Earlier this year, the Trump administration reversed the convention that nobody would be snatched by immigration and customs enforcement, or ICE, by a school, church or hospital. Since then, teachers have reported classrooms a third empty, as parents are too scared to send their kids in \u2013 volunteers walk them there and back.<\/p>\n
In the Rogers Park area of Chicago, a group of citizens are organising to resist such immigration raids. Sometimes, it\u2019s simple non-violent tactics, such as slowing officers down by walking in front of them. <\/strong>Last month, 50 people rushed to a church, where the congregation was trapped, having got word that there were ICE agents waiting outside. Maybe their most evocative tactic is whistles \u2013 coded blasts for when a convoy is suspected to be ICE agents, a different code when it\u2019s confirmed. They have numerous accounts of undocumented migrants warned off driving right into a raid, which is galvanising, but they also see and hear dismaying things all the time: vehicles standing empty, one door open, not robbed, merely relieved of their drivers; landscape gardeners arrested off ladders. Earlier this month, the Protect Rogers Park group got 1,500 calls in a day.<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t unusual; people don\u2019t like it when their neighbours are disappeared<\/a>. Similar stories could be told about Kenmore Street, Glasgow, or Peckham, in London, where neighbours surrounded Home Office vans until they were forced to release their cargo and head home.<\/p>\n But I only know about Rogers Park from Criminal<\/a>, a true-crime podcast. It\u2019s been running for more than a decade, and covers crimes that range from the macabre to the peculiar \u2013 always introduced with the same disconcerting intonation, the host announcing \u201cI\u2019m Phoebe Judge\u201d with the kind of pride and pizzazz you might use for \u201cI\u2019m Mr Invisible\u201d. But who, in this episode, is the criminal?<\/p>\n It\u2019s plain from the start that she is not talking about the whistleblowers, and yet it still takes a while for your brain to catch up: she has got to mean the federal government. This is a huge thing to imply, only secondarily because Trump is notoriously litigious, particularly against media organisations. First and foremost, it\u2019s a terrifying thing to articulate: if your government is breaking the law, what do laws mean? Can any be relied upon once some are breached? How do you tell the difference between living in such a society and hiding in it? In this, and a number of other episodes, Criminal is forensic, sober, but also quite unusual: a norm has settled over the reporting of ICE, where all the facts are laid out \u2013 raw numbers, painful details, the state of detention centres \u2013 except the central one, that people are being kidnapped.<\/p>\n Hannah Arendt discussed the term Gleichschaltung, roughly translatable as \u201ccoordination\u201d or \u201csynchronisation\u201d. It came from the Nazi justice minister Franz G\u00fcrtner to mean, broadly, that all political, social, cultural and civic institutions had to fall in line with the totalitarian state. Such a thing can only be achieved with the complicity of everyone: the minute-by-minute decisions of people who will do anything, personally or professionally, to stay with the majority. It might mean turning a blind eye to unacceptable state actions, or it might mean insisting, with the logic of your arguments, that things are still the same when they plainly are not.<\/p>\n People queue to pick up donated food at the Care for Real Rogers Park location, Chicago, 13 November 2025. Photograph: Erin Hooley\/AP<\/p>\n This is the trap many Democrats are currently in \u2013 they produce pie charts<\/a> to show that the majority of immigrants snatched off the streets are not criminals, but they do not say that to detain 65,000 people<\/a> is an authoritarian act. And this is partly a boiling-frog effect: ICE has been in existence since 2003, introduced by George W Bush after 9\/11; Barack Obama was no stranger to deportations; that uptick of detainees may break records, and the sheer activity of ICE across the US is running communities ragged, but there were nearly 40,000 migrants in detention when Donald Trump took office in January. Nobody gets a memo when democracy tips into something else.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s not all avoidance: most people prefer to synchronise, to stick with the majority. The anthropologist Michael Maccoby, writing in The Leaders We Need almost 20 years ago, drew on the research of Erich Fromm from 1930s Germany, and summarised quite bluntly that, as Fromm predicted, only about 15% of people resisted nazism. It wasn\u2019t because they were fervent supporters, or even, at the outset, because they were scared, but because that\u2019s where the herd was.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Matters of Opinion<\/p>\n Guardian columnists and writers on what they\u2019ve been debating, thinking about, reading, and more<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n