Chicago’s theater of violence Trump’s crackdown will change nothing

Earlier this month, a high-speed car chase cut through the Southeast Side of Chicago. At the intersection of 105th Street and N Avenue, a white car, apparently containing federal agents, slammed into the side of a red SUV in which undocumented immigrants were riding. The SUV spun out, colliding with another vehicle. Two figures spilled out and fled in panic.

The crash was intentional. The maneuver, known as a Precision Immobilization Technique, is regarded as reckless, dangerous and not particularly effective — including by the Chicago Police Department, which severely limits the practice. But this is no longer their town. Donald Trump has vowed to bring order to the city he now describes as a “death trap” — and has called upon the federal officers of the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agencies to make it safe again. Welcome to Chicago under Operation Midway Blitz.

Following the incident in the Southeast Side, a largely Latino neighborhood, a crowd gathered to protest. More federal agents were sent in to calm the situation, which they did by firing tear gas. Chaos ensued. Among those gassed were 13 members of the Chicago Police Department. The front page of the Chicago Sun-Times the next day depicted a federal officer pointing his weapon at a young man who had his hands raised.

Through the smoke and the havoc, it is possible to see the chaos as a win for both sides. For the MAGA Right, the protests are yet more evidence of the Soros-funded malignant forces Trump is trying to subvert. For the Left, here is a city united in a resounding rebuke of the President, the Resistance reborn.

That may help fundraising, and television ratings, but what about ordinary people who have bills to pay and families to feed? The truth, as I see it from reporting on Chicago over the last several years, is that Operation Midway Blitz will change nothing — no matter how aggressive its tactics. Instead, it will only exacerbate our existing divides, making solutions impossible. This is true of every major political issue. Vehemence trumps compromise. Vitriol trumps civility. We are all now living in Chicago.

***

Trump is right in his identifying of a chronic disorder that has plagued American cities since the Covid pandemic. Among big cities, Chicago has the highest per capita murder rate, far above that of a New York City supposedly backsliding into the bad old days. And the number of carjackings has soared in the last decade. But in trying to conflate illegal immigration, violent crime and general urban disorder, Trump has ensured that none of those issues will be resolved. This is the same intersectionality beloved by the Left, only applied to a different set of concerns.

The surge in National Guard troops and immigration officers in Chicago is the same approach the administration took in Washington DC. There, violent crime dropped by 22%, and a long stretch of August, which can be a turbulent month, went by without a single murder. But this is an unsustainable trend: federal resources in Chicago were not directed towards the largely impoverished, majority-black neighborhoods — Garfield Park, Washington Park, Englewood — where responsible interventions like a gun interdiction task force might make a significant difference.

Similarly, in Chicago, Trump’s zealous lawmen are unsure of what they want to do and where they want to do it: “They’re so afraid to go where the crime is,” an iron worker named Caroline tells me. “They’re picking up the fucking guys trying to make a living at Home Depot. They’re pulling busboys out of fucking restaurants.” Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino has thrust himself with rather disconcerting eagerness into the fray, apparently throwing a can of tear gas during one recent encounter with protesters. He now has to report to court daily, as if on parole.

As has been the case in Los Angeles, Washington and Portland, few believe Trump’s forays into Chicago will make much of a difference. But in an age in which politics is entirely performative, perhaps the performance of toughness is all that is required. Bovino may win an Emmy, when all of this is through.

The same, too, could be said about the performance of defiance. The protests by Chicagoans against this invasion of their city have been forceful and impassioned. Yet they will also change little in a lasting sense. American policy — whether it comes to immigration, crime, poverty, or just about anything else — will remain in a state of pervasive constipation. Maybe that explains the growing number of Americans (about a third of those recently surveyed in a recent poll from NPR, PBS News and Marist) who say violence is an acceptable laxative.

