Fight ICE with ice.
This weekend’s No Kings protests are likely to provide numerous opportunities to lash out at ICE. But that is not the way to hurt them.
Be as chill as 44-year-old Maria Greeling was earlier this month when she was suddenly surrounded by three men in civilian clothes and unmarked bulletproof vests on a dark and deserted Chicago street.
Be as chill as she intends to remain in Grant Park on Saturday, one of more than 2,500 gatherings planned by the organizers of nationwide No Kings protests against the authoritarian policies of the Trump administration. Anybody who is at all violent might later find themselves starring in footage that the would-be king and his cronies will use to support their false narrative about insurrection and the supposed need for troops in the blue state cities. Military in the streets now could become soldiers at ballot boxes during the upcoming elections.
So, just keep calm and leave ICE with its shame, as Greeley did on the night of Oct. 3 after she was stopped walking home in her bartender’s uniform after a double shift.
“They grabbed me, put my hands behind my back, and zip-tied me,” he later told the Daily Beast.
She said they initially uttered not a syllable regarding their identity or intent. Their cap brims were pulled low, further obscuring their faces.
“I couldn’t even make out the color of their eyes,” she recalled.
But they could not have trouble making out the color of her skin, which is the light brown of someone who describes herself as mestizo. To be more specific, she learned from a 23andMe DNA test that she is 54 percent indigenous American and 34 percent Portuguese.
“They were just standing around me and then. ‘We need your identification. Where’s your identification?’” she remembered. “I said, ‘Yep,’ because I was fully prepared for this.”
She directed them to the passport in her purse. She had begun carrying it several weeks before, after hearing that federal agents were stopping people of color to check if they could prove they are citizens and detaining them if they could not.
“Never in 44 years have I had the thought to carry around my passport, because it’s a very important document, and I would never want to lose it,” she later told the Daily Beast.
But for the very reason she was most likely stopped, her passport was not enough for these men.
“It says ‘Greeley’ on it and they were like, ‘This is an Irish name,’ like, ‘This is fake, this isn’t real,” she recalled. “They were just trying to intimidate me and make me feel fearful.”
She had an urge to tell these men exactly what she thought of them and what they were doing.
“I have a mouth on me,” she later noted. “I have a temper.”
But she remained cooperative.
“I was very respectful because I wanted to go home,” she recalled. “I had two dogs waiting all day for me to take them out to go to the bathroom.”
She quietly told the men that she had been adopted. She added that she was Chicago born and raised.
“I was just trying to explain, ‘This is me, this is who I am,’” she remembered.
She politely asked a couple of questions of her own.
“I said, ‘Please, what is your name? What is your badge number?’” she remembered. “And they just were like, ‘We don’t have to tell you anything.”
She later added, “They were just very, very, very just dismissive and didn’t want to acknowledge what they were doing was wrong.”
She continued to be as respectful as possible. The men sat her in the back of a white SUV for an hour while they confirmed her ID and checked to see if she had any outstanding warrants. They finally snipped off the zip ties and told her she was free to go.
“That’s all they said,” she remembered. “No apology, nothing.”
Apparently, joining ICE means never having to say you’re sorry.
That extends to America’s current top showman lawman, Border Patrol Chief-at-large Greg Bovino, who led the notorious sweep with horses and military vehicles through MacArthur Park in Los Angeles last summer.
When National Guard Maj. Gen. Scott Sherman questioned the wisdom of the show of force; Bovino reportedly questioned Sherman’s patriotism.
Bovino went on to stage the made-for-video raid on a Chicago apartment complex where agents fast roped onto the roof from black hawk helicopters. Snipers shone laser sights on residents, and children were among those rousted from bed and escorted outside, where they were separated by race in vehicles. The complex was supposedly occupied by the Tren de Aragua gang, but only one of the 37 people arrested was said to be a verified member. And, given the feds’ past mistakes in this regard, even that was questionable.
Bovino pressed ahead with what he called Operation Midway Blitz. He and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, aka ICE Barbie, staged a photo on Oct. 5 atop the roof of the Broadview ICE Facility in suburban Chicago. They gazed down to see only a handful of peaceful protesters who included a man in a chicken suit.
