“Men go through life telling themselves a moment must come when they will show what they’re made of. And the moment comes, and they do show. And they spend the rest of their days explaining that was neither the moment nor the true self.” – Shirley Hazzard, ‘The Transit of Venus’
For the record, I haven’t read that book, or even heard of Shirley Hazzard. That quote came across my Bluesky feed thanks to Maria Farrell, another writer I’ve never heard of. Now I have two new writers to check out! This is literally why I am on social media.
For the sake of letting you know that I am not trend-chasing, I started drafting this column two weeks ago. Then, I figured Behind With Knife needed a post-mortem1. Then, everyone started writing “what it feels like in Chicago right now” pieces. This is great! Kelly Hayes’ piece is required reading, of course. Tonia Hill’s reflection on getting teargassed in The Triibe is notable for how, as I’m reading it, I can easily picture the scene, and am unsurprised by average Chicagoans stepping in to help her. Dan Sinker’s piece on his blog is great. Of course, here’s Sarah Lazare with the original “people in Chicago are running TOWARDS ICE” tweet. It is wonderful, how many people are out in the streets, chasing those out-of-shape racists off with whistles, getting guns pointed in their faces for the crime of trying to protect their neighbors (or, in some cases, going to daycare). Everyone should be documenting how it feels in Chicago right now, because how it feels is both awful and wonderful. Every abduction is a heartbreak. Everyone’s tense and exhausted. People who are targets are staying home—with others stepping up to bring them groceries or walk their kids to school. The first patrol group I joined guards a church that has multiple Spanish-language masses during the week, because even though it’s the paramilitary wing of a racist, Christian theocratic government, ICE won’t let you pray in peace if you’re not white.
Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. Point is, it’s good to be documenting this stuff for later. I do not personally believe any ICE agent will ever face consequences—if there are free and fair and honest elections in this country ever again, the past teaches us that we’ll get some milquetoast centrist who pardons Trump in the name of national healing and then pretends the ICE thing never happened while setting records for deportations in an effort to appease the GOP. Let it be known, though, that ICE agents and their commanders and the people in government who ordered this deserve Nuremberg-style trials at minimum.
Once again, I’m getting ahead of myself. I want to write a “how it feels in Chicago” column. What do I have that those others don’t? Well, no one else who’s written one used to work for Cracked.com, to my knowledge. Here are 6 Things You Learn Fighting ICE:
It’s Exhausting, But Nothing Compares To What The Victims Are Going Through
The ICE facility at Broadview is a torture facility. There’s no other way to put it, “concentration camp” might be too nice. The water tastes like sewer, there isn’t enough bedding, there’s one bathroom and the lines last all day but they beat you if you wet yourself. That’s just at the facility. Separating families is also torture. Killing a man in his car after he dropped his kids off at school is torture. Dragging a daycare teacher out of her daycare, right after most of the kids have been dropped off, is torturing a lot of people at once. What’s happening to Kilmar Abrego Garcia is basically Franz Kafka’s The Trial. There is no higher decency to appeal to, here. Stephen Miller and Greg Bovino and the slobbering, Kool-Aid-stained, out-of-shape, divorced losers that make up ICE’s ground troops simply believe that people with brown skin should suffer as a matter of course. They are bad, evil people, and we live in the same country as them.
It’s bullshit, of course. Borders are stupid and people should have freedom of movement. Moreover, I know that it is the foundation and history of the United States of America to depend on racist violence towards a racial undercaste, but it’s time for that to fucking stop. We goddamn well ought to know better by now. This passively indoctrinated country loves to get all “hell yeah we beat the Nazis” but the Nazism has been right here the whole time. What we love doing is watching Fox News or Sicario or Narcos or Breaking Bad and getting all worked up about cartels, then next thing you know, real people just trying to live their lives are getting thrown in vans by masked goons. Imagine being kidnapped while at your job and being told that your kidnappers are actually the most heroic defenders that liberty has ever known. Knowing that that is what happens to someone when you couldn’t get to the scene with your whistle in time—or worse, when you’re there and ICE is unfazed by whistles or questions about whether their mothers would be proud of them or if their wife lets them see the kids on weekends and takes whomever they want anyway—that’s painful.
