The ICE Raid that Wasn't
Or: why the Sensitive Locations Memo Mattered
There’s so much to say about immigration from the last week and a half. From the (attempted) abolition of birthright citizenship, to the ending of TPS programs that kept people from unstable countries safe from deportation, to the increased presence of ICE in our streets and neighborhoods. And we’ll get to all that, if not now, then in future issues of the Injustice Report. But for now, I want to start with a hot minute of hometown pride.
During an interview on CNN last week, Tom Homan, holder of the made-up position of “Border Czar,” complained that ICE enforcement efforts had been hampered in Chicago.
“They’ve been educated how to defy ICE, on how to hide from ICE. They call it ‘Know Your Rights.’ I call it how to escape from ICE,” he whined.
As someone who has literally lost her voice giving innumerable Know Your Rights presentations and charlas in the Chicago area, I’ll take my own smug little thimbleful of credit on this one. I moved to Chicago in 2019, fresh out of divinity school, and started working at the National Immigrant Justice Center, doing communications work. From the get-go, it was incredibly obvious that Chicago had deep, established systems of care for immigrants, and that activists in the area kept fighting for the local government to do even better. From neighborhood-by-neighborhood community organizations and alliances to commitments at the state and city levels to make life easier for undocumented folks, Chicago felt like a beautiful, supportive place in which to become engaged in the immigration world, despite the extinction gasps of the previous Trump administration and the disappointments of the early Biden administration. This was a city and a people who looked out for their own.
Of course, that’s what’s made Chicago a target. We were one of the small handful of cities that Texas Governor Greg Abbott chose to bus migrants to, an occasion we sort-of-rose-to with sort-of-grace, and earlier this year, Homan promised ICE raids would start here in Chicago.
And here we are, about a week into the widely-advertised ICE raids taking place here and across the country. For all of Homan’s bellyaching, ICE has been arresting around 700-1000 people per day since the inauguration, many during “enhanced enforcement activities” in Chicago. Each one of those people is someone with a life, with a family, with people who are counting on them, whether they’re coworkers or children or parents or a spouse. Many of them have criminal convictions, many others likely do not, were just unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and got caught up. My smugness evaporates at all these people who were separated from their lives and livelihoods not because they were not strong or educated enough but because the state has too much power.
But I think, this week, I want to talk about the Chicago ICE raid that wasn’t.
On January 24th, my favorite local news outlet, Block Club Chicago, posted an article reporting that Chicago Public School officials said they had turned away ICE agents at an elementary school in Back of the Yards, a predominantly Latine neighborhood in the southside of Chicago. This was the first news I had seen of ICE presence in the city, and it felt significant that it had happened at a local elementary school.
Later on, Secret Service officials clarified that it had been their branch of the Department of Homeland Security that had stopped by the elementary school, looking to speak to an eleven-year-old who had posted an anti-Trump video in the wake of the Tik Tok ban. School officials had seen the DHS business cards, and amid anxieties of immigration enforcement in the neighborhood, drawn the wrong conclusions.
I can’t decide if it's worse or better that federal agents showed up at an elementary school to try to investigate a pre-teen for their online activity rather than to arrest undocumented students, teachers or staff, but I want to talk about why I believed this story—why I felt that it was possible that after years of having them off-limits, ICE agents had felt empowered to go into an elementary school.
The Sensitive Locations Memo was published in 2011, and forbade ICE from conducting arrests in schools, hospitals, or places of worship, and during demonstrations. I think it's impossible to understand, for those of us who are able to move through the world more freely, how much the Sensitive Locations Memo made public life available to undocumented people—children could go to school, even college, without their parents fearing that they would be detained, families could worship together, undocumented people could speak out for their rights during protests, people could seek medical care.
And two weeks ago, the memo was rescinded, and people started realizing, bit by bit, what it meant to lose these protections. A church in Chicago’s oldest Mexican neighborhood moved their Spanish-language services online—one that had previously housed immigration activists as part of the Sanctuary movement. I was for some reason particularly moved by Jen Hamilton, a TikTok L&D nurse, posting a video about how she was ready to go to jail for protecting her patients. And, of course, administrators at a Chicago public school believed that they lived in a world where ICE might come knocking on the door to arrest children between the ages of 5 and 11.
The rescission of this memo is an absolute blow to our neighborhoods, our communities, our families. It makes it so that people will fear to leave their houses, narrows the scope of their safe worlds to four walls. But I don’t want to leave it there.
We know, from Tom Homan, that Know Your Rights presentations work—knowing your rights keeps you safe. But knowing, and understanding our neighbors’ rights makes us better, more caring neighbors to them—better able to protect them. Know what to do when you’re out and about and encounter ICE arresting someone, make sure your workplace has an ICE safety plan, learn about how to safely and usefully film an ICE arrest, figure out what the ICE sighting hotline in your area is—and try not to share unconfirmed sightings of ICE on social media. Learn about the ways ICE agents are able to lie in order to gain access to spaces, and be cautious in who you let into your apartment buildings. Learn the difference between administrative and judicial warrants, and call your leaders if it looks like your state, city or county is about to enter a 287(g) agreement that allows ICE and local police to collaborate and detain people. Figure out who your neighbors are, become indispensable to one another—cook dinner, shovel sidewalks, watch kids. Go out of your way for the people who surround you. Each little step makes it easier to take the next one.
While this administration is doing its utmost to make public spaces feel unwelcome to undocumented people, we can do everything we can to make our neighborhoods safe places, despite the oncoming storm.
Alejandra Oliva is an essayist, embroiderer and translator. Her writing has been included in Best American Travel Writing 2020, and was honored with an Aspen Summer Words Emerging Writers Fellowship. Her book, Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith and Migration, was published by Astra House, and received a Whiting Nonfiction Grant. She was the Yale Whitney Humanities Center Franke Visiting Fellow in Spring 2022. You can find her newsletter here.