My travels through Chicago: teargas, resistance and Trump's big immigration crackdown

At 5am on a warm September morning a small crowd of protesters assembles in the dark. They are gathering outside the Broadview immigration processing centre, a two-storey brick structure in the Chicago suburbs that has the ambience of a US outpost in a foreign war. Windows are boarded with plywood. Fences are lined with razor wire and black cloth. Masked Ice agents appear sporadically, dressed in military fatigues – tactical helmets, flak jackets and rifles.

The protesters begin to heckle each time an agent turns up for work or leaves through a chainlink gate. “Quit your job!” they chant. “Take off your mask!”

The centre is a focal point in the resistance to Donald Trump’s recent immigration crackdown in the city, portentously dubbed Operation Midway Blitz. It is here, following arrest, that hundreds of people targeted for deportation are brought to languish in squalid conditions before being sent to detention centres around the country.

I expect to see civil disobedience. But the first people I meet are 22-year-old Milagros Pelayo and her sister, Yessenia Garcia, who is 16. They have been here at sunrise for the past five days, searching for information about their father, Rosalio, a janitor who was arrested by immigration officers at his home a week earlier. He is currently detained inside. “They won’t let us talk to him,” Pelayo tells me. “They won’t give us any information.”

Still bleary-eyed, the siblings stand by the doorway waiting for answers – or an opportunity to say goodbye to their dad. “I thought America was the land of opportunity,” says Garcia. “But it doesn’t make any sense now.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/03/my-travels-through-chicago-tear-gas-resistance-and-trumps-big-immigration-crackdown