I live in Chicago, and this article doesn't even scratch the surface of how bad it is. My wife went to the beach yesterday for 10 minutes to try and rest from the chaos and a fucking black hawk helicopter buzzed by her. They literally fly over my house daily.
People, US citizens included, are literally being abducted. People have been shot and killed by masked agents. People have had their children abandoned on the side of the road after being kidnapped. Just today they raided Little Village with hundreds of masked troops. I'm in a dozen signal groups to get alerted about where things are.
What scares me the most is how few people seem to actually know what is happening here. I talk to people outside of Chicago, and watch the news, and I don't see or hear about anything that's going on here. I tell them what's happening and they are shocked.
It is impossible to convey what is happening here, how scared we all are for this country, and how much things seem to escalate every single day that this goes on.
Edit: This post has been flagged and hidden, just demonstrating how much this country wants to pretend this isn't happening. It's unflagged now, but the fact that anyone would want to hide what's happening here shows how bad things are for all of us.
The media also has an existential threat of being taken as seriously as Russian and Chinese media are taken by the Russian and Chinese people, respectively.
OP mentions US citizens being detained. Commenter is wondering how other US citizens supporting such activities would feel if their family was detained similarly.
Unless you’re talking about citizens of another country that are in favor of these deportations, your comment is plainly illogical.
>The number of times this has happened has not been 0, but in terms of documented instances, you're not talking about a very large group of people.
"you're not talking about a very large group of people"? Does that make it acceptable? If so, what's the upper limit on an acceptable number of citizens being disappeared?
> If so, what's the upper limit on an acceptable number of citizens being disappeared?
I didn’t articulate that properly. There have probably been a non-zero number of illegal detentions, and a few instances (only about a dozen that I’m aware of, most of those preceding the present administration) where citizens have been deported. The ideal number of times either of these things would happen is 0, but there’s no evidence that it’s a systemic problem that would necessitate abolishing immigration enforcement entirely.
Ok. Thanks for clarifying that in your view it’s worth deporting a few citizens to a prison in another country so that we can deport folks at Home Depot parking lots etc.
>but there’s no evidence that it’s a systemic problem that would necessitate abolishing immigration enforcement entirely.
Who said anything about that? As I pointed out in another comment, the Biden administration deported more folks in four years than Obama and Trump did in twelve. And he did so without masked thugs slamming into the cars of citizens, dragging them out of their cars and abducting them off the street, while lying that it was the abducted citizen who caused the ruckus. And Biden did so without those same masked thugs slamming into the cars of citizens, then shooting them multiple times, lying about the circumstances and destroying evidence about it.
No one, other than you, said anything about "abolishing immigration enforcement entirely."
But we certainly don't need masked thugs with a budget larger than the Military budgets of all but three nations to do so. As the last 250 years have shown.
All that said, you're claiming that a non-zero number of people falsely deported (a clear violation of the Constitution) is acceptable to you? Okay. Let's start with you and your family. What's that? That's not what you meant? You mean you think it's okay as long as it's not you?
> All that said, you're claiming that a non-zero number of people falsely deported (a clear violation of the Constitution) is acceptable to you?
If you read what I wrote in my comment (not what you wanted my comment to be, but the comment as it was actually written), I wrote:
> The ideal number of times either of these things would happen is 0
You’re abusing the use of the word “acceptable” to indicate endorsement rather than toleration. Given that a system is necessary, and that the system is imperfect, there will be a non-zero number problems that the system creates. We could apply this to immigration enforcement; you’ll say I’m endorsing these mistakes as a necessary evil,
rather than tolerating their occurrence when compared with the alternative of simply never enforcing borders, which is the only way you could possibly guarantee mistakes like this would never happen.
We could apply it to automobiles and you’d say I was in favor of car accidents, or to NAS and you’d say I was in favor of disk failures. The only way to guarantee these systems will never fail is to abolish them, and what I’m telling you is that unless you can demonstrate that these deportations are a systemic problem, there’s no reason to do that, particularly when there are remedies for those who were actually unlawfully deported. Give this article a read, it’s far shorter than you might think:
>You’re abusing the use of the word “acceptable” to indicate endorsement rather than toleration.
Okay. How many Americans being murdered, beaten and deported without warrant, due process or oversight, all in explicit and direct violation of the Constitution are you willing to tolerate. Ten? A hundred? A hundred thousand? Provide a specific number of illegal (as the Constitution is the supreme law of the land) acts by ICE that you are willing to tolerate.
