ICE Raids In Chicago

Or How To Feed And Defend Our Community

Wishful thinking is the reason I’ve put off writing this piece. I hoped, naively so, that after a week, maybe two, at most three, that ICE would’ve stopped raiding my city. I knew from watching the attacks on LA that the raids would persist because as Adam Serwer wrote, the cruelty is the point, but still I hoped. Yet now, over a month later, it’s become clear that we’re settling into a new phase of terror.

When the raids first began, I wasn’t here in Chicago but overseas in London with my partner. During our brief vacation we went to every bookstore we could find, stuffed our faces with fish n chips, and even saw a movie at this lovely underground theater. But in between tourist attractions, while I was looking at my phone, I caught occasional glimpses of the fresh hell unfolding at home. Children were being tackled off their bikes, neighborhoods tear gassed. In one particularly devastating show of force, an apartment building in South Shore was raided, and the mostly black residents were violently torn out of their homes in the dead of night. The guilt I started to feel, the guilt of being so far away from the violence at home, was a familiar one.

Back in college, I would get an occasional message from my people letting me know how the world seemed to unwind in my absence. Fights in the family, a childhood friend killed, eviction notices. Each successive tragedy breathed life into the pernicious, egocentric idea that somehow it was all my fault, that if only I were there, things wouldn’t have turned out that way. It’s not a particularly happy period that I want to revisit, but if anything it did leave me with this lesson. When you are forced to helplessly watch the suffering of others, it diminishes your capacity to care for others and for yourself. I didn’t know this at the time, but I felt it. I dropped out of school and picked up a drinking habit, to alleviate the pain. Self-sabotaged myself academically and professionally as a form of penance.

But in the past decade, I’ve immersed myself in both art and organizing, two necessary outlets for exercising away my dread. I’ve learned to relinquish my perceived power over the world, and instead focus on the very real power I have in my community. And perhaps best of all, I don’t drink much anymore. So when I got off my flight from London and landed back in O’Hare I knew it was time to get to work.

Our local library hosted an ICE watch training session, and my partner and I attended so we can learn a little about community defense. The room was packed and we found ourselves elbow to elbow with dozens of other folks in the area, all looking for ways to get activated. It was one of the few highlights of the past few weeks, because rarely do I find myself on a random Tuesday night surrounded by so many people who give a damn.

I took detailed notes, organized them, and relayed them to my respective groupchats. A bunch of folks that couldn’t attend the in-person session, reached out and thanked me for the notes and remarked on how well organized they were. It’s always nice to see my writing make a real impact on the world.

Then, once trained, I started to help coordinate ICE watches at the local schools near me. Fortunately, many of the parents/teachers had already started to coordinate ICE watches while I was overseas, but for the ones that didn’t, I along with others have helped organize to make sure they had people to help protect them as well. But even though we’re working hard to protect our community, sometimes the devil works harder.

A couple of weeks ago I learned that SNAP benefits are being cut off and as someone that grew up on govt assistance, I can’t overstate how terrible this will be. The people that will go hungry first are the elderly and children, the most vulnerable among us. So in addition to dealing with kidnappings from the government, we now have to deal with starvation.

So now I’m working with a local elementary school to set up a food drive for impacted families. (I’ll have more info for how you can help soon). And once I’ve helped them set up a food drive, I plan on writing down the lessons I’ve learned so that others can replicate it across other schools in the city. We should expect this onslaught by the government to be both violent and long-lasting and prepare accordingly.

Those that know me, know that I’m typically a private person, and seldom do I share updates on the things I’m doing whether they’re good or not, but I wanted to share all of this with you because I believe it’s important that we all recognize how much power we as people have. While much of the world’s calamities are out of control, there is so much we can do to help feed and protect our neighborhoods, our communities. I mean, just imagine what our society as a whole would look like if we all put in a little work to feed, clothe, and defend one another.

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P.S. If you want to learn more about how these ideas and practices came to be, I suggest learning more about the Black Panther Party. Much of what we do today (community defense, food programs, etc…) is based on them.