One recent morning on Chicago’s southwest side, the manager of a Mexican grocery store began the day posted at the front door, rehearsing the phrase “I wish to exercise my right to remain silent” in English in case immigration agents showed up asking about employees.
At a Mexican restaurant, the owner stashed newly laminated private signs under the host stand, ready to slap on the walls of the kitchen and a back dining room where workers could hide if agents arrived without a proper warrant.
Inside a house nearby, a woman named Consuelo went to the living-room window and checked the street for unusual cars, then checked the time as her undocumented husband left for work, calculating when he was supposed to arrive at the suburban country club where he’d worked for 27 years, where he’d earned an “all-star” employee award, and which now felt like enemy territory. She lit the first prayer candle of the day.
A month into President Donald Trump’s promise to launch the largest deportation operation in U.S. history, this is what life was becoming in a neighborhood where generations of Mexican immigrants had built versions of American lives: People were in various stages of preparing for a crackdown that felt more imminent every day.
Although much of the controversy around immigration has focused on the southern border and recent waves of asylum seekers from Venezuela, Haiti, and Central America, anxiety over Trump’s deportation plan is seeping into the nation’s more long-standing population of undocumented immigrants. Experts estimate that at least 11 million people are in the United States without legal status, about 4 million of whom are Mexicans, many with deep roots in cities and towns across a nation whose central hypocrisy has long been to use the cheap labor that immigrants supply, while often demonizing them for political expedience.
Since Trump returned to office last month, his administration has claimed that it is rounding up immigrants with violent criminal backgrounds, though little information has been released about detainees so far. During the first two weeks of his current term, more than 8,000 people were arrested, including more than 100 in the Chicago area, a number roughly in line with enforcement surges in the past. What mattered more was the ever more dire message people were hearing.
Trump was no longer simply using terms such as “bloodthirsty criminals” and “animals” to describe immigrants. In a barrage of militaristic propaganda and executive orders, he was declaring them to be enemies and spies, and the situation at the southern border an “invasion.” His border czar, Tom Homan, was calling bystanders swept up in raids “collaterals,” the blithe euphemism for civilians killed in wars. Trump was preparing to designate foreign drug cartels and gangs as “terrorists,” and pledging to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which could give the administration extraordinary wartime powers to bypass due process and accelerate deportations. U.S. forces were building a tent city at Guantánamo Bay. Before being repatriated, a group of Venezuelan detainees had been held at a prison that once housed al-Qaeda suspects. In recent days, Trump was reportedly growing impatient with the pace of deportations, reassigning his acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And hour by hour, all of this was filtering into the social-media feeds and WhatsApp groups of people trying to figure out what was going to happen next.
“It’s the rhetoric; it’s the dehumanization; it’s the narrative of what Trump is making people think about us,” Eréndira Rendón, an immigrant-rights advocate in Chicago, told me. She herself had been brought to the U.S. as a child, and her legal status under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program was uncertain. “It feels more intense this time,” Rendón said, comparing the moment with previous crackdowns during Trump’s first term, and during the Obama administration before that. “Like there is no going back.”
That feeling was widespread in southwest Chicago, where dozens of people told me that they had no choice but to take Trump’s rhetoric seriously. The level of anxiety was such that almost no one wanted their name used, or their specific location mentioned, for fear of attracting the attention of immigration agents. The people I spoke with included restaurant workers, shopkeepers, meatpackers, construction workers, lawyers, a graphic designer, a teacher, and parents of American children, some of whom were attending a “Know Your Rights” seminar in the back of a public library one night.
“You should memorize your alien number,” an advocate named Laura was saying, referring to a number assigned to track noncitizens. “It starts with the letter A and is nine digits. This is how your loved ones will be able to find you.”
By the first week in February, life on the southwest side had entered a kind of limbo. In the days before Trump’s inauguration, several people told me, they had stockpiled food. Now the streets were quiet. School attendance was down. Attendance was down at a Catholic church that had welcomed immigrants for generations. “We are preparing for the worst,” the priest there told me; he requested anonymity to avoid drawing scrutiny to a place he was trying to keep safe.
