The Spanish panels are glued to the windows in the chicago windows: “Ice no es Bienvenido aquí”.
Warning networks have worked all day, every day, as people who spot immigration agents and customs’ application on the street send friends and neighbors or are starting to broadcast urgent custody on Facebook Live.
Even tourists were trained in the repression of the immigration of the Trump administration, surprised by the sight of federal agents walking in camouflage last weekend through the Gold Coast of the high-end city, near the famous Magnificent Mile.
This has started quietly in Chicago a month ago, such as a promise from the Trump administration to increase the arrests of illegal immigrants is now being felt throughout the city of 2.7 million people and in the wider metropolitan region encompassing millions of people.
Tensions vanish like small intense forest fires. In elementary schools on the west side, the parents organized to raise custody at the time of dismissal. Some construction companies keep their warehouse doors open to keep an eye on ice agents. The owners of small businesses make their own deliveries to protect their Latin employees from driving in the streets of the city.
In Edgewater, from the far north along Lake Michigan, a neighborhood list lit up on a helicopter surrounding the region on Sunday. Could it be ice, asked for a person. Is there something we can do, asking for another.
The neighbors went out in the streets of the southwest Saturday after a car accident involving federal agents and two motorists, who, according to the Ministry of Internal Security, continued the agents recklessly. Ice agents responded with pepper balls and tear gas; The crowd, shouting and waving anti-ice panels, remained until the federal agents finally left.
Restaurants have reduced the hours or stopped making deliveries, not wanting to risk the arrest of their employees.
“We cannot ask anyone to risk their safety just to serve the bagels,” said a restaurant, Bagel Miller, in an article on Facebook explaining its closure last weekend.
Berto Aguayo, a lawyer and defender of immigrants, described a month of growing tension, political organization and outright fear, while Mr. Trump’s American citizens have taken American citizens alongside illegal immigrants.
“Our family gatherings are filled with tears and try to understand how we are going beyond this moment,” said Aguayo. “People are terrorized. People are attacked. That’s what it does. “
When he visits his mother’s house in the back of the Yards, a district on the southwest side, he said, he sees far fewer people walking than usual. “Each person who looks brown is afraid,” he said.
