Postcard From Chicago: There’s an ICE Facility in My Backyard

Last Friday, with a newly purchased gas mask in my backpack, I went to the ICE building in Broadview, Illinois—which is so close to my Chicago suburb that I could have walked there. The ICE facility is in an industrial part of this working-class enclave, in a nondescript area with lots of low-slung warehouses and workaday businesses. If you’ve ever rented a party bus in Chicago, that vehicle likely lives in Broadview.

Right near an entrance to Highway 290, one block from the town’s main drag on 25th Avenue, is a squat building with an American flag in front. The building on Beach Street is visible from 25th Avenue and is surrounded by a tall fence. The windows and doors are boarded up so that nobody can see in.

According to various reports, food is scarce inside, and there are neither showers nor enough room for people to sleep. All in all, the scraps of information that have leaked out make this ICE processing center sound inhumane. Local politicians, including a congressional candidate thrown to the ground at a recent protest, held a press conference on October 3, asking to be let in and demanding accountability and transparency from DHS. To say those have not been forthcoming is an understatement.

It’s possible to live in Chicago and feel like things are normal—if you’re visiting the Art Institute, say, or driving down a leafy residential street. But that illusion is only possible if you ignore the stories that have emerged since Donald Trump and his administration launched what they call Operation Midway Blitz—stories about ICE shooting a single father just after he dropped off his three-year-old at childcare, shooting a woman in traffic in Brighton Park, tossing smoke canisters (possibly tear gas) out of a car window near a Northwest side school, and launching tear gas and other projectiles at peaceful, unarmed protestors and members of the media. Stories of officers rappelling down from Black Hawk helicopters as 300 federal agents stormed one apartment building. (DHS and ICE did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)

Being in this city right now feels like living inside a David Lynch film: Underneath a veneer of normality, something profoundly disturbing lurks, ready to strike at a moment’s notice. Or maybe we’re in a version of Andor, but replace the storm troopers with beefy cops holding long wooden billy clubs. As Alex Lawther’s Karis Nemik said on the show, “The empire’s need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear.”

True. But sometimes that mask is pretty terrifying.

Protestors have been gathering outside of Broadview’s ICE facility every day—but of late, Fridays have been especially packed. The gathering on October 3 featured the kind of human rainbow that must give Stephen Miller nightmares: clergy of various faiths, folks of all races and backgrounds, young people documenting the scene for their socials, veterans carrying flags, aging hippies, LGTBQ+ Chicagoans, a Native man shouting “Get off my land!,” an attendee in a striped concentration camp uniform, bros in concert T-shirts. Among the signs being held that day and on October 5: “Appeasement never works”; “What lies will you tell your children?” “Damned be any soldier who turns his guns on his own people.” “Fuck ICE” is spray-painted on Beach Street.

On October 3, dozens of what looked like ICE agents in camouflage gathered near the gates in front of the building. Eventually, the gates opened and they marched up to the protest area—armed and masked, of course. At various times, protestors were pushed back onto the lawn of a local business by elements of federal, state, and local law enforcement; these actions were usually taken without any visible rhyme or reason. Multiple people stumbled or were thrown to the ground; several were dragged away and arrested. All of them were peaceful and unarmed.

How much of this was done because DHS Secretary Kristi Noem was visiting the ICE facility that day, we’ll never know. She was denied entrance to the Broadview village hall—a municipal building where she appeared unannounced.

I saw a uniformed man with a very large gun standing over a protestor on the ground on October 3—an unarmed person who was swarmed by cops. More than once, I’ve seen a black, armored vehicle—a cross between a tank and a Mordor-themed Jeep—with many armored, helmeted, camouflaged men hanging off it. I’ve seen it roll up 25th Avenue, past the small houses on one side of the street, and enter the ICE facility. Poking out of the top turret is a guy with a weapon.

Whatever guardrails that may have held back ICE sure seem like they’re gone, at least in our city. Of the many things that have stunned Chicagoans in recent weeks, the South Shore raid is at the top of the list. It was reported that almost every single person in one apartment building was ripped from their home in the middle of the night by agents of the state, and those terrified residents—including elders and kids—were forced to sit in the street for hours, with some finally returning to wrecked apartments and missing possessions. “What is the morality? Where’s the human?” resident Eboni Watson recalled asking one agent. “One of them literally laughed. He was standing right here. He said, ‘f*** them kids.’” (According to Watson, “trucks and military-style vans were used to separate parents from their children.”)

The Windy City—imperfect, amazing, frustrating, beloved—has long been a punching bag of the right, not least because it’s a multicultural tapestry that is largely welcoming to newcomers. Now, though, we must be made an example of. President Trump has said our town should be one of the key “training grounds for the military.” One thing is crystal clear: Chicago was not a war zone when Operation Midway Blitz began, but DHS and ICE made sure it became one. As author and activist Kelly Hayes put it, “The president is waging war on our city for welcoming those he wishes to expel.”

Between the two main protest sites near the Broadview facility, there is a small tent with a couple of tables and supplies stacked around it. A local woman—assisted by other volunteers—gives out water, information about lawyers, food, and first aid supplies. A flyer with a QR code is on one of the tables; masks and granola bars cost money. Above the QR code, the flyer reads: “We are the heroes that we have been waiting for! The resistance requires angels.”

The spontaneous bonds that sprout among protestors, the kindness of the people at the resource tent and in the crowds, the communities and organizations that Chicagoans built in Broadview and elsewhere—not just in the past month but in the past decades—the faces I saw at the first “No Kings” protest in my otherwise sleepy suburb—these things have given me small but vital shreds of hope.

At the Broadview ICE facility on October 5, in the afternoon and into the evening, the scene was relatively quiet: protestors, cops, heckling, chanting, a few media cameras. People asking if anyone had a phone charger, talking about what neighborhood they were from, holding up signs. Drivers on 25th honking in apparent approval of protest signs. The usual—until a very angry biker rode up, parked his bike, and got in the protestors’ faces. Screaming slurs and yelling about liberals ruining America, he came up to me and three others gathered near 25th Avenue. A local man who’d joined the protests for a second day—a regretful ex-Trump voter, as it happens—was chatting with me when the biker threw my new acquaintance to the ground.

The biker was tackled and cuffed; the man who was assaulted did not press charges. Eventually, the biker was released. Will he or his friends return to Broadview? Regardless, the people of Chicago will keep showing up.