Loathing in Chicago

(The following is a summary of an article last week by Jamiles Lartey and Geoff Hing of The Marshall Project on ICE activities in Chicago. The Project is an excellent source to follow important news in criminal justice.)

Fear and Force in Chicago

The situation unfolding in Chicago offers a troubling snapshot of how immigration enforcement under the Trump administration has become both more aggressive and less accountable.

This week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents allegedly pointed a gun at a state representative and his staff on Chicago’s North Side. Within twenty-four hours, additional raids in the largely Latino neighborhoods of Little Village and Cicero led to the arrest of two American citizens employed by a city alderman. One community leader called the actions “a brutal escalation.”

In the two months since the administration’s intensified campaign began, scenes once unthinkable have become disturbingly common. ICE agents have been seen rappelling from helicopters, firing pepper balls at peaceful demonstrators, and zip-tying children. While federal officials have offered little explanation, they’ve defended the raids as “justified.”

The Marshall Project notes that this spectacle of force is intentional. The administration’s strategy, echoing a “shock and awe” approach, aims to terrify immigrants into self-deportation. Promotional videos released by the White House have even dramatized these raids, sometimes using recycled footage from earlier operations to glorify the campaign.

Yet amid the fear, community resistance has grown. Across Chicago, residents have organized whistle-alert systems to warn neighbors when ICE agents are near. Rapid-response teams and legal aid groups are working around the clock to monitor detentions and challenge excessive force. Legal hotlines have been flooded with calls from families searching for loved ones—many of whom have been transferred to detention centers in Louisiana and Texas, far from home and without access to counsel.

Behind the spectacle, The Marshall Project reports, the machinery of enforcement has been methodically hardened. ICE has made more than a thousand arrests in Chicago’s first month of the operation—sweeping up both new arrivals and long-time residents. What’s most alarming, attorneys say, is how completely the agency’s culture of discretion has disappeared.

Until recently, local ICE field offices were instructed to consider each person’s circumstances before making arrests—whether someone was a parent, a caretaker, or medically fragile. That policy, established under the Biden administration, required officers to weigh whether a person posed a genuine threat to public safety. The Trump administration has since reversed that standard entirely, redefining “discretion” as the authority to detain and deport faster, regardless of context.

The consequences are devastating. The Marshall Project recounts cases like that of 16-year-old Ofelia Torres, who is battling cancer and pleading publicly for the release of her father, Reuben Torres Maldonado. A long-time resident with only minor offenses, he was seized in a parking lot and sent to detention—without bond, without due consideration, and hundreds of miles from his family.

According to Sarah Cockrum of Beyond Legal Aid in Chicago, even children with cancer and nursing mothers are now being detained. “That discretion,” she said, “has totally evaporated.”

Meanwhile, judicial oversight is being systematically eroded. Immigration judges can no longer grant bond to anyone who entered the U.S. without authorization. Prosecutors have increasingly sought to dismiss cases only to have ICE agents re-arrest the same individuals immediately after court, using a fast-track process called “expedited removal,” which bypasses judicial review altogether.

In response, immigrant-rights attorneys have turned to federal courts, where some judges have found that ICE has violated existing agreements limiting warrantless arrests. Still, each victory is temporary, and the system grows more punitive by design.

The Marshall Project’s reporting makes clear that what’s happening in Chicago is not a collection of isolated incidents. It represents a calculated dismantling of legal safeguards in favor of fear-driven enforcement. The result is not just the erosion of immigration law—it is the erosion of the rule of law itself.