He had tried to reassure people of this, even though the Trump administration had just rescinded a policy protecting places of worship, schools, and other sensitive locations from immigration raids. The priest had promised that he was not going to fling open the front doors for agents, even though Trump was threatening to prosecute anyone interfering with enforcement. He’d done the only other thing he knew to do: On a table just inside the heavy wooden front doors of his church, he’d set out a stack of pamphlets with hotlines and names of lawyers who could help people sign over belongings, transfer home titles, establish guardians for children.
Outside, the steeple rose above a neighborhood of rowhouses and battered mailboxes with one name taped or painted over another—Ariza, Arevalo, Ramirez. In the past two years, thousands of Venezuelan migrants had arrived, but the dominant immigrant community was composed of Mexicans, many of whom had arrived in the 1990s after NAFTA sent a flood of subsidized U.S. corn across the border, decimating small farmers. At this point, lives were settled. The names and images of Mexican heroes and saints were chiseled on schools and framed on walls—Benito Juárez, Cesar Chavez, Óscar Romero, a thousand Virgins of Guadalupe. A commercial strip was packed with Western Unions, taquerias, and shops named for Mexican towns. A photography studio had sun-faded images of weddings propped in the window. Businesses were open, but many of their front doors were locked.
There had been reports of a man detained in an adjacent neighborhood, and rumors of ICE trucks patrolling. At a clothing store, the owners, a married couple, buzzed people in only after screening them. In came a delivery guy wearing a face mask. In came the undocumented man who lived above the shop. A portable television on a glass counter was blaring something about Trump. “This man is crazy,” the husband was saying.
He and his wife both told me that they had legal status, but worried that Trump was taking away protections for whole categories of immigrants. Their three grandchildren were born in the U.S., but Trump was trying to abolish birthright citizenship. Besides the man who lived upstairs, a daughter-in-law who lived with them was undocumented, which made the shop owners possible “collaterals,” and so they were saving money for lawyers. They were considering selling the business, and imagining what might be left for them back in Guanajuato, Mexico, after 28 years away.
Everyone had some plan. A couple decided that if one of them got picked up, the other would signal trouble by texting random letters.
At a restaurant, the cashier’s strategy was to stay inside except for work. “I don’t walk my dog. I don’t do laundry. I canceled my doctor,” she told me. She was in the process of establishing residency but had little confidence this would save her. She’d given her lawyer’s number to a friend. “If they come, I cannot start running,” she said.
Down the street, the grocery-store manager had gone over a plan with workers. If immigration agents came, employees were to calmly walk to areas designated as private, where agents were not supposed to go without a specific judicial warrant: up a spiral staircase to an office; behind the meat counter. A back door was open. The owner had recorded a video message as if preparing them for battle. “Your strength inspires us all,” he said. “We are with you.”
At the public library, people took notes as Laura, the advocate, explained about alien numbers, and which rights undocumented immigrants still had in America.
“You have a right to be silent, but you have to say so,” she said. “Say: ‘I wish to remain silent,’” she told them, and they repeated the phrase. She continued: You have a right to refuse to sign anything. You have a right to refuse to open your door, or to open it only a few inches; any wider could be interpreted as permission to enter. You should know the difference between an administrative warrant and a judicial warrant, and insist that the officer slip it under the door or press it against a window. You should know what to expect if a warrant is valid.
“They might break down the door,” Laura said, telling people not to panic if that happened, not to run, which could make the situation turn violent.
A woman raised her hand. “If they are looking for someone who used to live in this place before, can they enter?”
“Let them know they don’t live there anymore, but it is up to them to believe you,” Laura said.
“If I’m not at home, but my kid is, can they enter?” came another question. Laura explained that if the child says their mother or father isn’t home, agents might not accept it. “They can enter because they will think the child can lie,” she said.
She continued: Do provide ICE agents with your date of birth. Do familiarize yourself with locations of detention facilities. The nearest are in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Kentucky.
“How long is the process to get people back?” someone asked.
“It depends,” Laura said, explaining how the detention process could go.
“Your cellphone is going to be taken away,” she said, handing out pamphlets. “You will have to request to make phone calls.”
If due process is followed, she said, you get to contact your lawyer. If you are eligible for bond, it is $6,000 on average. And if you make bond, your case joins a backlog of 3.5 million cases, built up over decades. “It could take years,” she said.
