Democrats and Courts Won’t Stop ICE Gestapo
For Workers Strike Action – Feds Out Now!

Chicago Under Siege: Thousands
Demand Stop Deportation Raids

CHICAGO, October 27 – “We’re under siege. We’re being invaded by our own military.”

That’s what Darrell Ballard said after witnessing ICE, Border Patrol, FBI and other federal agents executing a late-night, military-style deportation raid on a Chicago apartment building in the black working-class neighborhood of South Shore on September 30. Some 130 residents were jolted out of their sleep by the sound of helicopters, as their building shook violently from multiple flash-bang grenades. Well over 100 federal agents in full tactical gear rolled up in an armored personnel carrier, rented box trucks and unmarked vehicles, while others rappelled down into the building from Black Hawk helicopters. The pretext: hunting down supposed members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang. Cameras were set up around the building to produce a slick propaganda clip – a cross between a Hollywood action thriller and the 1950s Gangbusters TV series – that was posted on social media two days later.

Inside the building, agents rampaged through the halls, blowing doors off their hinges, ransacking apartments, smashing walls and shattering windows. Residents, including U.S. citizens and the elderly, were zip-tied and detained in the back of vans and U-Haul trucks for hours. Trump’s thugs shoved assault rifles in their faces, demanding proof of citizenship and searching for outstanding warrants of any kind. Toddlers and young children, some barely clothed, were separated from their parents, zip-tied together, and led outside through a fence to a school parking lot where dozens were held. One witness saw a federal agent tear a baby from its mother’s arms. At least 37 people, mostly Venezuelans, were disappeared into the jaws of Trump’s “Operation Midway Blitz.”¹ When the rest were finally released, they returned to vandalized homes, with many of their personal belongings stolen or destroyed.

The feds have marketed their anti-immigrant blitz in Chicago as a twisted entertainment ploy. Trump kicked it off with his September 6 “Chipocalypse Now” post on Truth Social, a takeoff on the Vietnam War movie Apocalypse Now, with an AI-generated meme portraying himself as madman lieutenant colonel Larry Kilgore. Where the movie character declared “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” – referring to the deadly chemical the U.S. used to slaughter untold numbers of Vietnamese villagers – Trump declares “I love the smell of deportations in the morning.” He added, “Chicago is about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.” The video of the September 30 raid posted on the X channel of Kristi Noem, the psychopathic cruelty freak who heads the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), revels in scenes of federal agents terrorizing and humiliating Latino immigrants at gunpoint.

The made-for-social-media raid on the South Shore apartment building was a dramatic escalation of the Trump administration’s tactics in its mass deportations drive, and a foretaste of what was to come. Since “Midway Blitz” started in early September, some 3,000 immigrants have been detained in the Chicago area, the DHS announced in late October. The administration has tried to bring in 200 federalized National Guard troops from Texas, but was stymied by an injunction by a federal district judge which was upheld in a unanimous ruling by the federal appeals court. (The Guard troops are now sitting in barracks 50 miles southwest of the city.) Trump has appealed to the pliant Supreme Court, whose reactionary supermajority may greenlight his deployment. Meanwhile, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents continue to rampage through the city.

This is not simply a war on immigrants. Trump said as much. Just hours after the Chicago raid, he proclaimed a “war” against “the enemy within” in a typically meandering speech to the 800 top U.S. generals and admirals summoned to an unprecedented mandatory command conference at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia. And who is this “war from within” directed at? Trump listed cities like San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Portland, “the ones that are run by the radical left Democrats,” saying “we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.” Trump also proclaimed that he had issued an executive order for a National Guard “quick reaction force” to “quell civil disturbances.” This was after his war secretary toady Pete Hegseth vowed that the U.S. military would have “no more stupid rules of engagement,” just “maximum lethality.” Trump & Co. are gearing up to gun down protesters in the streets.

The administration’s militarized mass deportation operation has become the spearhead of its drive to impose authoritarian police-state rule, which The Internationalist has warned of for months. Governing by decree, the criminal gang that has all three branches of the federal government in its grip is brazenly violating laws and court orders, ripping up the Bill of Rights. It is going after immigrants, leftists, liberal and even “centrist” Democratic officials, besieging the population of Democrat-run cities in a war on workers and democratic rights. But the MAGA regime is not the only enemy working people face. Don’t forget that the Democrats under Barack Obama and Joe Biden, who both paved the way for Trump, deported far more immigrants than the would-be autocrat in the White House, building up the deportation machine with its concentration camps to hold our fellow workers.

