For nearly three weeks, Chicago and the surrounding suburbs have been invaded by Donald Trump’s ICE-Gestapo. Every day, these anonymous, masked thugs terrorize whole neighborhoods, rolling up on fathers, mothers, and friends, to kidnap people going about their daily lives, making a mockery of due process. Hundreds of people have been snatched off the street and held in wretched conditions in the Broadview ICE facility, and on September 12th, the ICE pigs murdered Silvierio Villegas-Gonzalez, a 38-year-old father. 

People have heroically responded to this cruel onslaught: neighborhood rapid response teams have been set up to monitor ICE activities and inform people of their rights (which of course, the ICE-Gestapo routinely ignores). The Broadview ICE facility has been the target of repeated protests, with activists, anarchists, religious leaders, regular people (and, yes, a few politicians and grifters looking for photoshoots) coming out in waves attempting to disrupt the kidnappings. These brave protesters have stood up against tear gas, pepper spray, and rubber bullets, faced arrests, and one has even been hit by a car. 

Meanwhile, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker have been denouncing Trump and taking a grotesque media victory lap for supposedly preventing Trump from backing up the ICE-Gestapo with the deployment of the National Guard. Whatever credit is due to Johnson and Pritzker, the National Guard has not been deployed to Chicago A, because of a September federal court ruling that the LA deployment was illegal, and B, because the ICE-Gestapo is doing a pretty fucking good job on their own carrying out a full-throated fascist assault on immigrants. Johnson and Pritzker’s claims of victory are covering up the fact that the State of Illinois and the City of Chicago are functionally allowing the ICE invasion to take place. 

Why is the Broadview facility allowed to operate in the State of Illinois in the first place? What is stopping Pritzker from deploying state police or the National Guard to actually shut down that facility and arrest the federal agents who are routinely violating people’s rights? For that matter, what is stopping Pritzker from bulldozing the facility in the middle of the night in the old Daley style? 

While Brandon Johnson bloviates to his diminishing number of supporters about sanctuary cities and the right to protest, what has he actually done to use the resources of the City to defend the large immigrant population? Why isn’t the CPD being deployed to Latino neighborhoods and Home Depot’s to actually impede the illegal ICE kidnappings? Hell, why aren’t the resources of the City’s Law Department being used to defend immigrants? Why can’t, for example, immigrants call 311 when they encounter ICE and be put in touch with an actual lawyer? We know, for a fact, that the City Law Department had endless time and resources to prosecute Behind Enemy Lines and other anti-genocide protesters arrested during the DNC. Why doesn’t the City have that same energy to materially act against the ICE-Gestapo? 

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The answer is, of course, that Brandon Johnson and J.B. Pritzker fundamentally believe in, work for, and uphold the same system that Donald Trump serves. That’s why they actively limit their ‘resistance’ to mainly empty and hollow declarations, and work overtime to keep protests within system-friendly confines, and why they won’t risk taking actions that would materially disrupt the mass-deportation machine, but call into question the legitimacy of the Imperialist system. 

As Behind Enemy Lines has repeatedly said: The crisis is not the people fleeing the horrors of US imperialism. The crisis is US imperialism! We welcome immigrants, migrants, and refugees because we don’t respect the borders of this country, which were built through conquest and theft, and because we stand with the people of the world, not the rulers of this country. 

Smash the mass deportation machine!