In Trump’s war on Democratic cities, Chicago is fighting back

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This past weekend, millions marched in “No Kings” rallies across the United States. The turnout was especially large in downtown Chicago, where more than 100,000 people marched in protest of President Donald Trump’s deployment of the National Guard and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents throughout the city.

Scenes coming out of Chicago over the past few weeks during “Operation Midway Blitz” have been characterized by overzealous and combative jurisdictional and constitutional overstep by federal immigration agents. Of note is a particularly aggressive raid on Sept. 30, during which masked and armed immigration agents stormed an apartment building in the middle of the night, zip-tying and detaining dozens of American citizens, including children, in their search for undocumented Venezuelan migrants.

Mr. Trump claims that Chicago was targeted because of its “horrible crime” and “incompetent governor” despite a clear drop in violent crime, according to FBI data. The more likely reason is that Chicago has long been a Democratic stronghold, has a historic and organized Black community, and has strong ties to former president Barack Obama, whose popularity significantly exceeds Mr. Trump’s, both while he was in office and now years later.

Unleashing ICE and the National Guard on specific cities is in part a branding exercise, a narrative that clearly resonates with certain portions of the electorate in suburban and rural areas, who undiscerningly associate Portland with Antifa, Chicago with Black Lives Matter, and Los Angeles with Latin American migrants, and are primed to be resentful of both the racial composition of cities and what they consider to be an unequal distribution of state and federal resources. It is also an attempt to militarize cities, and concerningly, could be a pretext for interference in the 2026 midterm elections.

Crowds rally against Trump at No Kings protests across the U.S.

Democrats are pushing back. Two prominent Democratic leaders in Illinois, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, both publicly clashed with the Trump administration long before ICE agents descended on the city. On Oct. 9, an Illinois district court judge barred the use of tear gas against protesters and later ordered that federal agents who have body cameras turn them on while conducting immigration arrests and interacting with protesters.

However, as the party with a minority in both the House and Senate, Democrats are limited in how they can challenge Mr. Trump’s overreach of executive power. The government shutdown, now in its third week, is a last-ditch effort to beat Republicans at their own game of stubborn, purportedly principled contriteness.

While the actions of political elites certainly matter, the most important set of lessons coming out of Chicago, Portland and Los Angeles aren’t about the Democratic Party at all. They are about the power of community organizing.

Building on longstanding grassroots networks and quickly forging new groups of volunteers, Chicagoans have formed rapid response and people’s patrol units. Along with activists and lawyers, volunteers are patrolling their neighborhoods, warning migrants when ICE agents appear, contacting family members when people are detained, and connecting detained migrants with legal services.

In the northside Chicago neighborhood where I used to live, whistles have become a powerful mode of communication to form a crowd, stay loud, and protect each other: three short blasts to alert others that ICE is nearby, and three long blasts when agents are detaining someone. Crowdsourced maps of ICE activity help keep vulnerable communities apprised of when they can safely walk their dogs, go to the grocery store, and walk their kids to school. Several organizations have “know your rights” training sessions, workshops and resources, as well as 24-hour emergency assistance hotlines and free legal aid for Chicago residents.

Because ICE agents rely on fear and uncertainty to carry out their work, an important role of community members is simply to bear witness to ICE activities. ICE agents do not want to be followed, questioned or have their identities revealed. Reporting ICE activities on social media using SALUTE rules (size, activity, location, uniform, time, equipment) helps combat misinformation and the unhinged narratives of the Trump administration, and, perhaps most importantly, provides documentation of who was detained and prevents those who are from being completely disappeared by the state.

It may not seem like much against masked and armed men with access to the full weight of militarized state power. But if Meta’s recent removal of a Facebook group that was used to share information about ICE agents in Chicago because of demands by the Department of Justice is any indication, these efforts are working. We may not know what lies in store for the 2026 and 2028 elections, but in the meantime: we keep us safe.