Blow the Whistle

A church in a Chicago suburb has set up the nativity scene ahead of the holiday season, but Jesus, Mary and Joseph are conspicuously absent. Instead, there’s a sign: “Due to ongoing ICE activity in our community, the Holy Family is in hiding.” 

It’s just one chilling reminder that many of Chicago’s neighborhoods are still reeling from what the Trump administration called Operation Midway Blitz, a full-scale military operation where both Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol agents descended on Chicago, rappelling from Black Hawk helicopters onto ordinary apartment buildings and terrorizing immigrant neighborhoods. At one point, they raided a day care center, violently arresting a worker in front of children and their parents in broad daylight.

One year ago, President Donald Trump promised a mass deportation campaign that would rid the United States of the “worst of the worst” criminals. Instead, he unleashed the most sweeping immigration crackdown in U.S. history, arresting and deporting more than 600,000 people — not including the 1.9 million who have opted to “voluntarily” self-deport due to ongoing fear and harassment. According to recent data, almost 75% of those currently detained have no criminal record whatsoever. U.S. permanent residents and citizens alike have been swept up in the raids that have now separated untold numbers of families and devastated local economies.

Without the legal system or due process on their side, communities across the country have banded together to warn residents about ICE raids and make federal agents’ jobs more difficult. “Know your rights” trainings, once meant to spread information about when ICE is and is not authorized to enter a building and make arrests, have expanded and evolved into “rapid response” trainings that strategize tactics to track ICE and warn neighbors when there has been a sighting. Whistles have become ubiquitous on the streets of Los Angeles and Chicago, and more recently, Charlotte, North Carolina; New Orleans; and Minneapolis. Short busts mean an ICE sighting — longer whistles mean they’re making arrests.

“All of the ways that the city resisted was really incredible,” said Alejandra Oliva, a Chicago-based translator and author of the book “Rivermouth.” “I have to believe that it made a difference in the arrests that they were able to make and the damage that they were able to do just by having their presence so continually and loudly announced.”

Lasting Scars

Still, raids have lasting effects on communities. In Los Angeles, which experienced the Trump administration’s first military-style immigration crackdown back in June, this can still be felt today. “It has a crippling effect on the economy,” said Luis Sandoval, the executive director for the Building Skills Partnership, an organization supporting low-wage workers across California, many of whom are immigrants. “If you go to the fashion district right now, it’s basically empty.”

A study published in August by the University of California at Merced found that a combination of the lack of foot traffic and economic activity attributed to fear over the June immigration raids led to a local economic downturn comparable to the COVID-19 pandemic. As Christmas approached, local businesses suffered even more. The annual Boyle Heights Christmas parade in Los Angeles, which normally showcases more than 80 groups from across the community in a neighborhood-wide celebration, was canceled due to fears over raids.

“We have to center immigrant workers at the center of our economy because that is how our country has historically thrived,” Sandoval said, pointing out that employers can do a lot to advocate for their immigrant employees. Training sessions that previously focused on educating immigrant workers about their rights in case of a raid have shifted to also educate employers on their Fourth Amendment rights, which prohibit unreasonable government searches and seizures. Restaurants in Minneapolis that have successfully resisted ICE by asking for a warrant are sharing information with other businesses on social media. In Kenner, Louisiana, a local gas station owner locked his door to Customs and Border Patrol boss Gregory Bovino and told him to “go fuck himself,” according to an Instagram post.

“Listening to the experiences of workers sheds a light on what workers are going through right now,” Sandoval said, adding that employers can also press their local Chamber of Commerce and elected officials to offer better protections to immigrant workers.

“This administration might not listen to folks in the immigrant rights space, but they may listen to the business community,” he said.

It isn’t just shops losing people — it’s also schools. A recent study conducted by UCLA and the University of California at Riverside found that school enrollment is down by more than 4% in the Los Angeles Unified School District, and high school principals across the state of California — a state where around 1 million children have a parent who is undocumented and 300,000 are undocumented themselves — report increased bullying and a “climate of fear” brought on by ICE raids. Teachers have taken a cue from local groups like Union del Barrio to wake up early to patrol for ICE, alerting their networks through social media and WhatsApp groups of local ICE activity. They’ve formed “walking school buses” to make sure that students can get to school safely.

‘One of the Ugliest Moments in U.S. History‘

“We’re living in one of the ugliest moments of U.S. immigration history,” Austin Kocher, a geographer and assistant professor at Syracuse University, told Truthdig. In his eyes, this moment is comparable to the Chinese Exclusion Act of the 1880s or the 1920s immigration quotas that used eugenics pseudoscience to justify limiting immigration from everywhere but Western Europe, laying the foundation for an immigration policy rooted in white supremacy.

“This moment is enabled by decades of policy and laws that Congress has passed to make it possible,” Kocher said. “To fix it, we need to fix a deeper problem.” 

Rapidly accelerating authoritarianism and surveillance has closed off most avenues that immigration advocates used to rely on to protect immigrant communities. Churches are no longer sanctuaries, as of an executive order that removed protections from “sensitive locations.” Helping people get legal status only works if protections and pathways to citizenship exist — something that has also become increasingly difficult as the Trump administration peels back protections like temporary protected status for a number of nationalities while placing severe restrictions on who can seek asylum. 

“A lot of progressive movements and immigrant rights movements have historically leaned on the courts and the legal system as an essential partner in the fight for social justice,” Kocher said, adding this requires faith in due process.

“But for that approach to work, those institutions have to be respected,” he said. “What we’ve seen is the Trump administration’s wholesale neglect of judges’ orders and attacks on immigration judges, attorneys and on the entire legal system.” 