***

Outside the ICE processing facility in Broadview, a shabby Chicago burb, I watch protests ebb and flow. Activists have set up a tent nearby. Tracy, a white, middle-aged protester, is all for securing borders. She is not especially political, she tells me, but she can’t square what she is seeing now in Chicago with what she thought Trump had promised.

“If ICE was actually doing what they said they were going to do, which is go after criminals, drug cartel people, I think that would be great,” she says. “But they’re really targeting people of color. They’re targeting brown people, and they’re targeting people that don’t look like they come from here.”

A poster flutters in the wind, bearing the name of a CPD officer who had allegedly aided in immigrant detention. An American flag also flutters. A pro-Trump counter-protester named Ben had driven to Chicago from Arkansas. He is holding a sign that says: “GOD BLESS ICE.” Some people honk in approval as they drove past. “I want them to know that America supports them and that we are not all crazy liberals,” Ben tells me. “We are not all these democratic socialists.”

At this point, events take a nasty turn. An activist runs up to Ben. A woman in a dinosaur costume has claimed that Ben put his hands on her. Did he put his hands on the woman in the dinosaur costume? Ben denies it. The activists bristle.

Another man, loud and irate, raises the name of Charlie Kirk, recounting the macabre details of the assassination and seeming to suggest that Ben deserves the same fate.

“Guess where he’s at now,” the irate man says ominously.

Ben does not miss a beat. “Heaven,” he replies.

Just as things seem like they could escalate, several state troopers step in. The ICE detention facility stands in the distance, a hulking symbol of whatever you want it to mean: fascism, law and order, something else altogether. The protester in the dinosaur costume remains near the fence, alone.

***

MAGA-friendly commentators have used videos of confrontations between ICE agents and local activists to depict Chicago as a war zone in desperate need of even more forceful intervention. Anti-Trump outlets have shown Chicago rising up in unison to offer the White House a resounding rebuke.

The truth is less satisfying. Chicago seems to be largely indifferent, as is much of the rest of the country — not just to the immigration raids but to, well, pretty much anything short of a nuclear strike. While there are a few stirrings of vigor in America — New York, for example, seems about to elect a socialist mayor — a strange passivity appears to have settled over much of the land.

Trump has used this moment to his advantage, while his opponents, motivated as they may be, have not found a way to attract the voters whom they lost in 2024. Having given up a huge share of the black and Hispanic vote, Democrats could now be losing the educated, city-dwelling whites who are their lifeblood.

“We’re completely fucked,” confessed an actor named Seth who was having a drink at Hemingway’s Bistro in Oak Park, a much nicer suburb than Broadview where no one would dare put an ICE facility. He voted for Kamala Harris in last year’s presidential election but was furious that the Democrats could do no better than her or the enfeebled incumbent. He would go to the large anti-Trump protest organized for the upcoming weekend (which would turn out to be huge, as it would be in many cities), but he was not sure if the protest would do any good. Apathy could set in. Maybe it has already. If it does, MAGA will doubtlessly benefit.

***

People are surprised to learn that there is a Trump Tower in Chicago. Perhaps they shouldn’t be. It is a graceless building on the Chicago River whose defining quality is that it is tall, and that its proprietor’s name can be seen from many blocks away. But the President seems to have an uncanny understanding of the unspoken grievances that motivate people to vote. His immigration raids have been needlessly provocative and disruptive, but they give off the sense that something is being done.

In 2016, Chicago resoundingly repudiated Trump. That year, he earned only 12.4% of the vote. But by 2024, that share had jumped to 22%. To understand why his support almost doubled here, you need only look at how the city has handled immigration over the past few generations — and how MAGA has learned to exploit those failures.

In 1985, Chicago became a sanctuary city — with a policy of not asking people about their immigration status or cooperating with federal immigration agencies. The current Illinois Governor, J.B. Pritzker, supports the policy. “We’re not going to help federal officials just drag them away,” he said of undocumented immigrants earlier this year.