Yet as federal agents are marauding through the streets of Chicago, even more wildly than they did earlier in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., they are facing growing resistance from the bulk of the population. There have been repeated emergency demonstrations downtown against the ICE raids, on September 6, with several hundred protesters; September 27 (500), on September 30 (3,000+) and on October 8 (at least 7,000) called by a Coalition Against the Trump Agenda made up of liberal, labor, community and left groups. Beyond these “popular-front” pro-Democratic Party rallies, there have been weekly and later near-daily protests outside the ICE facility in the suburb of Broadview. And now, as federal agents are grabbing people off the streets, large crowds have been spontaneously forming yelling “fascists,” “racists” and “get out of Chicago” at the modern-day slave catchers, sometimes forcing the feds to retreat.

Unlike Democratic politicians in Congress and officials in much of the country, who have basically “rolled over and played dead,” the billionaire Democratic Illinois governor JB Pritzker and Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, a former Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) organizer, have been pretty feisty in verbally standing up to President Trump, who has called for them to be jailed. “Come and get me, Donald,” Pritzker shot back. On October 6, Johnson signed an executive order to prohibit ICE and other federal agencies from using city property (including parks, and school parking lots) for immigration enforcement. The order also mandated massive distribution of Know Your Rights materials and official signs saying no law enforcement official can enter premises for immigration enforcement. The city and state have also sued Trump demanding that National Guard troops be kept out. But lawn signs and court suits will not stop the fascistic ICE Gestapo.

What’s needed to throw a wrench in the gears of the monstrous deportation machinery, to make Chicago a “no-go” area for the federal storm troopers, is a massive mobilization of the power of the working class against the mass deportations and police-state repression. If the National Guard is brought in, the call should go out from labor, “All Out for Feds Out!” Industry and commerce in the “city that works” should grind to a halt.

The more than 10 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. are a vital part of the working class, along with millions more whose legal status is now threatened. Whole sectors of
industry would collapse without their labor (agriculture, meatpacking, residential construction, restaurants, nursing homes, to list a few). The fundamental slogan of a fighting union movement is the old IWW slogan, “an injury to one is an injury to all!” All of labor must defend our immigrant sisters and brothers!

The harsh reality is that the war on immigrants and relentless push toward an authoritarian Bonapartist “strong state” embodied by Donald Trump are international in scope and rooted in the rotting capitalist system. Sizeable fascistic and outright fascist parties and movements have proliferated from Europe to the Southern Cone of South America. Racist reaction is rampant. As the imperialists and their Zionist allies carry out genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, and pursue a war drive against Russia and China careening toward a thermonuclear Third World War, the social institutions of “welfare state” capitalism (health care, education, social security programs, even postal services) are being privatized, demolished or existentially threatened. Ultimately, to put a stop to the deportations and the descent into barbarism will require nothing less than socialist revolution, led by a revolutionary workers party.

Repression and Resistance

On September 12 federal agents began Trump’s “war” on Chicagoans by gunning down Silverio Villegas González in the majority Latino, working-class suburb of Franklin Park. Villegas had just dropped off his 3-year-old son at a daycare center when his car was cut off by ICE agents. The DHS claimed that their victim tried to run over an agent and “seriously injured” him. But video footage shows that Villegas did not hit the agents with his car and was shot in the neck from some distance behind, while the agent told local police his injury was “nothing major.” A DHS statement called Villegas, a cook from Michoacán, Mexico, “a criminal illegal alien,” yet according to U.S. law, being in the country without authorization is not a crime but only a civil violation. As Internationalist protesters chant, undocumented immigrants are “Ni ilegales, ni criminales, somos obreros internacionales” (neither illegals nor criminals, we are international workers).

The ICE murder of Silverio Villegas González sent a wave of fear through heavily Latino neighborhoods like Pilsen, Little Village, Back of the Yards and Brighton Park on Chicago’s Southwest Side. The killing also sparked mounting anger and escalating protests around the city. As federal agents prowled the streets in unmarked vehicles, Chicago residents began following them in “people’s patrols,” ready to sound the alarm to warn the population of danger. Community and activist groups, and even local businesses, distributed whistles to alert people to the presence of ICE (with a broken rhythm) or attempted detentions (with a continuous steady blast). Chinga la migra (fuck the immigration police) T-shirts abound, and following the September 30 South Shore raid, the city issued official signs saying “Migra fuera de Chicago” (ICE out of Chicago). Soon, people started confronting federal agents on the streets.

