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.”
Suddenly, things begin to unravel. About a dozen protesters start blocking government vehicles from entering and exiting the buildings. Masked agents appear from behind the fence and snatch people from the street. One young man is body-slammed and dragged inside the centre.
As the sun rises, more people arrive. A dispersal order is played on repeat and immigration agents appear on the roof, looking out over a crowd of around 100 people. Two SUVs attempt to leave the building and protesters push back. The agents fire pepper ball irritants from above and tear gas canisters are launched into the group. A small phalanx of officers appear, as if dressed for combat. A thick plume of gas envelopes the street. It is a remarkable and disproportionate escalation; a telling image of where the country is right now.
I find Pelayo and Garcia in the aftermath. Both squint into the sun, their eyes still watering. A first experience of teargas while still in high school, for Garcia. “It was a burning sensation,” says Pelayo. “But we’re still here. We’re still fighting.”
Chicago is among the handful of Democratic strongholds where Donald Trump has pledged to deploy the military amid false claims of rising crime. A mere mention of the city on rightwing cable news has long elicited a line of predictable tropes, branding it a failed liberal city ravaged by violence, corruption and economic decline. But it is also a window into the splitscreen of American life at this early inflection point in Trump’s second term – amid an assault on free speech and an alarming rise in political violence in the wake of the murder of rightwing youth organiser Charlie Kirk.
The 31-year-old, who was shot dead on a college campus in Utah in September, grew up about 20 miles away from Broadview, in a separate Chicago suburb. He founded Turning Point USA, his hard-right campus political group, at a small office a short distance from here. “One of the last things he [Kirk] said to me was: ‘Please, sir. Save Chicago,’” Trump said during a eulogy at the organiser’s memorial later in September. “We’re going to go into Chicago and we’re going to have Charlie very much in mind.”
The troops may not be here yet, but to many in the immigrant community a federal government occupation has already begun.
With the residue of tear gas still on my shirt, I drive out to the village of Lemont, to the small converted garage where Kirk began his political movement. A steady line of mourners have been arriving all day and a sprawling tribute spills on to the pavement. “Fight for freedom or lose it,” says one placard.
It’s a sincere gathering. Many have driven for hours to come and lay flowers. One man tells me he has watched the video of Kirk’s murder a hundred times. I wonder if replaying an act of such horrendous violence on repeat is good for anyone. “We must never look away from the atrocities,” he says. “It just showed me that the division between the people of this country will never be breached.”
Others strike a more conciliatory note. A young woman weeps as she lights a candle. “I think he’s a modern-day martyr,” she says. “And sometimes it takes the darkest dark to bring the greatest good. I truly think he was the vessel for that.” Another young man, who neatly lays a white T-shirt with the word “Freedom” on it (the same design Kirk was wearing when he was shot), worries about the role social media plays in exacerbating polarisation. “The elites have designed this algorithm to basically make us fight,” he says.
The sentiment here, away from the glare of cable news punditry, online polemic and Trump himself, is measured. But closer to Chicago the onslaught is inescapable.
***
I first meet Kat Abughazaleh at the Broadview protest, sat cross-legged at the entrance to the facility with other protesters. A 26-year-old Democratic candidate for Illinois’s ninth congressional district – and formerly a journalist with a focus on the far right – her approach to electoral politics is at odds with the establishment wing of the Democratic party, with its lurch to the right on immigration policy and perceived capitulation to Trump’s expanding authoritarianism.
“I don’t think our representatives are doing enough to stand up against fascism,” she tells me at the protest. “I feel like Democratic leaders in particular have missed the moment. I think they are working from a playbook that is not in 2025. This is not a dry run.”
Abughazaleh, who is 5ft tall, was shoved later that day by a federal agent and thrown hard to the asphalt. A video of the incident spread quickly online and was picked up by Fox News, whose prime-time host Laura Ingraham ran a segment declaring the officer had done a “good job”. The Department of Homeland Security’s official X account also acknowledged it, posting an absurd accusation that effectively suggests she is “siding with vicious cartels, human traffickers and violent criminals”.
When I visit Abughazaleh at her campaign office the following day, she is nursing bruises but remains resolute, despite the online barrage from some of the world’s most powerful institutions and media organisations.