You Still Have To Worry About Rent
I guess I didn’t think about this one until a recent Behind The Bastards, when Robert Evans brought it up. Robert is someone I generally think of as prepared for these things, given both the subject matter of Cool Zone Media shows and his experience as a war correspondent. It makes me feel less alone that someone I look to for information can still be shellshocked by pedestrian things.
A big clarifier for “you always have to worry about rent” for me, amazingly, is something pretty bourgeoisie: having a mortgage and becoming a parent. Yes, I’m lucky enough to be a vanishing species, the Millennial Homeowner2. When you buy a house, you sign a mortgage, which is basically a document the size of a Bible that says “you will give us this exact amount of money every month for the next 30 years or we will take your house, because it’s not actually yours until then.” When you have a child (especially if both sets of that child’s grandparents live in different states), you are handed a helpless individual3 who needs your absolute devoted care and attention for a legal 18 years and a realistic, idk, 30? 40? Point is, these are pretty immutable responsibilities. And despite being homeowners, it’s not like our family is doing caviar bumps at the combination church and tech retreat. To put it delicately, we can’t afford any hiccups to our carefully constructed lives. Mallory works full time and I freelance and the child is taken to school every morning and picked up in the afternoon and neither of us can get arrested, for his sake.
I’m Bringing Social Anxiety To The Patrol Chat
Despite the previous sentence, the first time I heard of ICE in West Ridge4 and Rogers Park5, there was no hesitation. The child and I were coming back from his very first camping trip. Mallory had stayed home. We walked in the house unshowered and blissfully worn out. I set bags down, unloaded the car. Then I looked on Bluesky, and saw some cyclist getting harassed at the Domino’s where I regularly pick up a pepperoni for the child and a half bacon&pineapple, half cheese for Mallory and me. Without thinking, I told Mal that I had to go. I’d been to a community defense training6 the weekend prior, so I had a whistle. But I had no idea where I was going or what I was doing. In the car, my heart swelled to my temples. Syncatto thundered and screeched instrumental prog metal at a volume that can be only described as “blaring so my energy has somewhere to go and I don’t try to fight anybody.” I ended up in a parking lot next to a corner where a Block Club reporter was interviewing a tamalero. The reporter pointed me to where a crowd was gathering, and an organizer was setting up a Signal chat. That’s how I got on Signal, how I got on a few organized patrols. Within a week, my brain sounded like this:
oh my god what if what I send to the group is so stupid or out-of-date or interrupting-real-work that they say “you know what, actually, Chris, we don’t need you?” Oh my god I misread someone’s message. Oh my god what if I walk up to another whistle-wearer on the street and I’m like “hey I heard this thing on Signal” and they’re like “yeah I know dipshit I’m that person.” I feel like a total baby with these middle school-level concerns. I’m pretty sure no one is thinking about me. That’s just how my brain’s always worked. I’m deathly afraid of being annoying. In times of crisis, I suppose that’s amplified. But, I figure I got two things I can do with those feelings: keep feeling them (humiliating), or circle back to that first entry and remember that it’s not really about me. Toughen up, tighten up. There are important things to be done.
Actually, Talking To Other People On Patrol Has Been The Best Part
My neighborhood is about 38% white, 22% Latine, 12% Black, 22% Asian, and 6% “other,” per a 2025 CMAP report. We’re not Little Village, or East Chicago, or Pilsen, or Pullman, or Hermosa, or Belmont Cragin. But we are something of a target. Hell, the fuckers attacked lily-white Lakeview and off-white Irving Park, nowhere is off limits. Personally, I’ve seen ICE in person only once, when they came to my building. I’ve narrowly missed them three times, and they have been ambiently around plenty. I’m almost certain two of those three near-misses prevented some kidnappings. Still, those instances were reactive to kidnappings. All of this means a lot of tense standing around on these patrols. Every SUV is a potential ICE vehicle—if you drive a Chevy Wagoneer, GMC Denali, or Ford Explorer? I am sorry, you have to sell that car, it is a Gestapo car now.