Over at the ICE facility in Broadview, the regular Friday morning protests were routinely met with tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets. On social media one protester posted a screenshot of his back, covered in huge welts from rubber bullets; another was knocked to the ground and nearly run over by ICE agents, as protesters tried to stop a vehicle at the gate. A pastor was shot in the eye with a pepper ball by agents on a sniper’s perch above. Broadview is a heavily black (71% of the population) and Hispanic suburb, home to many unionized workers and not at all sympathetic to ICE, which, as Mayor Katrina Thompson complained in a letter to DHS, is “making war on my community. And it has to stop.” But Thompson has shrunk the protest area in front of the facility, and used Broadview police against demonstrators.

This came to a head on October 3 as Kristi Noem showed up at the Broadview ICE facility with a right-wing videographer in tow. When the DHS secretary and her motley crew tried to enter the municipal building unannounced, hoping to ambush the mayor (who was not there), a worker refused to let the feds in. He still wouldn’t open the door when she said she just wanted to use the bathroom. Having failed to pull off her media stunt, Noem slunk off, muttering about non-cooperation. The next day, CBP commander Bovino had ICE agents throw smoke bombs at the large crowd of protesters who were heckling them, and then personally tackled a man who was asking him, “What are you going to tell your children?” Also on October 4 (see chronology box), in Brighton Park federal agents shot five times a woman who had been trailing them. Video footage of these scenes of wanton violence by feds have further enraged Chicagoans.

In the following weeks, federal agents have roamed the city, stopping people outside homeless shelters, apartment buildings, churches, parks, sometimes doing U-turns to grab someone walking on the sidewalk to demand to see their papers – like back in the racist police state of apartheid South Africa. Amid reports of federal agents lurking around schools, the Chicago Teachers Union and community members formed ICE watch teams with orange whistles around schools and on nearby corners at drop-off and dismissal times, practicing “sidewalk solidarity.” At one school, a CTU video reported, a teacher blew her whistle when she sighted federal agents, alerting everyone. The school called students in from recess in a “soft lockdown” (outside doors locked) and a crowd formed outside. It grew to 100 despite the feds lobbing tear gas, as neighbors were alerted on rapid response chats, forming corridors to ensure safe passage for students.

As ICE and the Border Patrol expanded their operations to ethnically diverse North Side areas, residents held protests. After a tamale street vendor was arrested in Rogers Park, on October 11 some 400 neighbors came out near the site to show solidarity (Block Club Chicago, 12 October). The next day in Albany Park, where many Latinos live, when federal agents were spotted confronting someone, neighbors started shouting warnings in Spanish. Soon people came out of their homes, locking arms to block the agents’ path. One woman barefoot in a bathrobe stood in front of their car. People screamed “Nazis” at them and after half an hour ran them off, despite the feds tear-gassing the neighborhood as they fled. “‘We chased federal agents out of Albany Park today,’ one person shouted to a cheer from the dozens of residents who were out on the street,” the Sun-Times (12 October) reported.

Then on October 14, federal agents in a speeding SUV deliberately rammed a vehicle they were chasing on the Southeast Side. As people came out of their houses, dozens of feds in gas masks flooded the area, repeatedly throwing gas grenades at the crowd. Residents were shouting “ICE go home” during the standoff that lasted a good hour and a half. Feds also barged into a nearby Walgreens where shoppers yelled at them; a young black man was arrested as people cried out that he was a citizen. The next day at the United Workers’ Center, an activist from 10th Ward Rapid Response said that “hardworking people, landscapers, construction workers and street vendors [have been] specifically targeted.” Contrary to DHS claims that it has targeted gang members, rapists, abusers, “the worst of the worst criminals,” of 60,000 people in ICE detention nationally as of September 21, 71.5% had no criminal record (USA Today, 3 October).

Trump has tried to pitch his raids as a “crackdown on crime,” calling Chicago a “hellhole” and claiming the support of black Chicagoans. But seeing Latinos singled out because of their ethnicity, many recall African Americans’ own experience with racial profiling and racist killings by the police. The 1969 murder of Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton by the FBI and Chicago Police Department has not been forgotten. And the military raid on the apartment building in the black South Shore neighborhood drove home that we face a common enemy, ripping up the rights of all. Eboni Watson, who lives across from the building, confronted the agents demanding to know why they picked up U.S. citizens, saying “That’s illegal. You can’t just pull them out of their house and run their names for warrants” (New York Times, 20 October). She’s so right, it’s a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment against unreasonable search and seizure.