Why are we in the greater Chicago area?To arrest bad people and bad things. Exhibit A: Illegal alien from Mexico arrested by Office of Field Operations Operation Midway Blitz…In addition to 9 previous arrests (including felony and misdemeanor convictions), his most recent… pic.twitter.com/6CHa7htAbI
— Commander Op At Large CA Gregory K. Bovino (@CMDROpAtLargeCA) October 7, 2025
The next day, Bovino posted an unrelated perp photo of a forlorn Colombino Ramos displayed before a camera by two burly federal agents who had their backs turned. Columbino was wearing shorts, which revealed he had on black socks with the letters USA in white. Bovino wrote:
“Why are we in the greater Chicago area? To arrest bad people and bad things. Exhibit A: Illegal alien from Mexico arrested by Office of Field Operations Operation Midway Blitz… In addition to 9 previous arrests (including felony and misdemeanor convictions), his most recent arrest made national news, when on March 30, 2025, he allegedly posed as a rideshare driver in Chicago and sexually assaulted a woman inside his vehicle after picking her up outside a local nightclub. He was charged with aggravated criminal sexual assault, aggravated kidnapping with bodily harm, and unlawful restraint. He was released from detention two days after his arrest. With a lengthy and violent criminal record dating back to 2002, why has he been living free as a bird in the Windy City? Because of Chicago’s embrace of sanctuary policies, which hurt rather than help its residents. But no more. Operation Midway Blitz is here to rid Chicago of criminal illegal aliens like him.”
But, as noted by the CWB Chicago news site, another Ramos, Alexander, had been arrested for the ride-share attack in August and had been held without bail in the Cook County jail ever since. Columbino Ramos appears to have had no criminal record when he was arrested for being an undocumented immigrant by Bovino’s agents on Sept. 22. He had been living in the United States for three decades and had been making a living by collecting scrap metal for resale.
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to repeated requests for comment from the Daily Beast. Bovino did not delete the apparently defamatory post or express regret for the error. He apparently included the falsely accused Columbino Ramos among the 1,000 “illegal alien” criminals he says his agents have swept up in Chicago. Some 99 percent of them also appeared to have no criminal record.
And that is because they rely on such lesser known tactics as waiting outside bars and restaurants at closing time until workers of color as are heading home. They also simply look for those who appear frightened by masked goons.
“We need reasonable suspicion to make an immigration arrest,” Bovino told CNN. “You notice I did not say probable cause, nor did I say I need a warrant. Perhaps you look panicked when you see a Border Patrol agent. Perhaps you look scared. Perhaps your demeanor changes. Perhaps you’re gripping the steering wheel so tightly that I can see the whites of your knuckles. There’s a myriad of factors that we would look at to develop articulable facts for reasonable suspicion.”
Had Greeley not cooperated, a woman who had been quietly leaving work was liable to have been listed as one of the “criminals” ICE had detained in the name of making Chicago “safe.” She instead let the three men disgrace themselves and continued on home to her two dogs, a pair of uncommonly friendly pitbulls named Bronxx and Brooklyn.
She was left frightened enough by the encounter that she did not want her picture to appear in the media.
“I’m really scared,” she told The Daily Beast. “I don’t want to be targeted by any of white supremacists or Proud Boys or anything like that.
She did vent some of her outrage by buying two t-shirts.
A white one reads, “I.C.E. CAN GARGLE MY BALLS”
And a black one reads, “RELAX GRINGO..I’M LEGAL..”
She figures she will wear the more temperate RELAX GINGO one to the No Kings Protest.
“I don’t want to invoke any kind of hostility,” she said. “Just peaceful protest.”
And that t-shirt has a touch of humor such as some protesters in Portland displayed by donning cartoonish inflatable costumes.
“How can you say that a unicorn, a blow-up unicorn, or a blow-up giraffe, or somebody, you know, riding a rooster is a violent protest,” Greeley said. “”How can you say these people are so violent and that’s why we need to have the National Guard?”
She did have one worry that ICE might repeat what it had done in Portland.
“They’re taking tear gas and spraying it in the air holes,” she said.
Concern over ICE’s aggressive tactics prompted a federal judge in Chicago to order federal agents to wear body cameras. A lawyer for the Department of Homeland Security told the court that the government was unable to comply due to the continuing shutdown.
As for the “I.C.E. CAN GARGLE MY BALLS” shirt, Greeley figures, “I’ll keep that for more private events.”
She has connected with some of her biological family, whose skin is of a brown that might prompt an ICE stop even without whitening knuckles on a steering wheel. She may wear the Gargle shirt on Oct. 25 for the 89th birthday of her maternal grandmother, who was born in Arkansas, but would likely need a passport to prove to ICE she is not Mexican.
“My grandma will love it,” Greeley said.
The post Opinion: This Is How You Can Bamboozle ICE Goons at the No Kings Protests appeared first on The Daily Beast.