During all this standing around, I’ve met some people. Some I’ve seen more than once—a few people guarding the church, a few people guarding my kid’s school—and some have been single-serving friends. Remember that social anxiety I was talking about earlier? Well. I also can’t be rude and shut down around someone I want to back me up in a throwdown with the secret police. So I talk to people, using how much this all sucks as a jumping off point. And I meet the most normal fucking people in the entire world. Young people and retirees alike, born in the States or came here from wherever at whatever age, experienced organizers and first timers. Everyone’s pissed off that we have to be doing this at all, but absolutely committed to doing it. I feel guilty about how much I don’t go out, based on how much these people do. Hey, after the 2016 election, were you hit with the realization that a large percentage of the United States of America wants you dead? That’s not wrong. But there’s a huge number of people who feel the exact opposite, who feel like no government should treat its citizens this way. People who feel like the government’s responsibility is to take care of its populace where needed and otherwise leave us the hell alone. It’s good to know that these are my neighbors. It’s also good for me, a shy person who works from home, to feel like a neighbor, to feel like I am a part of the community in which I reside.
Sometimes You Won’t Know If You Saved Someone
When they came to my building, they laughed at assertions that this was private property. They’ve dragged people into their vans while holding their papers. They posed in front of The Bean and said “Little Village!” the way some people say “cheese!” mere hours after teargassing Little Village for the 800th time this month. ICE will do what it wants, because those stupid racist losers know that they will not be held to account by the stupid racist President they voted for and the stupid racist cuck who really runs the presidency. Again, this knowledge is painful.
There are times when we disrupt those jagoffs, though. Send them away empty-handed. We know they’re empty-handed, because they’re flipping us off from their windows. After someone was taken from Target a few weeks ago, I was on the scene and spoke with an organizer named Javier7. He added me to a Signal group, the most active one I’ve joined so far. That night, he sent a long message of encouragement to everyone, saying “I know we messed them up, I saw them driving out of the parking garage looking mad, they wanted to spend all day here and we chased them off.” He ended his missive by saying we’ll be out there again tomorrow. If I had to guess Javier’s age, it’d be somewhere between 45 and 70. When a Latino man in that age range is saying “back at it tomorrow,” you push your work around and get back at it tomorrow.
The other prevention happened a few days later, when a call came through that Signal group. ICE circling some landscapers at an elementary school, during recess hours. Within minutes, at least two people were on every corner. Most stayed for a few hours. There were so many people, in fact, that I went to check other areas. That’s the time that someone said ICE drove back by, flipping patrollers off in frustration. NOW! Are those landscapers still in Chicago? Have other preventative actions that I have witnessed firsthand but won’t write about kept those people safe long-term? I don’t know. I’m not set up to hide the Frank family in my apartment, I’m not part of those organizing circles. Still, preventing any abduction is good, even if you don’t always (or ever, really) get that Hollywoodesque rush of “I saved someone today.” Real work, it turns out, is less definitive than Spider-Man makes it look.
You Don’t Know What Lies Within You Until You Start Doing Stuff
Man, an editor would probably make that header better, huh? Could use Logan or Cyriaque right about now. More proof that no one is an island, that you can’t do everything by yourself, nor should you want to. Hey, speaking of not doing things by yourself! Quick story that I’m afraid will sound like bragging, but I promise is not meant that way. Please remember the running theme of this absurdly long column is my social anxiety. I’ve gone to protests when I could, I’ve gone to DSA events before (performed at a couple, too). But I’ve always had the feeling that I am not doing enough in my community, that I should seek out some sort of activity to get involved in that gives something of myself to my neighbors. It is hard for me to seek those things out. It is always easy to be overwhelmed with work, to suddenly need to catch up with someone, to suddenly be very tired. It’s not unlike quitting drinking, where tomorrow’s always the day you’ll get better, no wait, I meant tomorrow tomorrow. Another side of that coin is doomsday prepping, or “what do you do when they’re at your door” prepping. A moderate amount of that is not only healthy, it’s necessary; too much of that will rot your brain entirely and make you Republican. Maybe I read too many books, but I’ve been asking myself what I’d do when they were at my door since high school. I’ve been afraid that the Shirley Hazzard quote that begins this blog would be me.
