Since September 2025, United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have been stationed in Chicago, Illinois kidnapping immigrants and terrorizing the population at large. Their immediate goal is to capture enough people to meet Donald Trump’s target deportation numbers; beyond that, they aim to project strength, showing that they can wreak havoc in a “sanctuary city” with impunity. Arguably, the idea is to normalize the use of federal forces against the civilian population in order to erode our capacity for collective solidarity, paving the way for autocracy. Here, we focus on one of the strategies that people have employed to resist them.

We have seen at least three different complementary strategies emerge in Chicago in response to the ICE attacks. Some have gathered at the ICE holding facility in Broadview, a suburb twelve miles west of downtown Chicago, attempting to block the facility or at least to tie ICE agents down in conflicts around this bottleneck in their infrastructure. Others have set up rapid response networks in order to mobilize communities throughout the Chicago area to respond to ICE sightings and raids. Still others have set up continuous occupations at Home Depots and other locations, sharing information with people from targeted demographics and seeking to build ties within and between communities in the face of the assault on a deeper basis than could be possible through Signal threads alone.

Several comrades who have participated in the ongoing protests at the Broadview facility composed the following reflections for the benefit of those who are now responding to ICE assaults in North Carolina and beyond. Though we are all actively involved in rapid response networks, we chose to concentrate most of our energies on the protests in Broadview. We will recount our experiences in greater detail elsewhere; for now, we will focus on what we have learned so far, especially the things that we wish we had known at the beginning.

As of now, it remains difficult to assess the success of the Broadview protests, the rapid response networks, or the Home Depot occupations. ICE and United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has succeeded in arresting and deporting over 3000 people—roughly half a percent of the nearly 500,000 undocumented people living in Illinois. Measured against their stated goals, this represents a failure. People from a wide range of neighborhoods have engaged in principled resistance, blowing whistles, following ICE vehicles, reporting every helicopter and suspicious vehicle sighting, and doing everything in their power to prevent ICE agents from kidnapping their friends and neighbors. All of that activity is inspiring. Whatever our enemies might say, people in this city took enormous risks to protect their neighbors from arbitrary arrest for the simple reason that they identify with those that the current administration is trying to portray as foreign and dangerous.

Nonetheless, one in every 200 undocumented people has been kidnapped and disappeared by an overtly fascist government, and ICE intends to stay in Chicago to continue this campaign of ethnic cleansing. ICE has reportedly purchased a much larger building immediately adjacent to the Broadview facility and will likely be devoting more resources to turning Chicago from a “sanctuary city” to a hunting ground for anyone who looks “like an undocumented person.” From this point of view, our efforts thus far have been inadequate. It will require considerably more effort, coordination, commitment, and intensity to succeed in our goal of driving ICE out of Chicago and ultimately abolishing them. This is no small task, given that we are up against the most powerful government in the world.

We offer the following reflections on our experience in anticipation of a longer chronology and analysis.

The processing center in Broadview holds roughly 150 prisoners at any given time; it serves as a hub for ICE activity across the Midwest. Higher-capacity ICE detention centers are illegal in Illinois, making the location a logistical chokepoint in the transportation of prisoners. As federal resources for this center have ballooned to satisfy far-right politicians’ desire for xenophobic violence, the Broadview location has become increasingly important as a critical piece of infrastructure.

When protest activity at Broadview began, small groups initially tended towards self-sacrificial, spectacular acts—typically sitting down in front of ICE vans leaving the processing center, only to be dragged away by the Broadview Police Department. As reports and footage from each action spread and faith in the effectiveness of nonviolent resistance waned, the mobilizations changed form: the primary objective of action shifted from sacrifice to resistance. ICE began brutalizing and detaining protesters at will, and attempts to block the vans failed; in response, early morning crowds traded N-95 masks for black bloc gear and opted to follow agents instead of just sitting down.

-ICE Out of Illinois, ICE Out of Everywhere

Why Broadview?

The first and most obvious response to ICE attacks is to form rapid response networks. Comrades should join these and engage with them wholeheartedly. At the same time, because ICE will arrest whomever they please whenever they please, rapid response networks and neighborhood hubs alone are inadequate. The effectiveness of rapid response networks in neighborhoods depends largely on their ability to be everywhere. Tremendous numbers and organizational capacity are required, and this may not be possible in locations where there are neither established mutual aid networks nor strong communities connected on an ethnic and social basis.