And would that number change if you and/or your family are among those?[1]
As for me, I won't tolerate any violations of the rights of those protected by the law. Because we're supposed to live in a society of laws, not unaccountable, masked thugs who can act with impunity -- regardless of the goal.
The ends do not justify the means.
Want to be "tough" on those who have committed a civil infraction (overstaying their visas -- the vast majority of those who aren't here on valid documents) and on those who evaded border security (a misdemeanor). Fine. Then do so without harassing, beating and murdering folks, including those who don't have valid residence documents/visas -- as the penalty for such things is a fine and a short jail stay, then removal to their home country -- and certainly not creating a "papers please"[0] police state in our free and open society.
That's not the society I've lived in for more than half a century. Nor is it one I wish to live in.
Why do you want to live in such a society? No. Really. I'd like to understand why you want to live in a police state. Do tell.
>Given that a system is necessary,
Which system is "necessary"? We never (for 250 years) had to have masked thugs maiming, murdering and disappearing my fellow Americans before. Why is that? Because it's illegal and an explicit violation of Constitutional rights.
Why is it "necessary" now?
[0] So you want to have a society like the USSR, East Germany and the like, where masked, anonymous police can demand identity documents without warrants, probable cause or exigent circumstance and even if you produce such they can ignore them and abduct you off the street without recourse?
[1] Let's deport you and your family to CECOT "by accident." Oh gee. Sorry, lurk2. But our app says you're a dangerous alien. No, you don't get a lawyer or in front of a judge -- you're illegal, you don't have rights -- even though the Constitution says that all people in the US are entitled to due process.
> Okay. How many Americans being murdered, beaten and deported without warrant, due process or oversight, all in explicit and direct violation of the Constitution are you willing to tolerate. Ten? A hundred? A hundred thousand? […] As for me, I won't tolerate any violations of the rights of those protected by the law.
This is demonstrably false; if you aren’t violently resisting it, you’re tolerating it the same way that I am tolerating it. Consider this; Israel’s security is effectively guaranteed by the United States. Israel has killed innocent civilians. The United States is at least partially complicit in these crimes insofar as it continues to finance Israeli national security. This is ongoing. It’s happening now. You can say you won’t tolerate it, but you are tolerating it; you’re here with me now having this conversation, and not engaged in a campaign of guerrilla warfare against those facilitating these crimes.
When I say “the ideal number is 0,” it means just that; there’s not a situation in which it would become legally acceptable for a citizen to be deported, but it could feasibly happen, and if it did, this would not invalidate immigration enforcement as a practice.
> So you want to have a society like the USSR, East Germany and the like, where masked, anonymous police can demand identity documents without warrants, probable cause or exigent circumstance and even if you produce such they can ignore them and abduct you off the street without recourse?
None of that appears anywhere in my post.
> [1] Let's deport you and your family to CECOT "by accident." Oh gee. Sorry, lurk2. But our app says you're a dangerous alien. No, you don't get a lawyer or in front of a judge -- you're illegal, you don't have rights -- even though the Constitution says that all people in the US are entitled to due process.
You’re trying to use this as a rhetorical flourish (“How would you feel if the thing I’m pretending like you’re endorsing happened to you, huh?”) but the way you’ve written it betrays that it isn’t meant as a parable for me to learn from, but a fantasy for you to indulge in. You’re doing this because your arguments are weak and you have to rely on a resentful dream that I’ll be proven wrong in an /r/LeopardsAteMyFace style comeuppance.
Actually, you ignored (at least IMHO) the most important issue I addressed: that of the curtailment of our hard-won individual rights of free expression, freedom of assembly, freedom of movement, due process and privacy, among others. You know, those rights that are explicitly enshrined in the Constitution, paid for with the blood and treasure of our ancestors and protected with the blood and treasure of more recent ancestors.
You didn't address that at all.
That's what's got me up in arms here.
You appear to have imagined that I must think that "everyone on the planet, especially the darkies from Central and South America must be allowed to live in lurk2's house, eat his food and fuck his wife." Far from it.
My problem with all of this is that when you take away the rights enshrined in our Constitution for some, you set the precedent to do so for everyone. And I'm not okay with that.
I guess I also asked you the wrong question. You appear to be okay with the diminution and curtailment of the rights explicitly protected in our highest law.
