Photo: @loveandstrugglephotos
In Chicago, Portland, and other cities across the country, the Trump administration has deployed National Guard and ramped up ICE enforcement in an attempt to deport millions of community members. For many of us, the use of state violence against our neighbors and communities can feel overwhelming and impossible to stop.
But communities have more power than we think. Getting to know your neighbors and building relationships over time is one of the most powerful ways to counter this authoritarianism and protect each other.
I’ve witnessed how this works in Chicago since Sept. 8, when the Trump administration launched Operation Midway Blitz. Since then, hundreds of masked ICE agents have violently made their presence known in Chicago. In addition to disappearing people off our streets, they have shot at least two people including killing father of two Silvierio Villegas Gonzalez after he dropped his children off at daycare. They have detained U.S. citizens, including children. They have aggressively chased and purposely crashed into moving vehicles on busy city streets, endangering everyone. They have smoke-bombed and tear-gassed neighborhood streets, detained a Chicago alderperson and a journalist, and used chemical munitions and rubber bullets against protesters.
The scale of violence is terrifying. At the same time, people have come together to protect each other in beautiful and important ways. That’s what I have seen in Rogers Park, the Chicago neighborhood where I have lived for 22 years and which is home to a large population of asylum seekers and immigrant families.
What community defense can look like
Here are some examples of how our community has responded in recent weeks:
- Street patrols: On days of intense ICE activity, hundreds of neighbors patrol the streets on foot, bike, and by car to keep those vulnerable as safe as possible. That includes escorting people safely after church services. In recent days people engaged in ICE watch, or even in proximity to them have been violently arrested, had tear gas thrown at them, and had guns pulled on them—and yet they still show up for each other.
- School safety measures: In just 48 hours, neighbors organized safe passage patrols to monitor pick up and drop off for students at 12 elementary and high schools. Some schools have also begun offering rides for students who would otherwise have to walk and risk encounters with ICE.
- Warning systems: Community members purchased and distributed hundreds of orange whistles with instructions for how to use them to warn each other about ICE presence and identify each other when patrolling. One neighbor figured out how to 3D print whistles etched with the phone number of the citywide hotline to the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, the central place where people are reporting ICE activity.
- Mass solidarity: Over 400 neighbors turned up at the site where a community member was recently detained by ICE abduction. They demonstrated support for each other and resistance to the brutal practices of ICE and the collaborating federal agencies. This moment of collective spirit and solidarity exponentially increased the number of people connected to networks of care.
Community members have responded in similar ways in many other wards and neighborhoods across Chicago, and across the country.
This rapid, coordinated response was made possible by neighbors who had gotten to know each other and built relationships over the years. In my neighborhoods, Protect Rogers Park developed networks of care and rapid response to ICE during the first Trump administration. When the pandemic hit soon after, our community was able to start mutual aid projects to feed hundreds of families. And in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd, we organized community-based alternatives to policing. We brought neighbors together to get to know each other, train ourselves in deescalation and mental health crisis response, and develop a neighborhood safety Signal group chat to respond to issues that could be resolved without calling the police.
All this work built important social infrastructure—the relationships, the trust, and communications channels—that was already in place to help respond to the current situation. We didn’t have to start from scratch. And we were positioned to organize quickly because we had done it before.
How to get started
Citywide, statewide, and national advocacy and demonstrations are important. But getting to know your neighbors builds the foundation that makes sustained resistance possible.
If you are not already connected folks in your community, here are ways to start:
- Join a mutual aid project. Look online or ask around to see if there is a mutual aid project already in your community, and volunteer if there is one. Mutual aid is a great way to work together to build solidarity and get to know your community.
- Start a reading group. Reach out to people you know or the larger community to see who would like to get together and read an article or a book—like Silky Shah’s “Unbuild Walls,”—to build your analysis and knowledge together. Many reading groups evolve into other projects to support communities.
- Create art together. Check out local arts organizations to plug into. If you are a creative person, offer your talents to start a quilting group, paint a mural or banner, or join a community choir. Think about how many people would be excited to join a group like that and build community right now.
Lastly, here is an important tool you can use with your neighbors to respond to this crisis and help prepare for the next one: Mapping Community Defense and Care in our Neighborhoods.
The tool was created by my neighbor Kelly Hayes, who is a Menominee organizer, the co-author of “Let This Radicalize You,” and host of the Movement Memos podcast. Last month, Kelly introduced this tool at a local meeting, which I attended with my fellow collective members of our neighborhood art and mutual aid hub.
A few days later, we had a meeting with several mutual aid projects that use our corner storefront space, and we worked through the mapping process. We put large paper on the wall and identified groups and resources in the community, clarified our relationships with them, and possibilities of working together. Importantly, we also talked about what our values were (avoiding calling the police, restorative justice, redistributing resources), and what minor conflicts we may have had with other groups that we could heal in the interest of unity in this moment.
In that first session, we identified our bi-weekly food distribution as a potential target for ICE, and that we needed additional support to keep people safe. As events rapidly unfold in Chicago, we plan to revisit the tool in subsequent meetings to help us solidify our community defense plans. I encourage you to give this tool a try, as well. Grab the people you already organize with, your faith community, other tenants in your building, or other folks you feel aligned with, and work through the mapping process. You won’t regret it, and it will serve you in the years to come.