What I’ve learned about myself the past few weeks is that while I am frequently afraid, I am not a coward.
I am betting you are the exact same way.
I am betting that you see videos of masked goons trying to kidnap honest people but getting chased away by regular Faks wearing pajamas and think to yourself, “well, shit, that guy’s not doing anything I can’t do.” I am betting that you hear stories about children with cancer having their fathers kidnapped and you think, “if I saw that happening to [insert person you know with cancer and kids], I’d scream my head off!” I am betting that you hear stories everyday working people and PTA members and faith leaders and City Councilpeople alike organizing carpools/walking busses to school, organizing grocery dropoffs, and guarding churches, and you think, “no, I’m not willing to confront ICE, but I am willing and able to help my neighbors. How do I sign up for that? How do I organize that?” And then I’m betting you go out and do it.
Here’s my story, which I’ll keep brief: the other day on the school playground, I was hanging out with other parents8 when an old man with some wild shit sticking out of his mouth starting pounding on the fence. Another parent asked if he needed help, and before my brain could intervene, could yell DON’T TALK TO STRANGERS at me? My legs were walking over to the guy, and my mouth was echoing the “do you need help” sentiments. I somehow heard “I got a flat tire,” and “I was just at the dentist,” which made me realize the “wild shit sticking out of his mouth” was gauze and the idling van behind him was his. I jogged across the playground, out the exit, down to the alley where the guy’s car was. Plenty of time for my brain to ask what the fuck I was doing and anxietize, but the anxiety never came. When I got to the van, the guy says, “I’m 90,” which, dude. You are a 90-year-old man coming back from the dentist and you get a flat tire. I feel for you, my guy. But dude had already jacked the van up and gotten the tire off, he just needed me to stabilize the tire while he got the lug nuts back on. Impressive stuff from him. All he needed from me was something necessary, yet very easy. Another mom, who’d walked over with me, cleaned up the tools for him. He thanked us, and we left.
I’m not telling you that story to brag. I’m telling you that story because when the kid and I got home, I told Mallory, “I think something about me has changed.” Back in September? I’m not sure I would’ve have helped that man. I would’ve buried my head in my phone. I certainly wasn’t hanging out with half the parents I was hanging out with—one of whom has also begun organizing as a result of ICE invading Chicago. This occupation has changed us, the people of Chicago. We’ve lost thousands of our neighbors, yes. But something’s awakened in the people, too.
I don’t think the fascists are going to like what they’ve made us.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris
- this is not the right usage of the word, as Brendan and I consider Behind With Knife a success, calling the afterward to a slasher a “post-mortem” is just very funny to me & Neal. ↩︎
- My grandfather owned a farm that is now a mall, and as a result, I have a duplex. Other people? Say, people who are doing honest contract work in a foreign country and sending money back to their families so that they can build a house from scratch? They’re criminals. See how silly this country is? Silly ↩︎
- they get less helpless as the years go by, but if my own life is any indication of what’s to come, well. Needing your parents doesn’t stop when you’re 18, even if you live in a different state. ↩︎
- where I live ↩︎
- the adjoining neighborhood, I don’t even know where one stops and the other ends ↩︎
- put on by Alder Andre Vasquez and partially led by Cat Sharp, who is one of the Broadview Six. If you’re reading this the day it is published, there is an action you can go to: people are gathering by Federal Plaza for the Broadview Six’s arraignment. The Broadview Six also includes Kat Abughazaleh, whom I will be voting for in the IL-09 election. I can’t make it to Federal Plaza and also get home for school pickup, but I will be wearing green today in support of Cat Sharp. ↩︎
- his name’s not Javier ↩︎
- also a completely new thing for me ↩︎
I am so glad you took the time to write all of this down.