After weeks of preparation by Chicago’s immigrant communities — and a weekend of fear spurred by multiple reports that the city would be the site of the first major deportation raids of the new Trump administration — there were no reports of immigration enforcement on Tuesday.
President Donald Trump has promised what he calls the largest domestic deportation operation in American history, and Chicago has long been in the administration’s sights. Rapid responders patrolling the streets, looking for signs of raids or arrests, said they saw no activity but warned that the threat of deportations continues. They said the local community should remain alert.
“I woke up at 6, [thinking] it’s too late. We were told that at 5 o’clock, there could be [immigration] agents stopping people on their way to work,” said Juliet de Jesus Alejandre, executive director of Palenque, LSNA, an organization that empowers Black, brown, Indigenous and immigrant residents on Chicago’s Northwest Side.
Once de Jesus Alejandre noticed that, aside from a few false alarms and requests for more flyers with information about people’s rights, there were no deportations, she felt relieved that they had more time to educate people.
“People are on high alert,” de Jesus Alejandre said. “I am so grateful because even with those false reports, we’re able to see just how organized our neighbors are being.”
The Trump administration initially said it planned to deploy immigration enforcement agents in Chicago on Trump’s first full day in office, saying they’d target immigrants with deportation orders and criminal records.
But, by late in the weekend, Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan signaled the administration might reconsider after the agency’s plans were leaked to multiple outlets.
Still, city and state officials said the threat is real.
Over the weekend, all levels of government urged calm amid reports of Chicago being the target of sweeping immigration raids. Community organizations, advocates and city council members held “Know Your Rights” training sessions online and in person. They also created a deportation defense infrastructure that included rapid response teams at the neighborhood level.
On Tuesday, Ill. Gov. JB Pritzker said his administration has “heard” that the Trump White House is “targeting as many as 2,000 people” for deportation “in the city of Chicago alone.” But said federal officials had not communicated with his office.
Also on Tuesday morning, the parking lot of a Home Depot in suburban Cicero that is typically bustling with day laborers not authorized to work in the U.S. was unusually slow. Some advocates believe the location could be a target of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, or ICE, agents. A combination of the cold and the deportation threats had all but emptied out the area where workers usually stand.
Two men stood shivering from the cold across the home improvement store. They said they were aware of the deportation threat but needed the work anyway. They each had been given flyers with information about their legal rights and said they were instructed to remain silent if ICE agents approached them.
“I had work scheduled already, but they canceled on me, so I had to come here,” said one man in Spanish.
Rumors swirled online about sightings of federal immigration agents in the Chicago area, but groups like the Chicago-based Organized Communities Against Deportations reported that they did not have any information about ICE arrests as of Tuesday.
There were also rumors of immigration agents in suburban Elgin, where Latinos make up about 48% of the city’s population, but city officials said Tuesday afternoon that they had no corroborating information about the reports and its police department had not received any related calls for service.
ICE’s Chicago field office did not comment on if any arrests had been made since Trump was sworn into office.
Other areas around the city that were believed to be potential targets remained quiet, including three city-run shelters where some newly arrived asylum seekers have been living. A few adults and children could be seen walking in and out of the shelter located in Hyde Park.
The immigration court downtown was closed Tuesday because of subzero temperatures, with a steady stream of people still arriving at the building on East Monroe turned away by building security. While the courts were shut down, the offices of the U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services remained open inside a shared annex building on South Clark Street.
Immigration lawyer Magdalena Grobelski waited for a client who was due for a naturalization hearing, a welcome respite after a morning spent fielding calls from anxious clients — some 40 before 8:30 a.m.
“They want to know if they should go to work. I had clients tell me they weren’t going in this week. They wanted to know what to do, what are their rights if they are approached [by ICE officers],” said Grobelski, who said she told her clients to try to carry on with their normal lives. “I wouldn’t want them to be scared. Maybe something will happen, but there is definitely a psychological effect I worry about.”
In an interview with WBEZ’s Reset on Tuesday, Mary Meg McCarthy, executive director of the Chicago-based National Immigrant Justice Center, called Trump’s executive orders on immigration “heartbreaking” and “horrific.” She said they’d be closely monitoring immigration enforcement efforts in Chicago.
“I have no idea what they’re thinking operation-wise, but I know that you can’t just go to the Home Depot and arrest everyone in the parking lot based on the color of their skin or their accent. That is illegal,” McCarthy said.
Mawa Iqbal and Mohammad Samra contributed reporting to this story.
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