I guess I'd like to know why you're so willing to do so.
And yes, I strongly suspect that you're not posting in good faith, since you ignored (and then claimed otherwise) the most important parts of the discussion we ('we' meaning the HN community) were having about this.
Sadly, I expect you're channeling the anti-semites that Sartre mused upon[0] many years ago. And more's the pity.
My aunt is a republican lobbyist. She is also a drunk. This means that she gets drunk and texts the family things all of the time.
She wants everybody in US cities to suffer. Illegal immigrant, legal immigrant, or citizen. She thinks that people who live in places like Chicago are snooty woke idiots and that it'd be better if cops hit every single person there with a nightstick and took them away from their kids.
There are plenty of legal US citizens being abducted.
From TFA: US citizens, including women and children, were grabbed from their beds, marched outside without even a chance to dress, zip-tied, and loaded into vans.
If we assume the reporting in the linked video was accurate, you’re at most talking about unlawful detention and 4th amendment violations. No one with legal status to reside in the country was reported to have disappeared in the way you are implying.
I’m not at all worried about my family being deported for the simple reason that they have legal status to reside in the places where they reside. I wouldn’t have approached it the same way, but for the sole reason that you end up with citizens being inconvenienced.
This post wasn’t about citizens having their rights infringed upon, though; it’s obvious from the editorializing that the author does not believe that America has any fundamental right to sovereignty. The author’s primary concern (and yours, I would venture) is ensuring that foreign nationals are not molested as they continue to reside and work within the United States illegally.
So you believe that America has a fundamental right to enforce its immigration laws, and that enforcement of those laws is permissible provided that such enforcement occurs within whatever bounds you deem to be humane, and your only objection to these activities is their real or potential impact on the civil rights of American citizens?
Pretty obviously. In fact, you defined a pretty good standard with the exception of the snark about what the OP deems humane - not deporting to an overcrowded prison in a 3rd country can’t be that hard to agree on.
All evidenced by the fact that higher deportation numbers during Obama created no uproar. You think it’s coz Obama was handsome or smtg?
You're telling me it's obvious but I still don't think that you'd agree with the statement that: "your only objection to these activities is their real or potential impact on the civil rights of American citizens." If the infrastructure was in place to ensure each of these cases was thoroughly reviewed (for example, to address refugee claimant status), would you object to the deportation of absolutely all foreign nationals illegally residing in the United States? I have a hunch that the answer is no, and even if it were yes, I don't think it's obvious from the language used in this thread that attitudes towards this issue are stemming from a Ron Paul style concern over the fate of the American Republic and its civil liberties. From the language used, it seems far more likely that these people see immigration law as basically illegitimate, and that their policy position is whatever enables the largest number of illegal residents to remain in the country.
> In fact, you defined a pretty good standard with the exception of the snark about what the OP deems humane
You're reading into the comment. His own standard of what he deems humane would obviously be a prerequisite for him to deem the practices acceptable. Given the inane comment you made about another one of my comments being "plainly illogical" I would request that you keep to the issues and stop tone policing.
> - not deporting to an overcrowded prison in a 3rd country can’t be that hard to agree on.
Evidently not. It's not the most effective policy (which would be targeting employers), but if you don't imprison repeat offenders, the incentive will always be there to try again. For as many of the sob stories you're seeing about a father of six getting deported after working diligently for 30 years as an unlicensed carpenter, there are a dozen guys getting caught at the Home Deport parking lot who will be back in the country within the year. Deportation to these people is an inconvenience, not a Greek tragedy, and the only way you could really dissuade them from it would be incarcerating them so that the penalty is some period where they know they aren't going to have any earnings.
> All evidenced by the fact that higher deportation numbers during Obama created no uproar. You think it’s coz Obama was handsome or smtg?
Obama's higher deportation numbers were largely the result of changes to the definition of what constituted a deportation.
- No problem with deportation as long as civil liberties aren’t trampled on.
- 3rd country prison “because they will be back soon” is _plainly illogical._ What’s the point of deporting if you won’t maintain a border? Are we deporting people for fun and profits?
Deportation had been “sending you back home” until now. Sending people to a prison in whatever country you want is so plainly illegal and immoral. Not expecting morality anymore but would you agree with Americans being deported to Iran if they were in Palestine illegally? I am certain you would not.
Understandable, but note that decisions like that are part of the adminstration's objectives. This isn't a Chicago policy; it's a federal targeting of Chicago for political reasons.
