Last Sunday, in a mass in the Spanish language in the St. Paul’s Catholic Church in Bilsen, on the lower western side of Chicago, Father Arturo Perez spoke about our moment. “No one is more important than anyone else,” he said. “What happens to anyone happens to all of us. What one is suffering from.” Outside, Ice The raids started. They were barely secret. The Anti -Narcotics Agency announced on X that it was conducting raids in Chicago in partnership with the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Internal Security. Phil McGRAW, known as Dr. Phil, with the border of Tsar, Tom Human, was included in an unknown location and in the neighborhoods where the raids were conducted, covered live on MERIT TV, and his new conservative media platform.
In a clip called “Behind the Closed Borders”, McGuru showed a map of Chicago that showed where he believed that the goals were falling, reading out loud the various crimes they were convicted of. To hear McGRAW and HENAN they talk about it, Ice It was only after the perpetrators of sexual crimes, gang members, and murderers. In the emergence of other media, Human appears to have allowed broader survey operations. He told ABC News, which indicates that anyone who entered the country can be arrested illegally You have a problem“He talked about the possibility”Side arrests“Who can happen if the immigrant is not documented with one of IceObjectives at the time of detention. He also stated that over time, Ice will “Open the hole“Of their operations. The administration repeated Human. When the White House press secretary, Caroline Levitte, was asked about the number of unimpressed immigrants and thirty years arrested Ice Last week, she had criminal records, she replied, “All of them, because they broke the laws of our nation illegally.” (Entering the country can be without inspection or acceptance of a misdemeanor or a felony, but being not documented in the United States is not a crime. In civil courts instead of criminal courts.)
The raids in Chicago were expected to start the next day to install Trump. In the distant town of Xheron and the neighborhood of South West in the small village, companies that met the needs of an open Latin society – were canceled, grocery stores, and Western unions – but the streets were relatively empty. It was difficult to say whether this was a result Ice Or subzero temperatures. Some parents kept their children at home from school, or they had friends of American citizens to pick them up. Some adults at home remained from work. For the children who may return from school to find that their families have been taken, one of the non -documented parents said Chicago platform“All we can do is take all precautions and stay at home as long as we can.”
Local news and social media lit up when Federal agents tried to enter a public elementary school at the back of the Yardat neighborhood, on the southwestern side of Chicago. School officials, believing that the agents were from IceHe refused them and put the school on the lock. Bogdana Choubova, chief education official at Chicago, Illinois Confident Act and Chicago Armage Ordinance City, saying that CPS schools do not inquire about the student’s migration status, and you will not coexist with ICE. Reports later showed that the agents were from the secret service, and that they were there to investigate an unspecified threat related to the government Tiktok ban. in letter “While this incident was due to misunderstanding, it reflects the fear and anxiety in our city now“
I spoke with an uncomfortable woman from Viracrose, Mexico, who told me that she was “very afraid” that she was deported. She crossed to Texas three years ago, and traveled directly to Chicago, where she had a family. I was washing dishes in an Italian restaurant. She completes her income by selling Tamalis, mole, and other traditional Mexican dishes from her apartment on weekends, and sometimes cleaning homes. She met her husband, who also does not hold documents and works in construction, on Facebook. Unlike it, he arrived in the United States about twenty years ago, and Trump is believed to be right to want to rid Chicago and other American cities for criminal immigrants. Her husband tells her not to worry, because he does not think anything will happen to her. She said, “I calm down, but I always think about it.”
I also spoke to the child of illegal immigrants, who said he bought his parents, so that he could follow their movements if they were captured. He made them sign a document of the lawyer’s strength, allowing him to control their property for twenty years, which, as you can, will cover the period that his father may have to wait before returning the country if it is sent to Mexico. His father also gave the wages of the week, so that he could stay at home from work; The son told me that he lied and said he had received a grant to help the family. “I knew he would not take her if he knew that he was coming from me,” he said.
Last December, Human told a republican group at a holiday party that Trump’s collective deportation promised during his campaign.Start here in Chicago“But the fear that the city’s immigrants felt did not start after that. It is a more permanent or less.” The bad thing is that the anxiety was there for a while, ”Ambassador Reina Torres Mendeville, the Mexico Consul General in Chicago, told me.” He consumes emotional aspects And the mental health of society. “Since the undocumented immigrants build homes, they will never be able to buy food, bus tables, clean offices buildings, and care for children – with others – and they live with the fact that they are, at least in theory, to get a deportation in any A moment.
