Donald Trump is waging an authoritarian assault on neighborhoods across Chicago right now. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers are violently snatching Chicagoans off our streets, engulfing our neighborhoods and schools with clouds of tear gas, and brutalizing those who speak up against them. As the city council member representing the city’s Thirty-Fifth Ward on the Northwest Side, I’ve watched this dark period in Chicago’s and the United States’ history with horror. But across the city, neighbors are organizing to defend immigrant families.

In the Northwest Side neighborhoods of Humboldt Park, Belmont Cragin, Logan Square, Avondale, Albany Park, Hermosa, and Irving Park, residents are distributing “Know Your Rights” information and our regional ICE-sighting hotline number through door-to-door canvassing. Our Northwest Side Rapid Response group, a coalition of neighborhood-based organizations, elected officials, and area residents, has formed patrols and teams that monitor and respond to immigration enforcement activity in our neighborhoods.

Trump wants to terrify Chicagoans into submission. We aren’t having it.

Our recent immigrant defense organizing began in November 2024, two weeks after the presidential election. Our coalition of progressive and democratic socialist elected officials at every level of government on Chicago’s northwest side — from Congress, to the state legislature, the county board, and the city council — organized a postelection debrief town hall that drew over six hundred residents in response to the widespread fears of what a new Trump administration would mean for our communities. We talked about the need to build a broad grassroots coalition committed to fighting for a working-class political agenda and to protect our immigrant communities from a new era of immigration enforcement.

We knew what was coming: heightened racial profiling, terrorizing raids, violent arrests, and militarized responses to protest. So we pledged to use our offices, platforms, and resources to organize community defense networks.

Similar networks across the city are doing the same work: responding to ICE presence in their neighborhoods, protecting immigrant day laborers and street-food vendors, supporting families impacted by deportation, and creating community alert systems for ICE sightings. When immigration agents started operating near our schools, hundreds of volunteers stepped in to accompany families during student drop-off and dismissal. Recently our groups have created whistle kits to provide to community members so that they can alert their neighbors when they spot ICE.

In September, our coalition hosted an emergency town hall about the uptick in ICE activity that drew more than five hundred neighbors. We organized six skill training sessions and recruited volunteers to join rapid response efforts in their neighborhoods. Soon after, a group of elected officials and organizers on the city’s North Side held a similar event to train their own communities. Every week, more residents and local businesses are joining similar efforts across the city to protect each other.

Our organizing has a strong ally in our mayor, Brandon Johnson. At the start of his administration, Mayor Johnson created the Office of Immigrant, Migrant, and Refugee Rights to coordinate citywide support for immigrant and asylum-seeking families and expand access to legal aid, housing, and health care. Recently he signed a series of executive orders to strengthen Chicago’s sanctuary protections and push back against federal immigration overreach and the deployment of the National Guard. One of these executive orders is the new “ICE Free Zone” order, expanding on the “Protecting Chicago” citywide campaign.

The order establishes mechanisms to prevent federal immigration agents from using any city-owned property for their operations, a response to recent incidents where ICE agents used Chicago Public Schools parking lots and other city facilities as staging areas. This action also comes after ICE agents were caught on video recklessly deploying tear gas outside a public school and even temporarily detaining my colleague, Twenty-Sixth Ward alderperson Jessie Fuentes, after she demanded to see a judicial warrant for a detained resident who had been hospitalized following a violent arrest.

Chicago’s resistance builds on a long tradition of solidarity. Chicago is a city where working people have always organized to confront injustice. From the Haymarket martyrs to the Sanctuary movement, from the Black Panthers to the historic 2012 Chicago Teachers Union strike, ordinary people know how to stand up to extraordinary power. The defense networks organized today are part of that same legacy.

The vast majority of people being arrested by ICE have no criminal record. They are workers, parents, and young people who contribute to our city every day. When immigration agents tear families apart, they make communities less safe and more vulnerable. These raids are not about safety or justice; they are about power and control.

That is why our movement is defending the rights and dignity of every person who calls Chicago home. We are defending the principle that no one should live in fear of being disappeared by the state. We are standing up for due process, for families, and for the simple belief that human beings cannot be reduced to their immigration status.

This struggle reaches beyond immigration enforcement. The same agencies and tactics used to raid homes today can and are already being used against labor organizers, journalists, students, and anyone who dares to resist. Authoritarianism spreads when it goes unchallenged.

At a time when people are struggling to survive amid rising costs of living and family separations, the federal government is working to dismantle Medicare, Social Security, and more — all while also imposing harmful austerity on our cities and states. Trump would like us to believe that immigrants, not billionaires and corporate greed, are the problem in America today.

In addition to fighting ICE, working people must demand that our city and state governments tax the rich to maintain and expand the public resources and services our communities need to thrive. We cannot accept the aggressive dismantling of the social safety net to enrich billionaires. Both fights are essential to dismantling authoritarianism.

In Chicago, a coalition of grassroots organizations, labor unions, and city council members is organizing to reinstate a tax on large corporations in the upcoming Chicago city budget that former Mayor Rahm Emanuel eliminated in 2014. Trump’s recent cuts to federal funding are already impacting our city’s Department of Public Health, as well as federal grants for affordable housing and public transportation. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act maintained tax breaks for the ultrarich while also handing federal agencies $170 billion for immigration enforcement, detention, and deportation over the next four years. If we don’t make the wealthiest corporations pay their fair share, Trump’s cuts to our public programs and grants will be devastating.

The groundswell of pushback in Chicago is proof that working people will not tolerate violent and racist authoritarianism in our streets. In communities across the nation, others are standing up too. Rapid response and immigrant defense organizers should help build long-term organizational structures. Our resistance cannot be a flash in the pan. We need to organize people into unions, their local working-class political organizations, and national organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America.

Our task is clear: protect our immigrant neighbors, defend democracy, and build a movement powerful enough to abolish ICE and defeat this billionaire-backed authoritarian agenda.