If you are unable to prove that you’ve been in the country longer than two years, though, due process may no longer apply, Laura said. She explained that Trump had recently expanded a policy called expedited removal that used to apply only to border areas but now applied to the whole country. In theory, you could be transferred directly to a waiting airplane, Laura said, advising people to start carrying old utility bills or leases to prove long-term residency.
She continued for a while, advising people not to carry any documents that would identify them as a citizen of Mexico or any foreign country. She warned that immigration agents might be driving any kind of car, or wearing any kind of clothes, and that the situation was fluid. The old rules could change any day.
“It’s hard to know what is going to happen,” she said. “It’s hard to plan.”
People exchanged phone numbers, and when the session was over, Laura did what she has been doing most nights since Trump’s inauguration, which was to pick up her undocumented father from the restaurant where he worked, sleep a few hours, and then start another day of Know Your Rights seminars. She had given dozens all over the city. Homan, Trump’s border czar, was calling such events “How to Escape Arrest” seminars.
“Sanctuary cities are making it very difficult to arrest the criminals,” he’d said on CNN. “For instance, Chicago, very well educated. They’ve been educated how to defy ICE, how to hide from ICE.”
Chicago activists took this as a minor victory; the city had a long and proud history of immigrant-rights advocacy, and had often set the tone for how activists around the country would handle federal crackdowns. A veteran immigrant-rights advocate named Omar Lopez, who had been involved in the cause since the early 1960s, told me that he believed this was one reason Chicago was among the Trump administration’s first targets.
“I think they wanted to see how Chicago would respond,” Lopez said. His organization was planning work stoppages and boycotts in the months ahead.
But one month into the Trump administration, he and others worried that the barrage of propaganda casting detainees as “criminals” and “the worst of the worst” was taking hold, stifling protest, even though federal authorities had released little information about who was actually being detained. No one wanted to be perceived as standing up for criminals.
“Once that idea takes hold, we’ve lost the narrative,” Rendón said.
There were rumors that the organizations such as the one where Laura worked were going to be targeted next, which the leaders took seriously enough that they told all their employees to stay home for a few days. Homan had floated the idea of prosecuting Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, for spearheading a similar effort in her district. Even hardened attorneys understood that legal challenges would not necessarily stop a Trump administration determined to deport millions of undocumented immigrants. Those challenges were mostly based on due-process rights; ultimately, the president had the power to pursue an aggressive deportation policy.
“People are saying to me, ‘Aren’t you going to stop this?’ Well, no, we’re not going to stop all of it in court, because deporting people who are here illegally is not, per se, unlawful,” Lee Gelernt, the ACLU attorney who argued the challenge to the family-separation policy and other high-profile cases during Trump’s first administration, told me. “The immigration laws are incredibly harsh. The only way this is going to be stopped is if the American public rejects it.”
But there has been no large-scale rejection, not yet, and in many corners of Trump-supporting America, people have been cheering him on. For now, there was the quiet of a neighborhood where people were memorizing alien numbers, locking doors, and hiding inside houses, including one where the curtains were drawn on a bright afternoon and a cooler full of stockpiled food sat on the front stoop.
Inside, Consuelo was waiting for her husband to return to the home they’d bought with money from his job as a busboy, waiter, and bartender at the country club, and from her jobs at a shampoo factory, a metal-shelf factory, a frozen-food factory, and a florist, and stuffing envelopes on the night shift. The rest was their American life: photos of two American-born children on a piano, a box of dried mangoes on top of the refrigerator, a Virgin of Guadalupe on a kitchen wall, crucifixes in the living room, and so many saints and prayer candles these days that Consuelo’s son complained that they lived in a church.
He was 21, and she had been busy preparing him for the next four years under Trump. If agents came to the door, he was the one designated to answer. He would tell them his parents were not home. In a few days, she would sign over the house to him. She would put his name on the bank accounts. If she was deported, she planned to take her teenage daughter, who has autism. Her son would petition to bring his mother and sister back, a process she knew could take years, and might not happen at all. In the late afternoon, waiting for her husband to return from work, she thought about the town in Mexico where she’d spent her childhood and young-adult life. It was difficult to picture. Her parents had died. People she once knew were gone. What she knew was the life that she was beginning to think of in the past tense.
“This has been my home,” she said.
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