewpoints that Trump often berates. Vargas told me the group supports immigrants regardless of whether they’ve broken any laws, rejecting the argument that some—typically hardworking parents with no criminal records—deserve empathy and others don’t. Its members identify as abolitionists, believing that state investments in marginalized communities would more effectively and humanely counter societal problems than the immigration and criminal-justice systems. In their work filming arrests, they take inspiration from the Black Panther Party, which organized “Copwatch” patrols during the 1960s civil-rights movement. (Their vigilance around who is allowed to volunteer with them is also rooted in history; the FBI infiltrated the Panthers and other civil-rights organizations to try to disrupt their work and prosecute members.)
The administration is bearing down on more mainstream immigrant-advocacy groups, too. At the National Immigration Law Center, which has advised Congress and filed precedent-setting litigation for 46 years, staff attorneys have memorized phone numbers to call if they’re arrested. “We normally do know-your-rights presentations for immigrants—now we’re doing it for our staff,” Kica Matos, the organization’s president, told me. “I’ve been doing this work for 20 years, and it’s never been this bad.”
Matos said people are still eagerly coming forward to support the work, but their demographics have changed. Whereas before, rallies her group organized or participated in were attended mostly by immigrants and people of color, she said “the last rally I went to, I’d say, was made up of 70 to 75 percent white folks. Immigrants are too afraid now in many communities to speak out and to take part.” In the past, an undocumented speaker would often headline those rallies, but now the group makes sure to spotlight only U.S. citizens.
Brian Hauss, a First Amendment attorney at the ACLU, told me that listservs connecting tens of thousands of immigration lawyers have been alight with questions about what might trigger the administration to come after them. Hauss said that many are concerned about not having their student loans forgiven after spending years in public-service jobs if the administration deems their work to be “supporting terrorism” or subsidizing “illegal immigration, human smuggling, child trafficking, pervasive damage to public property, and disruption of the public order,” as a recent executive order warns. In August, Justice Department lawyers filed a motion to financially sanction an attorney who they said made frivolous arguments as he tried to stop the deportation of a man to Laos. The attorney, Joshua Schroeder, challenged the motion; a judge has yet to decide on it. “Nobody knows what the lines are anymore. Everyone is asking, ‘If I do this, will I get in trouble?’ ‘Is this okay, or is that okay?’ And the answers are ‘I don’t know,’” Hauss said. “Even if you win in court and are within your rights, there could be a lot of damage done.”
Some lawyers have had to get lawyers themselves. The Hana Center, which serves about 16,000 immigrants a year in Chicago and created an app that can send a message to your emergency contact or notify your consulate if you encounter ICE, reinforced its cybersecurity system and hired lawyers to review social-media posts and press releases, according to its executive director, Danae Kovac. Karen Musalo, the director of the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at UC Law San Francisco, secured pro bono counsel to respond on her organization’s behalf when it was one of more than 200 groups probed by the House Homeland Security Committee. Musalo called the inquiry “performative for the MAGA base” and an “attempt to intimidate” her staff, adding that her attorneys remain steadfast. “To be intimidated against doing what one thinks is ethical and principled because of the threat of retaliation is cowardice at its core,” she told me. “I don’t want to live in a society where everyone capitulates.”
Some, however, have capitulated—particularly among the elite. Big law firms once dedicated enormous resources from their pro bono departments to defending immigrants against the government. But soon after Trump retook office, he began singling out those firms in executive orders that, if implemented, would have obliterated their businesses. Several struck deals in exchange for having orders against them dropped. Collectively, they have agreed to about $1 billion in free legal work on causes that the president supports. Even firms that were not explicitly targeted in executive orders have scaled back their pro bono work on immigration cases, in what one lawyer described to The New York Times as “anticipatory obedience.”
Despite the intense pressure that OCAD is facing, Vargas told me the organization doesn’t plan to stop. Nor, she said, does it long for the days before Trump was elected, when ICE carried out arrests that separated families and made their friends and neighbors live in fear, only with less fanfare. Many of the group’s members began advocating for immigrants’ rights when they were college students. They’ve never seen this level of aggression, but across Republican and Democratic administrations, they have experienced punishing periods of ICE enforcement. Vargas said she shudders to hear some people speak wistfully about the past, when the immigration system was still broken but the public debate over it was comparatively dispassionate. “Those discussions were about the subjugation and oppression of me,” she said. “If you want to have a calm conviction about it, I’m so glad you feel safe enough to do that—I am not.”
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