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Federal agents search for undocumented immigrants in Chicago as part of Operation Midway Blitz. Photo by Scott Olson\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\tBy David Isaacson<\/a><\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\tNovember 25, 2025\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n On Halloween afternoon in Evanston, Illinois\u2014 just a couple miles north of my home \u2014 masked, armed men went on a rampage: They deliberately caused a fender-bender accident, shoved women to the ground, repeatedly punched a young man in the head and dragged him across the pavement, and pointed pistols at and pepper-sprayed passersby. These masked men were agents of the United States Customs and Border Protection.<\/p>\n \u201cAs soon as I walked up,\u201d local resident Jennifer Moriarty recalled<\/a> in an online interview, \u201can agent grabbed me by my neck and threw me back and threw me to the ground and was on top of me.\u201d<\/p>\n As horrifying as the assault was, it had sadly become the norm for our community: For the previous two months, the greater Chicago area was the target of a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) crackdown on immigrants and, increasingly, those who came forward to protect their immigrant neighbors.<\/p>\n The following day, Daniel Biss, Evanston\u2019s mayor, spoke to hundreds <\/a>\u00a0who gathered to protest the federal government\u2019s campaign. \u201cWe in Evanston are on fire,\u201d Biss said. \u201cWe know what is being done to our people\u2026 We know the violence and the emergency and the authoritarian nightmare that is coming at us.\u201d<\/p>\n He then evoked the memory of his grandmother, who as a young woman in Europe in 1940 had not comprehended the dangers she faced. \u201cBy the time she knew the truth,\u201d said Biss, \u201cit was too late to protect herself, and she and her siblings and her parents were put on a cattle car, and the day they got off that cattle car was the last day her parents lived.\u201d<\/p>\n The analogy is an extraordinary one, but Biss is not alone in evoking the specter of the Holocaust to describe the daily reality here \u2014 a reality that was subsequently visited upon Charlotte, North Carolina<\/a> and is planned for New Orleans<\/a> next. Several members of Chicago\u2019s city council called out<\/a> \u201cthe Gestapo tactics\u201d of the twin DHS agencies, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). And as far back as February, JB Pritzker \u2014 the first Jewish governor of Illinois \u2014 publicly decried<\/a> the Trump administration\u2019s \u201cauthoritarian playbook,\u201d warning \u201cIt took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I\u2019m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.\u201d<\/p>\n The very name of the DHS campaign \u2014 \u201cOperation Midway Blitz\u201d \u2014 served to conjure up the WWII bombing of London. And the daily itinerary of its agents called to mind aspects of 1930s Germany. Every morning, federal agents departed their local headquarters in the near-west suburb of Broadview in unmarked SUVs, wearing gator-style face-coverings and carrying semi-automatic weapons.<\/p>\n They cruised the streets of a rotating group of targeted neighborhoods or suburbs, looking for dark-skinned workers whom they deemed would be easy pickings: tamale vendors, landscape workers, day laborers at Home Depot, drivers in the ride-share lot at O\u2019Hare. They made only cursory efforts to determine whether their targets were citizens, legal residents, or undocumented individuals. The DHS talking point that agents are only seizing the \u201cworst of the worst\u201d criminals is easily refuted by the data: When the Trump administration finally released names<\/a> of people they arrested in the Chicago operation, 598 of the 614 had no criminal record at all.<\/p>\n The DHS arrestees were manhandled and taken to Broadview, where they were held in gruesome conditions<\/a> and pressured to sign self-deportation agreements. Many detainees are so fearful of indefinitely staying at Broadview \u2014 or a similarly cruel detention facility<\/a> \u2014 that they sign. They often leave behind families and shattered lives.<\/p>\n The federal agents made a point of flouting the law, as if celebrating their indifference to anything other than their own cruel mission. If an immigrant refused to leave their car, agents routinely smashed the window, dragged the person from the vehicle, and sped off, leaving their victim\u2019s car unattended and unsecured. When agents found themselves surrounded by residents calling attention to their presence, they brandished guns, hurled epithets, fired pepper bombs, and lobbed teargas canisters.<\/p>\n An investigation by Block Club Chicago<\/a> found that federal agents employed tear gas and other chemical weapons 49 times in the Chicago area from Oct. 3 through Nov. 8.\u00a0 Even an admonishment from U.S. Circuit Court Judge Sara Ellis did not stop them; after her temporary restraining order, federal agents used chemical weapons at least four more times.<\/p>\n Ellis\u2019s 233-page opinion<\/a> in the use-of-force case, released on Thursday, is a compendium of immigration enforcement run amok. With access to aerial, bodycam, and cell phone footage, along with extensive testimony, the court found a consistent pattern of violence from government operatives, and an equally consistent pattern of lying about that violence from their superiors. In determining whether the government had violated the plaintiffs\u2019 Fourth Amendment rights, Judge Ellis noted that \u201crepeatedly shooting pepper balls or pepper spray at clergy members shocks the conscience\u2026 Tear gassing expectant mothers, children, and babies shocks the conscience\u2026 Tackling someone dressed in a duck costume to the ground and leaving him with a traumatic brain injury, and then refusing to provide any explanation for the action, shocks the conscience.