Because ICE can choose the time and place of their attacks, we will almost always be a step behind if we focus solely on reacting to them, no matter how dense our networks are. One solution to this problem would be to identify tactics that we can engage in proactively after ICE strikes, regardless of whether rapid response networks react in time. That would require identifying stationary secondary targets, or at the minimum, gathering after the fact at the location of kidnappings, using the model demonstrated by the movement against racist police violence. A third option is to identify strategic locations that ICE continuously depends on and exerting pressure there.

A friend analogized rapid response tactics to intervening at the point of consumption. Our wager was that, by engaging at the point of production—the detention facilities and hotels that ICE agents depend on—we could maximize the effectiveness of our numbers. When ICE agents encounter resistance in the streets, they can simply go elsewhere, and they often do. But their holding facilities represent what business executives call “fixed assets,” investments that can’t easily be transferred, so obstructing these can create a bottleneck.

While we don’t have precise data, observers reported that the protests at Broadview did diminish ICE activity in the neighborhoods. The more that federal agents have to deal with at their home base, the less they can do out in the city.

The Broadview facility is approximately 45 minutes away from downtown Chicago by car; it takes over an hour to reach it by train. This means that the first challenge to solve is logistical: how do you get people out of the city and to the facility? This remains a tremendous obstacle today.

But that was not the most serious challenge.

Between ICE and the Democrats

Our first engagements with ICE were terrifying. They do not behave like normal law enforcement, but like soldiers. They wear full combat fatigues, are comfortable tear-gassing and pepper-balling anyone who defies them, make virtually no distinction between “violent” and “nonviolent” protesters, and generally do not modulate their aggression according to circumstances. Yet, as became clear later on, their control of the streets was fragile, at least until Democratic politicians reinforced them with state and local police. As far as we can tell, there were never more than 300 ICE officers in Illinois at any point over the past three months. If they had been forced to defend the Broadview facility by themselves, without assistance, they would likely have behaved in such a way as to intensify local anger, potentially leading to a outburst of resistance of the sort we saw in 2020.

There was a window of opportunity at the beginning of the ICE operations in Chicago when they were not yet well oriented in the physical and political terrain, before local and state police reinforced them. If we had acted more boldly and ambitiously at the Broadview facility during that time, we might have been able to precipitate a much more interesting and generative situation, drawing in a wider range of people with more combative energy.

After a particularly rowdy demo on September 26, it became clear that ICE could not maintain the perimeter around the Broadivew facility without constantly tear-gassing protesters—a tactic that annoyed neighbors and local community members and generally created the impression that local politicians had lost control of their territory. In response, Illinois governor Jay Robert “JB” Pritzker and Broadview mayor Katrina Thompson sent in state and local police to secure the area.

We place so much emphasis in this analysis on the Democrats and Illinois State Police because their arrival at Broadview was clearly intended to address the danger represented by the evolving intelligence of the crowds. It was not surprising that, in response to the violence that ICE agents employed in the first days of the conflicts, some people defaulted to self-sacrifical behavior, seeking only to emphasize their moral difference from ICE rather than looking for ways to escalate and expand the conflict. But building strong bonds of trust with people on the ground and engaging with each other directly across ideological differences has made a lot of things possible that did not feel possible before.

At the beginning of October, our minimum objectives were to overcome the trap of the self-sacrificial approach, to break out of the free speach zones and state-imposed barriers, and bridge the gulf between the “front liners” and the rest of the protesters in order to be able to directly engage the police. It was precisely this growing confidence, camraderie, and tactical intelligence that forced the politicians to bring local and state police forces to bear on the situation.

The Illinois State Police in particular has played a brutal role in the repression of protests around the Broadview ICE facility, beating and severely injuring a number of entirely non-violent protesters and several members of the clergy on a regular basis for weeks. The day before Pritzker stood up in front of 300,000 No Kings demonstrators to thunder against the brutality and illegitimacy of ICE’s presence in Chicago, his state police beat up and arrested 11 people to defend the Broadiview facility; police attacks at the facility resumed just a few hours after his speech. It is essential not to let Democrats get away with such contradictory positions, to force their hand wherever their rhetoric deviates from reality.

How can autonomists exert leverage on Democratic Party politics without legitimizing or strengthening the Democratic Party itself? How can we take advantage of the fault lines between the Democrats and the Republicans, which threaten at any moment to give rise to a larger crisis of governance, in order to divide the political class and weaken their capacity to coordinate repression? One strategy could be to build relationships with institutional left organizations, like unions or other advocacy groups that have already developed the necessary resources, relationships, and infrastructure to pressure Democratic politicians.