“Things are going to get worse, and that is why it is more important to have solidarity between elected officials and protesters, between anyone with power or a platform,” she says. “What this administration is trying to do is terrifying. They want to crack down on our basic human rights. They do not want appeasement, they want complete and utter submission.”
“We need to stop underestimating these people, we need to stop assuming that they will follow this social contract that people say exists, because they are following a new one, and it only caters to Donald Trump.”
She points to the documented instances of poor conditions inside the Broadview facility, which is overcrowded, has no showers or cafeteria and where there is extremely limited access to medical care. “Ice has shown us who they are. They will do anything, including throwing a 5ft woman to the ground, but they’ll do a lot worse stuff than that.”
Trump only returned to office eight months ago, but the popularity of his extreme domestic agenda already appears to be waning. Polling published by the New York Times this week indicates more than 60% of Americans believe the president has gone “too far” in pressuring media organisations that cover him unfavourably, while 53% oppose sending the National Guard into major cities.
Cook County, the second most populous county in the US, and home to Chicago, is of course a staunchly Democratic jurisdiction where 70% of residents voted for Kamala Harris in 2024. Unsurprisingly, revulsion at Trump’s plans for military deployment and his ongoing immigration raids seem pervasive throughout the city – extending well beyond the frontlines of protest.
In some areas, community groups have created their own informal patrols, where volunteers walk the streets, equipped with whistles and “know your rights” handouts. I join one of them, led by a local jiu-jitsu instructor named Elias Cepeda, in the city’s Pilsen neighbourhood.
We walk along tree-lined streets, and head towards a local middle school in time for pick-up. Chatter fizzes with politics and history. Some people fear a return to 1968, when the city hosted the Democratic National Convention, and seven days of anti-Vietnam war protests saw protracted clashes between police and protesters. Others point even further back, to the fight against fascism in the second world war.
“It’s disgusting what they’re doing,” says one man standing by his stoop, who claims that Ice surveys the area on a daily basis. “They’re violating everybody’s rights.”
Cepeda, who himself was later detained and then released at another Broadview protest as they continue to escalate, fears even these informal neighbourhood patrols could come under suspicion. Last week, Trump signed a sweeping memorandum authorising government-wide investigations into activists and non-profits broadly connected with “domestic terrorism” – he has recently labelled a decentralised, umbrella movement known as “antifa” with this classification. It is a move civil liberty groups say is simply an attempt to “investigate and intimidate his critics”.
“They’re trying to criminalise speech,” says Cepeda. “And they’re trying to criminalise working with and giving resources to undocumented immigrants.”
Like Abughazaleh, he remains undeterred.
***
On the day of Charlie Kirk’s memorial, which draws tens of thousands of attendees to a stadium in Arizona, I drive about 60 miles out of Chicago, to McHenry county – a Republican-leaning area dotted with cornfields and grain silos. I come to a tavern in the small town of Woodstock, which is airing the event on a large outdoor screen. I had expected, perhaps, a few dozen people. Instead, around 600 arrive.
There are lavish motorbikes, patriotic clothing and extremely loud fireworks, which explode between prayer and song. A giant stars and stripes hangs from a crane, and some raise a single hand in prayer while holding a beer in the other.
A local pastor offers his own invocation to the group. “We know that as one has fallen, millions and millions are rising up. We are truly a giant who has been woken from his sleep,” he says. “Bless this nation because of Christian people who are making a stand, who will not be pushed to the corner. Let us gain courage for the battle ahead.”
As the afternoon wears on, the alcohol continues to flow and there is louder heckling as the speeches beamed in from Arizona become more and more political. “Fuck Obama!” one man shouts.
But a thunderstorm also rolls through; pounding rain and wind leaves me soaked to the bone and a few gazebos blow away. The event empties out before Trump speaks. I listen to his chilling words on the motorway back to the city.
“I hate my opponent,” Trump says – drawing a line between himself and Kirk. “And I don’t want the best for them. I’m sorry.”
His shortcomings as a leader have perhaps never been so clear. And the consequences are likely to intensify in Chicago and far beyond.