Dana Roche, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Illinois Chicago University and director of the family’s mental health program at the university, told me that since Trump was elected, especially after his inauguration, her patients have reached their sessions, often in crying, and asking questions such as: “What if he did not return My father to the house? Each one produces anxiety. But in recent weeks, she said that the distress of her patient was striking. People “who were in good condition with their adapting skills now flooded him with fear.” She said that what they suffer from is compound pressure. The last manifestations for years, if not contracts, of fear.
ICIRR (ICIRR) is one of the numerous organizations prepared for raids. They hosted the information “Learn about your rights“Workshops in the intense neighborhoods of migrants, direct members of society about what they must do in the event of a meeting with Ice Officers. (You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to refuse to enter your home.) With other areas groups, ICIRR filed a lawsuit against Ice Trump’s administration, claiming that the raids were revenge due to the status of Chicago as a city of refuge.
The organization is also taking place against the raids within the Chicago Latini societies and migrants. Live Facebook pages have become important sites for immigrants to exchange information. Once the raids were announced, many members of society published Ice viewer. A member of the community asked whether they were aware of the immigration lawyer or fast response groups who could go to help. Another recommended is recommended from doors and installing home store cameras.
Facebook has also become a place for immigrants and their families to exchange their fears and discuss the real intentions of the new administration. Citing McGaru and Human, some wrote that Trump only sought to deport criminals. Even after Trump announced that schools, churches and hospitals will not be outside the border, some have speculated that Ice It will only enter them to follow a criminal immigrant looking for a shelter inside. (Until now, there are no confirmed reports on Ice Making arrests in these “sensitive areas”, but Human and other administration officials defended the shift of politics.) mamaIn this context, it means something like “nonsense”. One of the posters said that members of society cannot live in fear. I recommended that they “should remain alert, but do not attach yourself to a bubble.” Try to shed light on the situation: “Fake to make it 🤷🤣 #2025 #soylegal.”
The following week to start raids, members of society expressed different ideas about what their response should be. When a “day without immigrants” was announced on February 3 – employees will not send their children to school, they will not go to work, and they will not buy anything – some of them were all. But others did not think that would work, and he argued that he might have a harmful effect. One of them wrote, “People need to work to pay bills and other expenses. This country is very large and only a small amount of population is ready to do so.” Another publication, “This will make us look bad like Latinists. Let’s obey the laws and do the right things.”
We may not see surveying such as those in the 1990s or ninety -century, which gathered tens or hundreds of migrants in one raid; Many cities have lost up to a third of its Mexican population, including the American citizens who fell in the raids. It may be more gradual – removing migrants on the border and sustainable internal enforcement operations from the coast to the coast – but at some point many immigrants may decide that he no longer deserves to live in a state of persistent fear. This is definitely what the Trump administration contemplates. This is what many Republicans have wanted for a long time-at least since 2012, when Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate of that year for the president, invited illegal immigrants to report self.
When she sent a message to someone who was participating in Facebook conversations, she wrote again and told me that she and her sister have already returned to Mexico. She said, “We do not want problems with this devil that runs your country.” Torres Mendeville told me that the consulate had received requests – not much, but some – for information on how to return the Mexicans in Chicago, and what government services available to help them if they decide to return. “I can’t deal with this,” Torres Mendeville told me they say. “I prefer to return to my community and I will take my family with me, even if there are American citizens in my family.” “
The person who bought the limits of his parents told me that they were almost “numb”, or resigned, because they could have to go, although they wanted to stay – to work, for school. When he described the tension between resignation to go and the desire to stay, remind me of the song “La Jaula de ORO” – “The Cage of Gold” – by Los Tigres Del Norte: “What is good is money / if you are” m like a prisoner in this country? “
He explained that his parents are exhausted by contracts of living in fear. Like many immigrants, his family was not, when they crossed the border the first time, they believed that their stay in the United States would be permanent. As other migratory families, they used some of the money they gained here to build a house in Michoan, where they were hoping to retire one day. They have never been to go, because if they visited, they may not be able to return. But what was one day their retirement preparation is their insurance plan now. ♦