Try telling that to Greg Bovino, the CBP commander who is running the feds’ Chicago blitz. Everything he is doing is against the Constitution and U.S. law, as well as violating explicit court orders. Specifically, a 2022 consent decree bars ICE agents from carrying out warrantless arrests unless they can prove probable cause. (This applies across the country, although it resulted from a suit brought by the Illinois Civil Liberties Union.) A federal judge in Chicago has extended that decree to February 2026, while another issued an order limiting immigration agents’ use of chemical irritants against protesters without warnings. On October 23, Bovino personally tossed tear gas cannisters into a crowd protesting a raid in the Mexican neighborhood of Little Village. The government was ordered to produce agent Bovino in court on October 28, but don’t expect that to end the feds’ assault on brown and black people. To stop the racist people-snatchers will take nothing less than a full-scale mobilization of Chicago’s powerful working class.

Democrats Won’t Do It, For Workers
Mobilization to Stop Deportations

In the face of Trump’s assault, we’ve heard a good deal of tough talk by Democratic officials in Chicago and Illinois against the federal invasion. Governor JB Pritzker denounced ICE and CBP agents as “jackbooted thugs” who were “abusing their power, intimidating innocent civilians and waging war on our people.” He told a press conference on September 29 that “All of this has been aimed at causing chaos and mayhem in the hopes of creating a pretext to deploy military troops to Chicago.” It’s all true, of course. The governor often poses as a “friend of labor,” and can be seen occasionally at the head of marches in defense of abortion and trans rights. Yet Pritzker, a former businessman (net worth $3.9 billion) is a member of one of the ten richest families in the U.S., owners of the Hyatt hotel chain. And as a bourgeois politician he is part of and beholden to the machinery of the capitalist state now headed by Trump.

Mayor Brandon Johnson plays up his career as a former history teacher, and CTU organizer and strike leader. He often speaks eloquently about black slave labor building the wealth of the country and the power of working people. He and attorney general Kwame Raoul continue to channel outrage and demands for action into multiple lawsuits, hoping for temporary restraining orders from federal judges. The district judge who issued a TRO blocking the deployment of the National Guard and the circuit court of appeals, in upholding it, both held that Trump’s description of Chicago and claims of a “rebellion” are at odds with the actual situation. But even if the U.S. Supreme Court does not grant the Trump administration’s request for an emergency order overturning those rulings, the federal agents already in Chicago will continue to run riot.

The Democratic mayor and governor have denounced the endless legal and constitutional violations. They have assured one and all that they will not collaborate with Trump’s militarization of Chicago. But Pritzker’s idea of “defending” immigrants was setting up a toothless Illinois Accountability Commission to collect video evidence of the feds’ misdeeds. It’s crucial to understand that looking to the Democratic Party and its politicians is a dangerous illusion – remember that Obama was rightly called the “deporter-in-chief.” Yet many activists believed the Democrats’posturing, and were stunned when Illinois State Police were deployed to the Broadview ICE facility during DHS czarina Noem’s October 3 photo op. Pritzker said they were there to protect protesters. But there were the state cops in solid lines, riot batons in hand, forcing protesters off the streets and keeping them away from vehicles going in and out of the facility. And there were the Chicago police two days later holding back crowds protesting the CBP’s shooting of Marimar Martinez in Brighton Park (see box).

As for the labor leadership, the powerful Chicago Federation of Labor drew upwards of 7,500 people to its “Workers Over Billionaires” Labor Day march, which included calls to stop deportations, defend immigrants and oppose the presence of ICE and possible National Guard troops. The CFL and several unions – including the CTU, AFSCME, SEIU and IUPAT (Painters) District 14 – called a February 2025 Chicago Labor Forum on immigrant rights, and some (including the Iron Workers Local 63 president) spoke at the protests in Broadview. But as state violence against black and brown working-class neighborhoods has escalated, the labor tops have been notably silent. Their big event was a pilgrimage of local union leaders to Rome for an audience with Chicago-born and raised Pope Leo XIV (Robert Francis Prevost) to appeal for his thoughts and prayers for immigrants and his home town. But pope’s prayers won’t cut it.