As a result of Republicans efforts to reverse the “long march through the institutions,” many of the the NGOs and left institutions that the Democratic Party depends on are in crisis. While Trump’s Department of Justice attacks their capacity to raise money legally, the younger volunteers and radicals they seek to recruit or employ are turning towards more autonomous milieus and tactics. Many people inside these institutions are aware of this and have begun to seek out input from or to build relationships with autonomous social movements, especially after witnessing the courage and success of militant efforts during the George Floyd Uprising and the Stop Cop City movement. This could present a crucial opening for anarchists to work with the rank-and-file membership of these groups, at least for now, drawing them away from supporting politicians like Pritzker towards more autonomous efforts like direct action confronting ICE.

If politicians like Pritzker and Katrina Thompson can declare their opposition to Trump on television and in the media while arranging for their underlings to brutalize even the most peaceful protests against ICE, if they can declare their support for undocumented people while protecting the very shock troops that are carrying deportations without paying any political price, there will be no limit to how fast and how far autocracy can proceed. There are challenges and risks in attempting to work with powerful institutions that do not necessarily have incentives to be reliable allies to autonomous movements. But it is at least as dangerous to forgo the opportunity to work with more people at a time when radical movements must expand or perish.

Building Ties

The two preexisting organizational forces that had the greatest impact in the Broadview protests were, first, autonomous networks—as virtually everyone defaulted to the leaderless, horizontal structures that became popular through struggles between 2010 and 2020—and, second, clergy. The notorious footage of Pastor David Black being shot in the face after praying in front of the ICE facility went viral and led to several corporate media interviews. Clergy-driven demonstrations and other protests have taken place consistently at the Broadview facility every Friday morning.

Historically speaking, it has been difficult for these two tendencies to work together, as their tactical sensibilities and strategies for resisting repression differ considerably. Autonomists generally operate with opacity and maintain their capacity to intervene by avoiding being individuated, whereas clergy require recognition as clergy in order to preserve the perceived legitimacy that they bring to bear via protest. When ICE shot Pastor Black in the head with non-lethal rounds at point-blank range, this created a potential opening for autonomous activity—but only if autonomous organizers demonstrated the patience and tact necessary to reach across these tactical and political differences to establish real relationships of trust and familiarity. This is not always easy, but it is often necessary.

We caught a glimpse of what it could look like to fulfill this potential on November 1, when a playful demonstration managed to take the streets and advance on the police lines using reinforced banners. Although the police quickly seized the banners, the tactic was effective: it led to far fewer injuries than previous efforts and only one arrest, and the police had to call in quite a few reinforcements to secure their position. This was the first time that many of the protesters had ever used a reinforced banner. It convinced the clergy to train two weeks later on how to resist a police line, something that had been unimaginable just a month prior.

Other Ways Forward

In order to address the challenges posed by the distance of the Broadview facility from downtown Chicago, we could have undertaken a more concerted effort to mobilize from within rapid response networks to shuttle people. Immediately building closer relationships with unions and other institutionalized leftist groups might also have helped.

While practically all of the protesters at Broadview were also active in various rapid response networks, these relationships nonetheless felt underdeveloped over the last few months. It is as important to build relationships across space as across political difference. Ideally, participants in the rapid response networks and the various facility protests and occupations should understand one another as participants in a single larger effort and strategize accordingly. If we had, we might have proved more effective on all fronts.

We could also have organized to provide more concrete points of entry into the actions at Broadview. One of the things that anti-ICE demonstrators in Chicago tried to do to cross the gulf between autonomous organizing and mass unrest was to participate in the October No Kings protest, fielding a small black bloc to assert a radical presence. It might have been more effective to try to recruit people in the march to participate in autonomous spaces and tactics, mobilizing them to actions that could give them an experience of immediate power and efficacy. Handing out a flyer promoting a demonstration at which liberals link arms with strangers to block a driveway could be a better use of time than marching in symbolic black blocs that neither engage in open conflict with the authorities nor bridge the divides that separate radicals from everyone else. Instead of asserting fixed political identity as something that distinguishes us from everyone else, let’s try to transform the politics of those who have yet to share the streets with us.

ICE is already reportedly moving on from North Carolina to New Orleans and other targets. This drives home that when we engage in frantic activity in response to a crisis, we should not forget that the most important thing is to build long-term connections and momentum that will remain after the urgency of the moment has passed. If every time that ICE strikes, they leave each community more mobilized, interconnected, and radicalized than before, we can use their efforts to eventually become capable of defeating them.