Both this and the following article were submitted before the killings of
Renée Good and Alex Pretti by ICE agents on January 7 and 24,
respectively. Here local demonstrators protest Good’s killing
on North Prospect Ave. on January 11, following a car caravan
from Lincoln Square Mall in Urbana to Lowe’s in Champaign.
Photo by Marci Adelston-Schafer, used with permission
In October of 2025 Julio Cucul-Bol, a Guatemalan citizen, was sentenced to 30 years in Illinois prisons for the fatal hit-and-run accident which claimed the lives of two white women here in Urbana. In September of 2025 the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had announced on their website “Operation Midway Blitz” a targeted enforcement program aimed at Chicago. DHS said that, due to “sanctuary policies” and Democratic Governor JB Pritzker, immigration had become a problem in the state. The announcement dedicated the operation to the victims killed in that January, 2025 car crash here in Urbana.
And really, could this drama have even played out any other way? Kristi Noem, former governor of South Dakota, has been making quite the name for herself in the new Trump administration as the secretary of homeland security, even earning the nickname “ICE Barbie” for her habit of appearing front and center in official publicity photos and as a talking head on right-wing news media. In a recent video posted to YouTube by Benny Johnson, Noem can be seen touring a “200,000-square-foot” building she reportedly wanted to buy in the Chicago area to expand Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) processing. It’s unclear whether this is a serious effort on her part or more like a social media stunt.
If Noem is indeed the most visible member of the DHS team, former ICE director Tom Homan is the most sinister. Appointed by the second Trump administration as “border czar,” he maintained unofficial links to the DHS after an FBI investigation into corruption charges—he took $50,000 in cash for future business access in an FBI sting operation before the 2024 election (the administration has since halted the investigation). The Southern Poverty Law Center investigated his links to the white nationalist group the Proud Boys (who according to the Anti-Defamation League accrued “the highest number of insurrection-related arrests of any extremist group”), finding that Homan had met with Proud Boys associate Terry Newsome about deportations in Chicago as far back as December, 2024. Given that both Newsome’s anti-gay US Parents Involved in Education and Proud Boys chapters targeted libraries and churches hosting LGBTQ Pride events in 2022, it’s easy to suggest that these meetings may have been about mobilizing white nationalist elements within Illinois into the swelling ranks of ICE officers.
An article in The Guardian from September 2 reported that the DHS had a target of 10,000 new recruits by the end of 2025. To that end they are offering $50,000 signing bonuses and $60,000 in loan repayment, and have lowered the minimum-age requirement to 18. In addition, the DHS is running white-nationalist recruitment propaganda on their official social media channels with slogans like “Want to deport illegals with your absolute boys?” The Atlantic on August 5 asked the question “Where have all the Proud Boys gone?,” suggesting that they have been among the first waves of recruits to ICE. Certainly a quote from that article seems to illustrate the possibility: “On Telegram, an account linked to the Toledo, Ohio, chapter of the Proud Boys declared: ‘Toledo Boys living high on the hog right now!!’” However, the Proud Boys’s Wikipedia page estimates total national membership between “several hundred and 6,000,” which leaves their potential quite far short of ICE’s hiring goals.
These facts help to explain the absolutely shocking scenes playing out in Chicago. ICE agents tear-gassed Chicago police officers during a confrontation with protesters in Brighton Park. The Brighton Park protest itself was sparked when, according to Kristi Noem, ICE vehicles were “rammed and boxed in by ten vehicles, including an attacker with a semi-automatic weapon” and, according to DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin, officers were “forced to deploy their weapons and fire defensive shots.” Body camera footage from ICE officers showed that the driver of the vehicle, Marimar Martinez, had been shot five times.
This isn’t even the first time DHS has lied about shooting a suspect. Earlier in September, ICE fatally shot a man in Franklin Park during a traffic stop. In reporting by Block Club Chicago, video from a nearby business shows two ICE officers approaching the driver’s and passenger-side doors of Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez’s vehicle before he backs up and drives away. Then, according to an ICE statement, “the officer fired his weapon.” In a now-deleted post, the Village of Franklin Park’s Facebook page announced that Villegas-Gonzalez was pronounced dead at Loyola Hospital. Though the ICE statement had stated that the officer “feared for his life” after being dragged by Villegas-Gonzalez’s car, body cam footage obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times directly contradicts this narrative. While ICE alleged the officer sustained “multiple injuries” and was “dragged a significant distance,” the footage shows the officer saying the incident was “nothing major.” In light of these two events, we can see a pattern of official DHS messaging exaggerating the severity of incidents, and spinning the events themselves to fit President Trump’s narrative—uttered as early as August during a visit to National Guard troops in Washington, DC—that Chicago was “a mess” and needed Federal intervention to make the city “safe.”
So who is ICE targeting? On Thursday, October 2, DHS announced on its social media that its agents had made over 900 arrests in Chicago, and included video of an operation that targeted an apartment block. A DHS spokesperson said that around 300 agents raided the apartment complex to arrest 30 people, accusing them of being members of a Venezuelan gang. The posted video corroborated reporting that had alleged that agents had accessed the roof of the building via helicopter. Residents reported that agents woke them up to be detained with zip ties and placed in unmarked vans, and that children were among those being detained.
Mother Jones’s reporting on the incident follows up by correctly pointing out that these immigration pressures were initiated by Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s 2022 effort to bus as many as 50,000 immigrants to Chicago. Hundreds of millions in state and local funding weren’t enough to keep these people housed, and by 2024 people started slipping through the cracks. WBEZ Chicago reported that some Venezuelan migrants arrived at the building with housing assistance and others without leases. A resident quoted in both articles, Cassandra Murray, says many units have been occupied by squatters as a result of the building management company’s refusal to hire security for the building.
It’s important to note that these migrant residents of Chicago at no time have been able to make any decisions about their own fate. They were camped outside of city police stations or at O’Hare as new arrivals to Chicago, and then placed in housing complexes like one in Woodlawn which was already the subject of a court battle over living conditions.
So will this be the defining legacy of the second Trump administration? Aimé Césaire wrote about this phenomenon: “And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss. People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: ‘How strange! But never mind—it’s Nazism, it will pass!’ . . . the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples.”
