In These Times

10/16/2025

Protect Rogers Park, the group that organized the rally, is a rapid-response network that monitors ICE activity in the neighborhood. Members share real-time updates via Signal to let one another know where ICE vehicles or agents have been spotted. Members show up as quickly as they can get there, blow whistles to alert neighbors of imminent danger and document any encounters with federal agents on their phones. The group offers online training sessions in ICE monitoring and understanding people’s legal rights when dealing with federal agents.

“We’ve had at least 500 people in our online training sessions,” Protect Rogers Park organizer Marissa Graciosa recently told Block Club Chicago, which has become a go-to online source for neighborhood-level news in Chicago, especially since the onset of ​“Operation Midway Blitz” in September. That number has now doubled. The last training had over 1,000 people sign up. And Protect Rogers Park is just one of several organizations leading training sessions and mobilizing people.

The recording of encounters with federal agents is crucial, given that ICE’s own account of events tends to differ sharply from what many people have witnessed on the ground. Organizers stress the need to have direct footage that contradicts the claims of ICE, which maintains that its agents have committed no abuses or used excessive force.

Protect Rogers Park also coordinates response teams stationed outside of neighborhood schools as children are dropped off and picked up, when families feel particularly vulnerable because of the fixed schedule and known locations. Many immigrant parents in Chicago are afraid to send their children to school. Some are keeping their kids home. Stories abound of children hugging their parents extra tightly before leaving for school, in case their parents are taken away during the school day and they aren’t there when the kids get home.

What ICE and CBP are doing now — not just in Chicago but in multiple U.S. cities — is extreme but not without precedent, as Goodman shows in painstaking detail in The Deportation Machine. And yet, ​“What’s happening today is different in important ways,” he said. ​“To give one example: More people are organizing and standing in solidarity with immigrants than ever before.”

This is on full display throughout Chicago today. And not only through organized channels like Protect Rogers Park and its counterparts in other neighborhoods. Much of the response to ICE stopping and grabbing people off the streets is spontaneous. Since the launch of ​“Operation Midway Blitz” in September, people have been confronting ICE agents on their blocks and in their neighborhoods, whenever and wherever they happen to encounter them, on a daily basis.

“Communities are being forced to think differently about safety and providing safety to each other,” said Xanat Sobrevilla, an organizer with Organized Communities Against Deportations (OCAD). Those networks of support ​“have been the sole reason many of these disappearances are not going unnoticed,” she said. ​“Violations are being documented and families at least know who may have taken them.”