Since taking office, Trump has fired or driven out more than 100 immigration judges and temporarily replaced them with military judges — a move that critics say removes unbiased arbiters from the courtroom. Recently, the Department of Justice has put out a call for “deportation judges” who are explicitly called upon to expedite the removal process.

While cities like Los Angeles, Washington, Chicago, Charlotte and most recently, Minneapolis and New Orleans, have received the most press coverage, other states — especially with high immigrant populations, like Texas and Florida — have also felt the lasting impact of ICE in their communities.

“We’ve noticed the doors getting closed on a lot of our community members,” said Gemima Cadet, a Sunday school teacher in West Palm Beach, Florida, and volunteer with the Florida Immigrant Coalition, adding that Florida has the second-highest number of immigration arrests in the country, after only Texas. 

One reason for this is the proliferation of 287(g) agreements, collaborations between federal agencies like ICE and local police forces that essentially train and deputize local police officers to act as immigration enforcement. These agreements have led to an increase in racial profiling at routine traffic stops, which then trigger ICE arrests. This, combined with Trump stripping back protections like temporary protected status for Florida’s Haitian and Venezuelan communities, has left many more people at risk of arrest and deportation.

“A lot of our friends and family are not able to go to college and pay a fair tuition anymore or have a driver’s license or even be able to work after February of next year,” she said, noting that February is when Haitians are slated to lose these protections. Without TPS, immigrants are no longer able to legally work, drive or qualify for in-state tuition. While the coalition is focused on making sure that the communities they serve have enough to get by during the holidays, this gets more and more difficult as protections are stripped away.

“We’ve been pulling our resources together to make sure that no kids go without a meal or a turkey on Thanksgiving,” she said, adding that many who are affected by these changes have also been affected by the rollback of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits. “But it’s hard to make sure that everyone is safe.”  

Giving Immigrants Agency

Another way the Trump administration has severely curtailed the lives of immigrants is through restricting who is eligible for release on bond while their cases are decided. 

“We used to see bonds at the minimum quantity [of $1,500],” said author Alejandra Oliva, who is also on the board of the Midwest Immigration Bond Fund, a community-based fund that raises money to help the families of detained immigrants post bond. “This year we’ve paid off $10,000, $20,000 and even $100,000 bonds.”

At one point, Oliva feared that their work would drastically change — after consistently raising the average bond amount, the Trump administration announced that immigrants who entered the country without inspection would no longer be eligible for bond. This meant that the only alternative to immigration detention would be deportation. 

“There was a moment in the fall where we weren’t getting very many requests at all and that was very scary to me,” she said — a sign to her that the system truly was falling apart. At the end of November, there was a rare victory when a federal judge overturned that memo. While it remains to be seen when — and how successfully — this will go into effect, Oliva is hopeful that more families will once again be able to take advantage of the bond fund to avoid immigration detention while they fight their case in the courts. 

Remaining free can mean the difference between someone being able to support their family or languishing in detention while worrying about how their loved ones are getting by. “You get to go home and live with your family and keep living your life while your case works its way through the system,” she said.

“It gives them back choices that immigration detention really removes from them,” she said, adding that while this autonomy can be as momentous as deciding whether to leave the country or stay and keep fighting their case, it can also be as small as deciding what time to go to bed.

“If I want to go to bed at midnight, I can do that. If I want to have an early night, I can do that too — I’m not going to be pulled out of my bunk for count at midnight,” she said. “It’s these little, stupid moments of agency that we take for granted that people in immigration detention are denied.” 

Creative Resistance

Along with the proliferation of rights and rapid response trainings, protests have become more and more creative and targeted. At a Home Depot in Los Angeles — a popular location for ICE to meet their arrest quotas through targeting day laborers — protesters lined up to purchase symbolic ice scrapers — only to immediately get back in line to return them, causing a disturbance large enough to occupy the staff, keeping them from letting ICE agents into their stores. “Fortnite” players across the country are role-playing ICE raids to prepare for real-life situations. Carolers have replaced the lyrics of popular Christmas songs, warning that “Kristi Noem is coming to town.” In Minneapolis, where Trump has referred to Somali immigrants as “garbage” in a move to end temporary protected status for the state’s 80,000-strong community, a handful of particularly comedic Somalis have responded with a social media campaign that trolls Trump by spoofing Zionist talking points, proclaiming Minnesota as the ancestral homeland of the Somali community. 

Others have turned to fundraising to support local businesses, organizing restaurant crawls to bring new customers to immigrant-owned businesses whose typical clientele might be in hiding. One particularly effective tactic has been buying out street vendors — helping them support themselves while keeping people who might be vulnerable to immigration arrests off the street. 

“People are just doing the things that make them people,” Oliva, the writer and activist, said, sharing that many Chicago artists have donated proceeds from their sales to the bond fund and other mutual aid initiatives. “They’re making art, they’re hanging out with their friends. They’re eating dinner and cooking food and wanting to do that to benefit us.”  

Faith leaders around the country have also treated their congregations as spaces to come together — especially those whose typical congregants are affected by the raids. As a Sunday school teacher, Cadet sees faith as a powerful way to engage with the present moment in a way that is empowering and not demoralizing. 

“I’ve focused on the Book of James — which talks about perseverance and suffering,” she said. “When we are bombarded with so much horrible news, these headlines are going to affect us mentally.” 

Cadet is aware this is only the beginning of a long and difficult fight. After Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” passed in July of this year, agencies like ICE and the Department of Homeland Security have more money than ever to carry out immigration enforcement operations. Immigrant communities across the country are bracing themselves for more kidnappings, more detentions and more racist scapegoating, while still keeping in mind that there is strength in community, solidarity and endurance.

“If they’re not going to let up, we’re not going to let up,” Cadet continued. “We have to focus on persevering so we can get up again and continue to speak up about the injustices and continue to raise the alarm when we need to and advocate for one another.”