Chicago’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, feels the same. Three years ago, after the Texas Governor, Greg Abbott, decided to bus Mexican migrants across to liberal cities such as Chicago — presumably to show big city mayors what Texas had been experiencing for years — Johnson seemed initially upbeat about the development. “We are going to do everything we can to make this home for you,” he told a group of migrants who were sleeping in a Chicago police station. Johnson further argued that these convoys did not constitute “a crisis” — even though the migrants had nowhere to live and no means to make a living and had not asked to be sent to Chicago.

The fact that Abbott was moving people like political pawns did not seem to feature in Johnson’s thinking. Overall, some 40,000 migrants ended up in Chicago, the vast majority of them desperate families wanting a better life. Many of the migrants Abbott met in the police station had fled deteriorating political and economic conditions in Venezuela. However, the visible presence of these new incomers — and evident lack of solutions — only reinforced the sense that Chicago’s leaders had lost control of the city they were supposed to lead. These highly unpopular progressives have proved easy foils for the MAGA Right.

Throughout 2023 and 2024, migrant women sat with their children on many corners in the downtown Chicago district known as the Loop, with desultory boxes of candy for sale on the pavement before them. Some of the women coddled infants. Sometimes, toys were scattered on the ground. They looked helpless and you, passing by, were helpless in your own way. The nature of the modern American city is such that the comfortable are too comfortable, and the afflicted too afflicted, for things to ever really change.

At a City Hall hearing in the summer of 2023, I watched a man in a baseball cap with the motto “Power Pussy Peace” berate legislators for what he saw as their hypocrisy. “On every corner there’s an undocumented immigrant,” he told the members of the subcommittee on fire and police, who surely knew as much. “Single mother, with two to three kids, with a box of candy, all downtown.”

The man in the Power Pussy Peace hat pointed out that the migrants were generally not harassed by the cops. This also bothered him. “If this would be us,” he said, referring to black people, “all our kids would have been taken, they would’ve been arrested, they would be going through family court.” The migrants got a free pass. He couldn’t understand why.

Undergirding all this is the resentment of downwardly-mobile whites who reasonably expected to enjoy the same lifestyle as their parents — only to see job security, affordable home ownership and a pension vanish. When Trump announced his presidential run in 2015, in what most serious people thought was a joke, he appealed to them directly in his speech from the lobby of the original Trump Tower, in Manhattan: “The US has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.”

***

It is not too hard to find Chicago residents who feel the same way about their own city — and perhaps understandably so, given the Texan migrant-busing “experiment”. One local poll from 2024 found Chicago residents less favorable towards immigration than the general US public. Where only about a third of the general US population wanted to see “immigration reduced”, half of Chicagoans did.

But immigrants — including the 257,000 undocumented immigrants living in and around Chicago — know that Trump Tower cannot function without them. Nor could just about any of the city’s services or businesses. And while they are scared, they are also indignant.

I meet Esmeraldo at an ice cream shop in the North Austin neighborhood, close to where there have been ugly confrontations between ICE and immigrants. Tables are packed, but nobody is eating ice cream. They are here for a WhistleMania event, making kits that included whistles which could be used to issue an alert when immigration officials were approaching.

Esmeraldo is a student at DePaul University and a native of the Austin neighborhood on the West Side of the city. Her parents are undocumented. “I’m doing this event for them,” she tells me. “They are fearful. They can’t go outside to work.”

Migrants helped power the great American urbanization that started to take place around the turn of the Millennium. They are, to use a pandemic phrase, essential workers in the truest sense. Without their contribution, the American economy could sputter. The signs are already there, at least here in Chicago. When I checked in at my hotel, a makeshift notice had been pasted up in the lobby: “Due to a staffing shortage, Housekeeping service will be limited,” that sign partly said. Enjoy your stay.

