JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
When it launched Operation Midway Blitz in September, the Trump administration said it was going after, quote, "the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens in Chicago." But the impact of this campaign has touched the lives of citizens and noncitizens deeply. Heavily armed federal agents have deployed tear gas outside schools, prompted schools to go into lockdown, shot pepper guns in residential areas. The result has been a swell of grassroots resistance. And many of these new networks are drawing from the experience of one neighborhood group that started preparing for this eight years ago. NPR's Odette Yousef reports.
ODETTE YOUSEF, BYLINE: On the Monday after Halloween, it was clear that federal agents were mobilizing for a morning of raids in and around the Chicago neighborhood of Rogers Park.
JILL GARVEY: Do you have gas masks in your back?
GABE GONZALEZ: Yeah.
YOUSEF: When this happens, Jill Garvey and Gabe Gonzalez are ready to jump into a car at any moment.
GARVEY: East on Peterson. White GMC Denali, Florida plates, DQ.
GONZALEZ: Yep, this way.
GARVEY: Found them.
(SOUNDBITE OF HORNS HONKING)
GONZALEZ: That's them?
GARVEY: There's horns.
YOUSEF: Oh, horns.
GARVEY: Yeah, let's go.
(SOUNDBITE OF HORNS HONKING)
YOUSEF: A blizzard of encrypted text messages had already broadcasted to rapid responders in the neighborhood information about a vehicle seemed to have federal agents inside.
(SOUNDBITE OF HORNS HONKING)
YOUSEF: Gonzalez and another car make noise to warn people that ICE is in the neighborhood. He pulls up quickly to a biker who's also in pursuit.
GONZALEZ: Don't get that close to them. They'll grab you.
YOUSEF: On the sidewalk, pedestrians are blowing whistles. When the cars stop for a red light, one of them, a woman, runs into the street.
GONZALEZ: Don't get that close. Do not get that [expletive]. No, no, no, no, no, no.
YOUSEF: She bangs angrily against a window of the agents' vehicle.
GONZALEZ: Get back. Come back, come back.
GARVEY: Get back.
GONZALEZ: Come back, come back, come back.
GARVEY: Oh, no.
GONZALEZ: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
YOUSEF: The other car in pursuit peels off. Gonzalez follows the agents as they turn west, but he eventually peels off, too. At this point, they're out of his neighborhood.
GONZALEZ: It was just two agents in one car. But that car we have seen before involved in multiple abductions.
YOUSEF: Gonzalez is a cofounder of Protect RP. RP stands for Rogers Park, the neighborhood where he lives. Protect RP was launched in 2017 as a community defense network during Trump's first term. The goal was to bring the neighborhood together to resist an expected onslaught of federal immigration enforcement. In fact, that onslaught didn't happen. But now it has, and the infrastructure and strategy of Protect RP has become one model for communities across the country. Their guiding principle is to make the work of immigration enforcement as inefficient as possible.
GONZALEZ: So that was 15, 20 minutes. I'm sure he has no intention of being where he is right now. So it's probably another 20 or, you know, another 10 or 15 for him to get back. That's half an hour that he lost, right? That's half an hour where he's not going to grab somebody. That's all the time they have to pay him for not doing anything, the gas money, the - I'm sure they grabbed up our license plate, so they're going to have to have time to run all of that stuff and blah, blah, blah. Time and money. Time and money.
YOUSEF: Gonzalez has spent his career as a community organizer. Protect RP's team sees community organizing as exactly what's needed now, when the stakes are higher than ever. Jill Garvey says they're not just standing against heavy-handed immigration enforcement. They're also pushing back against what she sees as an authoritarian strategy that, unchecked, could ultimately eat away at the freedom and rights of everyone in this country.
GARVEY: We often talk about places being sort of like lynchpins for a region.
YOUSEF: Garvey is part of Protect RP's core team. She's also the founder of a nonprofit called States at the Core - or STAC. Up until now, STAC has mostly worked outside of Chicago. In Tennessee or Ohio, for example. It supports local communities dealing with what it sees as authoritarian threats.
GARVEY: It could be a very small town that is trying to fend off Christian nationalism. And they may be the thing that is standing in the way of that network or formation gaining more influence in the region.
YOUSEF: In this moment, Garvey believes Chicago is a lynchpin for the whole country.
GARVEY: I think that what's happening here is an attempt to strengthen sort of a national police force and occupy a city for a long time, terrorize the city for a long time, and make it normal so they can go and do that in a lot of other places.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: He can't breathe.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Screaming).
GONZALEZ: (Shouting) He can't [expletive] breathe.
YOUSEF: Three days before I met with Garvey and Gabe Gonzalez, it was Halloween. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker had asked Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to stand her agency down that weekend. Kids would be outside. Noem refused. It ended up being among the most violent days of this federal operation in the Chicago region.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
GONZALEZ: He's punching him in the [expletive] face. You got three guys on him, and he's punching him.
YOUSEF: Gabe Gonzalez witnessed it. He shows me the video he took. It was in Evanston, a suburb just north of Chicago. Federal agents were so active there that day, the schools canceled outdoor recess. Gonzalez and other residents were in cars following a vehicle that contained federal agents. They wanted to let people nearby know that immigration enforcement was close by.
Gonzalez said the agents stopped suddenly, and the vehicle behind crashed into them. A crowd formed as Border Patrol agents jumped out and pulled the occupants out of the damaged car behind them. Then Gonzalez said, from amongst the crowd, a young white male ran up near the agents, and they decked him. The video shows two agents kneeling down on the man's back, handcuffing him. As they pinned him down onto the street, a third agent punches the man's face again and again.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
GONZALEZ: Jesus Christ, man.
YOUSEF: The Department of Homeland Security claims the agents were aggressively tailgated by the vehicles behind them and that the young man had assaulted and grabbed an agent's genitals. So far, no video evidence has clearly shown that. DHS said three people were arrested, all U.S. citizens, and released without charges.
Gonzalez and others in Protect RP say while many have been stunned by federal tactics in Chicago, they know that it's less surprising to communities of color. But Operation Midway Blitz has created a shared experience across a much broader spectrum of people. Gonzalez thinks the aftereffects will linger for a long time.
GONZALEZ: They've radicalized a set of people through their own actions, and that'll be a generation before that goes away.
YOUSEF: DHS didn't respond to questions for this story. But speaking on Fox, Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino blamed the governor of Illinois and the mayor of Chicago for creating conditions hostile to immigration enforcement.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
GREGORY BOVINO: And it's certainly a nonpermissive environment.
YOUSEF: That's the goal of those working with Protect RP and similar networks, one that they hope other cities will also achieve. Odette Yousef, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF COMMON, KANYE WEST AND JOHN LEGEND SONG, "THEY SAY")
SUMMERS: Tomorrow, why community organizers in Chicago say other cities are taking note and feeling emboldened to push back.
GARVEY: It's a little bit of contagious courage. I know other people are going to do this, too.
(SOUNDBITE OF COMMON, KANYE WEST AND JOHN LEGEND SONG, "THEY SAY") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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