10.06.25

Terrible things are happening

Margot, Edith, and Anne Frank

Last Tuesday at 1 AM, ICE, Border Patrol, FBI, and ATF agents used flashbang grenades to enter a five-story apartment building in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood. As drones and helicopters flew overhead, the agents rampaged through the building, approaching or breaking down every door, and dragged both adults and children, citizens, legal residents, and undocumented immigrants alike, into a parking lot across from the building. Some were naked. Adults were handcuffed, children zip-tied. They stood outside for hours or were locked in vans. Children were separated from parents.

The agents ransacked the apartments, throwing toys, clothing, and food into the hall, scattering people’s official documents, including proof of legal status.

Homeland Security claimed that the residents were drug traffickers and the neighborhood was “frequented by Tren de Aragua members and their associates.” Thirty-seven people were arrested. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, “DHS gave no evidence to support the assertion, and authorities did not confirm that any of the people arrested were members of the Venezuelan gang.”

A DHS spokesperson later told CNN that the children were taken into custody “for their own safety and to ensure[they] were not being trafficked, abused or otherwise exploited.” Four of them are U.S. citizens with undocumented parents.

“It was heartbreaking to watch,” said a neighbor who witnessed the raid. “Even if you’re not a mother, seeing kids coming out buck naked and taken from their mothers, it was horrible.”

This raid is a direct outcome of the Supreme Court ruling on September 8, in Noem v Perdomo—on the emergency docket—to overturn a temporary restraining order on ICE’s blanket raids in Los Angeles.

In July, U.S. District Court Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong cited a “mountain of evidence” that ICE agents roving throughout LA were indiscriminately arresting and detaining, without reasonable suspicion, brown, Spanish-speaking people on delivery bikes or at Home Depots mustering for day labor, and then denying them access to lawyers. In so doing, Frimpong ruled, Homeland Security was violating the Fourth Amendment protecting people from search and seizure without probable cause, and the Fifth, guaranteeing due process.

After the ruling, Noem called Judge Frimpong an “idiot” (she also called her “he”) and pledged that “none of our operations are going to change.”

Another court upheld the ruling. But the operations did not change.

Over Labor Day weekend, ICE targeted 300 Guatemalan children for deportation, rounded up 76 of them from their caregivers’ homes in the middle of the night, and put them on planes to send back to their home country. Just hours before takeoff, a federal judge intervened to stop the flight.

The Trump administration appealed the LA ruling to the Supreme Court, which sided with it. The stay, the majority said, had to be lifted because it was preventing ICE from doing its job.

Justice Sotomayor, joined by Kagan and Brown-Jackson, wrote yet another searing dissent as her conservative colleagues shred the Constitution” “The government . . .

has all but declared that all Latinos, U. S. citizens or not, who work low wage jobs are fair game to be seized at any time, taken away from work, and held until they provide proof of their legal status to the agents’ satisfaction.

Yesterday, the Intercept reported that Homeland Security is tracking down unaccompanied minor immigrants as young as 14 and offering them $2,500 to waive their rights and agree to be deported. Immigration advocates had earlier learned that the government was considering lowering the age to 10. ICE would not tell the Intercept whether the children were threatened with detention if they did not comply.

Most of these kids don’t have lawyers. In March, the Trump regime cut a federal program providing legal representation for children who arrive in the U.S. without their families. The program had supported more than 26,000 children.

The neighbor who witnessed the Chicago raid last week was shaken and disgusted. “One of [the agents] literally laughed,” she recounted. “He said, ‘Fuck them kids.’”

Looking down from her family’s hideout in Amsterdam in February 1943, Anne Frank wrote in her diary:

Terrible things are happening outside. At any time of night and day, poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. . . . Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared. Women return from shopping to find their houses sealed, their families gone.

Eighteen months later, the same thing happened to Anne and her family.