There are signs everywhere, and not just pasted angrily on the streets. Some restaurants have started posting notices on their doors prohibiting immigration officers from entering without a judicial warrant. Meanwhile, inside federal buildings, there are signs addressed to “illegal aliens” printed in both English and Spanish advising them to self-deport. “Self-deportation is safe,” these say. “Leave on your own terms by picking your departure flight.” If you leave it up to Trump, is the unspoken implication, you might end up in Uganda.

***

On a miserable afternoon, in a windowless room with a blue wire carpet, I witness Chicago’s administrative machine in action. A young judge named Craig Defoe is here at the courthouse to hear 19 immigration cases. There are three rows of hard wooden benches. A baby cries, grows silent, then cries again.

While the cinematic scenes of ICE encounters shared on social media make it seem like deportations are happening all the time, in the courthouse, deferral remains the order of the day. The cases I hear center on the question of whether a person, or people, deserves to stay in the United States, after having entered the country without doing all of the paperwork and waiting their turn.

These people had crossed jungles and deserts. They had forded rivers and sat in locked vans like cargo, not knowing where they were headed. This was brave, but it was also illegal, because other people had filled out their paperwork and waited. My family, for example, waited for a decade, though on the whole, emigrating from the Soviet Union was a lot easier than emigrating from Latin America.

Now a judge in his 30s would decide their fate. Defoe seems bored and morose, but he frequently surprises me with his shows of empathy. The third case that afternoon is of a Cuban woman who had entered illegally from Mexico. She was apprehended, sent back to Mexico, then crossed back again. Defoe and her attorney spar through a complicated exchange full of acronyms that no ordinary human being could be expected to understand. The upshot seems to be that there were several things the Cuban woman could have done to make her status here more secure, only she had failed to take those steps and was now at risk of deportation.

“That was not smart,” Defoe says. I imagine that he is going to let this woman really have it, ordering her sent back to Cuba at once. Instead, he simply schedules another hearing.

It is more or less the same with a Nicaraguan couple who had been delinquent with their paperwork. Their lawyer tries to explain that they could not file the necessary papers because the husband had been in prison. “The excuses don’t sound very compelling to me,” Defoe says. He grants the couple a month to file whatever had not been filed before.

The sixth case is an East Asian couple and it involves a protracted debate about whether they need a Korean or a Mandarin translator. Finally, Defoe sets a new hearing date for the couple: 27 June 2028.

By then, we will be in the midst of electing a new president. Perhaps, by that time, artificial intelligence will have divined an answer to our immigration morass. But it seems more likely that things will remain as they are.

I certainly see little enthusiasm for Trump’s heavy-handed approach here. The afternoon is, to the people who actually work in the tangled guts of the immigration system, just one more performance in a country that has come to treat politics as entertainment. After it was done, there would be a new show — and another after that.

***

When I emerge from the courthouse, the rain has stopped but the weather is still raw. I go to Wicker Park, home to the Chicago Bath House, one of the last true Eastern European steam rooms in Chicago. Once, every city in the Midwest and Northeast had many steam rooms, because that is where Russians and Poles and Hungarians and Jews bathed and socialized. But then the Russians and Poles became Americans, and the steam rooms closed. The Eastern Europeans moved to the suburbs, where they bought houses with lawns and voted for Republicans.

Inside, I slip easily back into my native language of Russian with both patrons and staff. Everyone else here is speaking Russian, too, or another Slavic language. This would earn no dirty looks, no questions about legal status. Nobody here is worried about having to sit in Defoe’s courtroom anytime soon, or having to sit in a communal cell in the Broadview processing facility. Ensconced in an underground steam room, we are safe. No tear gas here, just purifying steam, salty snacks and beer.

By the time I leave, day has gone and darkness has fallen over Chicago. What fresh provocations and foul surprises will tomorrow bring? America is exhausted, and its exhaustion is especially evident in this city. Last year, Democrats asked voters to save democracy and the oceans and Obamacare. They may have simply misjudged our collective stamina, the reach of our moral imagination. People mostly just want to save themselves. In the zero-sum contest that is American life, you can’t fault them for that.

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