Meanwhile, federal workers are under frontal attack, facing mass layoffs and firings by the Trump administration, which has slashed the jobs of 200,000 employees since taking office, and now the federal government shutdown. Yet less than a hundred were mobilized for an emergency protest downtown in early October. At the same time, close to 2,000 layoffs at the Chicago Transit Authority are slated for coming months amid the latest funding crisis, which also promises fare increases and massive service cuts. Today many Latino and Latina CTA workers face racial profiling and harassment as they travel to and from work. But rather than building union defense of the members and immigrants, the two Amalgamated Transit Locals (241 and 308) held a protest in front of CTA headquarters to demand the agency “do something” about violence against bus and rail workers. That’s practically inviting ICE and CBP agents to militarize public transit!

The labor misleaders are part of a bureaucracy that sits atop the unions – the mass defense organizations of the workers – while chaining them to capitalist parties, mainly the Democrats. Under pressure from the ranks and facing the threats coming from the Trump gang, some may go through the motions of going to bat for immigrants. But the “labor lieutenants of the capitalist class” will ultimately bow to the Democrats and/or Trump. The Democratic politicians may rouse a crowd with talk of labor action: at the October 18 pro-Democratic Party “No Kings” rally, amid the chants of “U.S.A.” and “I love America,” Johnson conjured up a nationwide “general strike” to “stand up to this tyranny” and to send a “message” to the “ultra-rich and big corporations” to make them . . . “pay their fair share of taxes”! A real general strike would mobilize the workers against the bosses and all their parties.

At the “No Kings” event, which sported a number of Democratic (Party) Socialists of America (DSA) City Council members on stage, the mayor called on people to “take it to the courts and take it to the streets.” But getting favorable legal rulings by lower courts will not stop a regime bent on erecting a police state and whose fascistic mastermind Stephen Miller has lambasted federal judges’ rulings as a “legislative insurrection against federal power.” The capitalist rulers have 1,001 ways to circumvent, appeal and tie up cases in federal court for months or even years, while those who have been swallowed by the monstrous deportation machine have their lives ripped up or die in detention, as the slide towards authoritarian rule kicks into high gear. Capitalist politicians (including DSA Democrats) will only lead immigrants, black people and working people as a whole into a dead end.

The war on immigrants and drive toward a police state are a result and reflection of the putrefying capitalist system. The millions of workers who do the worst and lowest-paid jobs are made scapegoats for the declining living standards of the mass of the population. Those who defend them are labeled the “enemy within,” while those who exploit their labor wallow in obscene luxury. It is summed up by Kristi Noem flashing her $60,000 Rolex watch in front of inmates at the torture center in El Salvador where deportees have been sent. The governor accuses Trump of carrying out a “power grab,” having the military in the streets to intimidate people in the lead-up to the midterm 2026 elections. It is much more than that. We are witnessing the descent of moribund capitalism into militarized repression and witch-hunting at home and barbaric war (genocide in Gaza) abroad.

In New York City and Portland, Oregon, the Internationalist Group and fraternally allied groups of labor militants (including Class Struggle Education Workers and Class Struggle Workers – Portland) have undertaken initiatives leading to the formation of Labor Committees to Defend Immigrants. These include activists and leaders of unions representing teachers and other school workers, warehouse and transportation workers (including, in NYC, several Teamster locals), construction workers (in Portland, Painters, IBEW, Carpenters, Iron Workers), healthcare workers, municipal employees, restaurant workers, arts and entertainment workers, and others. They have taken the lead in getting resolutions passed in a number of unions to defend immigrants against deportations, built workplace committees as part of this struggle, carried out workplace trainings, and mobilized to defend our coworkers, students and community members independently of the bosses parties and politicians.

Today we face a deadly onslaught by Trump, who is itching to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act and impose martial law. But remember that in 2020 it was overwhelmingly police in Democratic-run cities who arrested demonstrators protesting racist cop murder, while both Biden and Trump called to shoot “rioters” in the legs. The outpouring of community members across Chicago to resist the masked terrorists who are abducting their neighbors is extremely important, and an inspiration to immigrants and their defenders around the country. But to turn the cities into “no-go” areas for ICE and other federal agents requires a class-struggle leadership with a revolutionary program to mobilize the power of the working class. Facing a mortal threat to the rights of all, we seek to oust the bureaucrats, who keep that power chained; to break with the Democrats and build a workers party to champion the oppressed and fight for a workers government.

All out for FEDS OUT!

For workers mass action to stop deportations!

Full citizenship rights for all immigrants!

To contact the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, send e-mail to: internationalistgroup@msn.com

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