\u201d<\/p>\n When assessing the government\u2019s truthfulness, Ellis wrote that \u201c[CBP Commander Gregory] Bovino appeared evasive over the three days of his deposition, either providing \u2018cute\u2019 responses to Plaintiffs\u2019 counsel\u2019s questions or outright lying.\u201d<\/p>\n The use of force, along with the targeting of individuals based on their ethnic identity and the government mandate to deport one million immigrants per year, brings to mind for me the Polenaktion<\/a>, the mass arrest and deportation of 17,000 Polish Jews from Germany in 1938.\u00a0 At the same time, I ask myself, are such equivalences accurate and helpful? Holocaust scholar Daniel H. Magilow, in an astute discussion<\/a> of ICE\/Gestapo comparisons, reminds us that while \u201canalogies can be useful for clarifying complex ideas\u2026 they risk oversimplifying and trivializing history.\u201d<\/p>\n For my parents, who came of age as Brooklyn Jews as the Nazis were coming to power in Europe, the question had hovered over their lives: \u201cCould it happen here?\u201d After two months of brutal and lawless behavior, I was asking, \u201cIs it happening here? Now?\u201d<\/p>\n So I called my nonagenarian parents to ask them what they thought. My dad said Operation Midway Blitz did remind him of \u201cGestapo tactics, a Gestapo presence, the Gestapo\u2019s impact on society.\u201d My mom added a note of caution: \u201cWe should be careful talking about them like all individuals in ICE are the same. It takes a while to answer the question \u2018who are they,\u201d how Gestapo-ish all the people in ICE are.\u201d<\/p>\n Who are the officers of ICE and CBP? It is a question that Illinois Senator Dick Durbin addressed in a letter<\/a> to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. Durbin pointed to loosened standards for ICE hiring and training, and to recruiting advertisements \u2014 targeted to white applicants \u2014 urging them to join up to \u201cdefend your culture.\u201d (A recent article in Haaretz <\/a>also raised alarms that imagery on DHS\u2019s social media used antisemitic dog whistles and was intended to appeal to neo-Nazis.) Durbin asked Noem whether there was any vetting to check if applicants were January 6 rioters or members of white nationalist groups and, if so, whether those extremists were getting hired.<\/p>\n Such concerns go back many years. A ProPublica investigation in 2019<\/a> uncovered a secret Facebook group for current and former CBP personnel that revealed \u201ca pervasive culture of cruelty aimed at immigrants.\u201d In 2022, twenty-seven civil rights organizations wrote the Justice Department<\/a> to warn that CBP was collaborating with white supremacist paramilitary groups on the U.S. southern border.<\/p>\n Whether one accepts the \u201cGestapo\u201d analogy or not, it is clear that Chicago residents are heeding the dire warnings coming from politicians and activists alike. When the \u201cfive-alarm fire\u201d commenced, the response of thousands of residents was rapid and well-organized<\/a>. Secure chat groups were launched; ICE-watch trainings were at capacity. In my neighborhood and beyond, during the worst days of the crackdown, one could see on every street-corner people on patrol with orange whistles around their necks, ready to document and peacefully confront the armed federal incursion.<\/p>\n During the Halloween incident in Evanston, CBP agents stuffed three people \u2014 including Jennifer Moriarty \u2014 in an SUV. They then drove erratically around Evanston and Chicago\u2019s Rogers Park neighborhood, attempting to goad other drivers into more traffic accidents. But wherever they went, the orange whistles were sounding. \u201cWhen I was on the ground and when I was in the car,\u201d Moriarty recalled, \u201clooking out at all the people, all the faces of the community members\u2026 I never felt I was doing anything wrong. And all those people were also there, doing all the right things, as well.\u201d<\/p>\n My experience when I joined a local patrol was the same as Moriarty\u2019s. I had a sense of pride and wonder that so many neighbors were united in non-violent opposition to racist attacks. Whether DHS agents were akin to the Gestapo, in the end, did not matter to me. What mattered was that there was definitely a Resistance.<\/p>\n David Isaacson is a Chicago playwright and advocate. His writing can be found at substack.com\/@davidisaacson.<\/p>\n The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author\u2019s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forward. Discover more perspectives in Opinion<\/a>. To contact Opinion authors, email [email\u00a0protected]<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Federal agents search for undocumented immigrants in Chicago as part of Operation Midway Blitz. Photo by Scott Olson\/Getty…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":403969,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5124],"tags":[960,5386,1818],"class_list":{"0":"post-403968","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-chicago","8":"tag-chicago","9":"tag-il","10":"tag-illinois"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115611285857826689","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403968","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=403968"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403968\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/403969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=403968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=403968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=403968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/GettyImages-2243832425-300x200.jpg\")
Demonstrators gather within the \u201cfree speech zone\u201d near an ICE processing and detention facility in Broadview, Illinois. Photo by Jamie Kelter Davis\/Getty Images<\/p>\n