Sweet home, Chicago.
For years now, I have described myself as a Chicagoan exiled in Maine. Don’t get me wrong, Maine has become my home and there is much I love about it—but Chicago will always be home. It’s the place that shaped me. It’s the place of almost all my firsts, I spent almost the first 30 years of my life there; not only was I born and raised in Chicago, I married twice there. My eldest child was born there. I still have family in Chicago. My oldest friends are still there, and my earliest memories of home were on South Shore Drive in Chicago, where we lived briefly in my preschool days.
To quote the late, great Anthony Bourdain, “You wake up in Chicago, pull back the curtain and you KNOW where you are. You could be nowhere else. You are in a big, brash, muscular, broad shouldered motherf***in’ city. A metropolis, completely non-neurotic, ever-moving, big-hearted but cold-blooded machine with millions of moving parts — a beast that will, if disrespected or not taken seriously, roll over you without remorse. It is, also, as I like to point out frequently, one of America’s last great NO BULLS**T zones. Pomposity, pretentiousness, putting on airs of any kind, douchery and lack of a sense of humor will not get you far in Chicago.”
I remember when I heard his words on Chicago, they stopped me because as a born and bred Chicagoan, it felt like he nailed why it was so hard for me to stop loving my hometown despite living in a beautiful state like Maine, where even now I struggle to feel at home at times. The essence of Chicago is embedded in my own DNA.
Which is why what happened this week in my beloved city of origin has shook me to my core. I knew this administration was doing bad things and was going to do even more bad things. I knew they were targeting Black people, I have been writing and speaking loudly about the administration’s attacks on Black people.
But what happened the other night feels personal on a deep and molecular level.
On Tuesday, various federal agents (apparently not just ICE but also FBI and ATF) stormed an apartment building in the South Shore neighborhood of Chicago. They say they were there for gang members and drug-related crimes, but this feels like something much more. Military-fatigue-clad federal officers rappelled out of Black Hawk helicopters, for God’s sake.
In the hours since this heinous event, the stories coming out of Chicago have wracked my soul in a way that feels not only personal but visceral. Residents awakened to the sounds of people beating down their doors, federal goons coming in at night when families and other people were winding down for the night. People being rounded up by federal goons who reportedly decided that arresting any and all humans they encountered with nary a question asked was the best course of action.
As a result, numerous on-the-ground reports were that they put Black folks in one U-Haul truck, immigrants in another truck, and reportedly put kids in another truck. Residents were told if they had any warrants for anything they would be hauled off. The majority of residents were released after spending several hours in custody, only to return back to their apartments and discover that their homes had been destroyed. Literally torn apart, food taken out of refrigerators, beds ripped apart, electronics tossed on to the floor. Suffering the indignity of being unlawfully taken from their homes and held for hours, only to return to homes in ruin.
This action literally comes right on the heels of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the president addressing some 800 top-ranking military officers from posts around the world just the other day and literally telling them that “dangerous cities” should be used to train the military in actions against U.S. citizens to fight “the enemy within.”
That’s not a coincidence. This wasn’t military, but it might as well have been, and the administration clearly intends to employ not just the National Guard but active-duty military branches of all sorts against us.
I’m not saying there isn’t crime in the South Shore neighborhood. It’s a working-class community and it’s the third largest city in the United States and after talking to my brother, who lives in Chicago, it seems that in recent years Venezuelan immigrants have moved into the community. But this kind of operation, performed with such drama, is clearly a terror tactic and a prelude of what’s to come. More than that, this is a very Black area of the city—not the kind of place ICE would be expected to storm. They weren’t looking to round up immigrants; they were looking to send a message that Black people are in the target sights too.
Most of us in the Black community already knew this. There was never any doubt for most of us, I believe, that we would be added to the list of “rot” and “dissent” and “undesirables” to be rounded up at will for no good reason. Some, I think, have tried to tell themselves though this was only ever going to be about immigrants.
No, we’re in it too. As someone who does high-profile anti-racism work, I’ve known that I’m probably on a list somewhere. How high or low on it, who knows? But this is terrifying.
Who flies into a Chicago neighborhood with attack helicopters and empties out a building of I’m sure overwhelmingly law-abiding citizens, some of them barely-clothed or naked from their showers or beds? Our federal law enforcement under a regime in D.C. that wants to control everything, especially cities that trend Democratic—that’s who.
And soon, quite likely, the military will be doing this, too.
Here’s the other kicker. White people are being targeted too and I think too few of them realize it. During the weekend before this raid on the South Shore, ICE agents were marching through the streets of Chicago in upscale neighborhoods and upscale shopping districts. You think they were there for immigrants? Nope. They were there to make people nervous and afraid—to tell them that even if they are white and have money they are potential targets. They were there to show power, even if it wasn’t as violent as the South Shore raid.
And now they’ve employed their power brutally against a largely Black neighborhood and terrorized an entire building for what probably was no real threat or lead at all—and even if it was, it didn’t need a military-style offensive.
My heart weeps. My fear is real. But I’m not going to give into it and none of us can afford to give into it. Autocratic rule and authoritarian tactics are out in full force now.
It’s just a matter of when and where they will spread that terror. We cannot simply cower and keep hoping for someone to save us from within a system almost totally co-opted by a right-wing, white nationalistic regime.
It’s also only a matter of when and where the military will find itself in violation of U.S. law using its force against civilian citizens in a country that is supposedly about freedom, choice, due process, and so much more.
Not so anymore, it seems.
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