It’s a story repeating itself: Border Patrol agents flooding immigrant neighborhoods, showing dramatic force, storming Home Depot parking lots and preying on people at courthouses.
Those arrests erupted in Chicago. Then they were 750 miles away in Charlotte, North Carolina. And they will keep roving across the country.
But no matter where they go, Chicagoans will try to stop them.
As President Donald Trump’s ramped-up Border Patrol action hits city after city, Chicago’s immigration-focused community organizers are following. They aim to pass on what they learned to foster pushback in Operation Midway Blitz.
The resistance effort, which was backed by top elected officials in Illinois, provides a blueprint for immigration activists nationwide: lawsuits, whistles, cellphone cameras and more.
Chicago’s immigration advocacy groups, which played an integral role organizing on-the-ground rapid responders, are now sharing their information nationwide.
Veronica Castro, deputy director at the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, said she has been in at least half a dozen calls with organizations, mutual aid groups and government entities outside of Chicago, including Boston and North Carolina on best ways to prepare for immigration enforcement.
“We definitely want to share information with other folks,” she said. Earlier in the year, Castro and her team reached out to Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., to prepare for the immigration crackdown in Chicago and is now circling back to them to “compare notes.”
Casa Central, a Hispanic social services agency in Chicago, is planning a conference call with 304 invited affiliates of Unidos US to discuss rapid response tactics and insights from immigration enforcement in Chicago, according to Unidos’ director of immigrant integration, Laura Vázquez.
The call will feature information on the long-lasting humanitarian impact of what happens to family members after some of them, often the primary income earners, are detained, said Vázquez.
“There is tremendous value in bringing people together so organizations can learn lessons and effective tactics,” said Vázquez, who noted interest went beyond North Carolina, from New Orleans to New York City, where threats of similar immigration operations loom.
The federal action centered in Charlotte last week, where Trump’s Border Patrol chief, Gregory Bovino, led a weeklong arrest spree that quickly started after agents left Chicago.
Pooja Ravindran, who lived for a decade in North Carolina and is now chief of staff for Chicago City Council’s Committee on Immigrant and Refugee Rights, once again couldn’t look away as the arrests hushed cherished hometown bakeries, coffee shops and an elementary school in Charlotte.
Ravindran has met online around 10 times with groups in Charlotte to present tactics learned organizing alongside Ald. Andre Vásquez, the committee’s chair.
“I can’t be at all places at once, I can’t be in all of the areas where I call home to prep everyone,” Ravindran said. “To see the resistance, but also the devastation, there is just a whirlwind of emotions.”
Earlier this week, Protect Rogers Park community organizer Gabe González said he planned to travel to Charlotte, where he was set to speak with hundreds to try to pass the information baton.
“We learned from Los Angeles and D.C. and it’s our turn to share what we learned with the cities facing it now,” said González, co-founder of Protect Rogers Park.
Just as González was preparing to discuss safe resistance techniques with the North Carolina crowd, Border Patrol reportedly ended its operations in Charlotte dubbed “Charlotte’s Web.” But González is skeptical that the actions will truly end.
“Today it’s in Charlotte, tomorrow it might be in New Orleans, and in March it might be back in Chicago,” said González, who is also in touch with community organizers in New Orleans and Memphis, Tennessee.
Chicago’s top elected leaders have gotten involved too, from the City Hall to Springfield.
Gov. JB Pritzker spoke to North Carolina’s Gov. Josh Stein about dealing with masked federal agents, tear gas deployment and documenting activity when rights were being violated, his office said in a statement.
The governor has stayed in touch with California, Oregon and other states in an effort to “push back against these authoritarian power grabs and curb normalizing the militarization of American communities,” the statement said.
On Friday, Beatriz Ponce de León, Chicago’s deputy mayor for immigrant, migrant and refugee rights, met with leaders in St. Paul, Minnesota, where federal agents arrested over a dozen people Tuesday at a manufacturing plant.
Ponce de León shared strategies Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration has used to push back, like lawsuits, executive orders and close collaboration with community groups.
“Chicago clearly is front and center in the response to these militarized immigration tactics,” she said. “We are all in this together … Why would we not share what we learned?”
When other cities reach out, Ponce de León often offers advice she got from people in Washington, D.C.: “This is a moment to be very clear and bold and not to shrink away.”
The quick response from Charlotte community groups to respond to and document arrests occurred in part because of what people there learned from Chicago, she said. And someday, the connections made by City Hall now could shape its own response if federal agents return en masse.
“As the federal actions evolve, we all have to evolve and be as prepared as possible to maintain and to protect the things that are important to us and to our cities,” she said.
At the online meetings Ravindran helps organize, other cities are getting everything from advice on how to fight for more legal protection funds in budgets to tweakable scheduling documents for volunteer patrols outside schools.
“People were just so grateful that they didn’t have to think about protocol,” Ravindran said. “This documentation has created the opportunity for them to spend more time doing the actual recruitment of folks.”
It was an emotional homecoming for Ravindran, who first engaged in community organizing as a University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill student and then continued that work in Charlotte.
But the incremental progress does not erase what Ravindran has witnessed in one home, then another.
“It’s really hard to see, the detentions in your community, over and over again.”
Chicago Tribune’s Olivia Olander contributed.
Laura Turbay, Jake Sheridan
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