> People, US citizens included, are literally being abducted.
Show me a case where an ICE officer has been convicted of abduction.
Or are you just saying that because you think you get to have a veto over every arrest?
Just under Biden, 7.2 million illegal aliens have crossed the border (Trump says 10 million). [1] Why are you surprised there are so many arrests? There are so many people to send back. In fact, Trump is arresting so few people, that it will be impossible to bring the number down Obama levels.
I live in Oak Park, just outside Chicago (and adjacent to Broadview, where the major regional ICE detention center is).
We have daily ICE sitings, and approximately every-other-day ICE detentions or arrests. It's a constant presence.
What it means psychologically depends. If you're someone who could visually be mistaken (perhaps in bad faith) for a Latino, it's a very big problem. ICE/DHS routinely stops people based on their visual appearance, it takes 15 minutes for them to work out that you're present legally, and throughout the whole thing you have hanging over you that they might just decide to detain you at Broadview anyways, which is a nightmare even assuming your eventual release.
If you're not someone like that --- at least where I live --- you can mostly ignore what's happening, if that's what you want to do. People are basically living their lives. About the closest an ordinary white/Black family here gets to direct disruption is needing to make special arrangements with their landscaping people.
A big issue for people detained, even if they are citizens, is that it can take some time to be released, and when released you may not get your belongings back. That includes passport, phone, keys, cash, jewelry. The advice I am hearing is to avoid carrying around much if you are at risk.
I am an angry old not-quite suburban white male. My household employs no servants. We mow our own lawn, we rake our own leaves.
I know a fair number of people who are US born and have what appears to be a Central American complexion. I imagine much of the HN readership can get by without income for the time it can take a citizen, or someone with perfectly legitimate immigration status, to establish his or her bona fides to ICE. Not everybody who is getting in can.
And have you looked into the big employers, not Harriet Homeowner, but the meat packing plants, to see how carefully they examine documents?
Hell, have you examined the Trump organization's record?
None of this has anything whatsoever to do with whether "Pedro" will be there to shovel their driveway. Nobody cares about that. We all live with 100% certainty that somebody will exchange dollars for snow shoveling. The reason you hear about landscapers right now is that ICE is directly targeting them. If you're ICE, looking to meet a detention quota from whatever quadrant Oak Park is in, the easiest way to do that is cruise down the street and stop anybody on a riding mower.
So no warrant, no probable cause beyond looking Latino. So it seems we have replaced stopping people for driving while black with stopping people for working while brown.
Your contention is that when ICE goes to the parking lot of a Home Depot and rounds up day laborers its because they had specific intelligence and an arrest warrant for one of them?
Are you claiming that the detainees - assumedly primarily illegal immigrants - are taking part in the voting process and that's why the governor is "grandstanding"?
That's the story I hear from certain folks and as far as I can tell, it has no merit. I'd be interested in any actual stats here.
Michigan found approximately 12 non-citizen voters after going through their rolls. Texas claimed to have found nearly 1000, but opened 100 investigations.
those kinds of numbers should make you understand why we have to give up on this whole constitution thing.
One of the more egregious stories that made national news and captured the zeitgeist of this situation was the alleged illegal immigrant that was working as a sworn police officer in suburban Chicago:
So given that this was allowed to happen, you want me to believe it's impossible for an illegal immigrant to cast a vote in an election? In Chicago? Where the dead people vote?
So there aren't any stats for illegal immigrants voting then I take it.
I would expect they don't check for citizenship when becoming a police officer. I do expect them to check when a voter is registered. Frankly, given the amount of hubbub about illegals voting, I would expect there to at least be a notable amount of it happening that can be pointed to.
Please do not make these sorts of claims based on vibes. They have wider consequences on the amount of hate towards foreigners - illegal or not - that is completely undeserved.
Yeah? What about being a sworn police officer is it that you think qualifies you to vote? Have you ever worked a shift as an EJ? Do you know how the Illinois/Cook County voting system works?
Is it your contention that if someone was an illegal immigrant as alleged, and in doing so able to pass a local government background check without arousing suspicion, someone wouldn't be able to outsmart some 80 year old election judge who is volunteering her time that would otherwise be spent watching reruns of Judge Judy?
The system is not as airtight as you purport it to be.
From this I can infer your answer to "have you ever been an EJ" is no.
As a starting point, citizenship is not in fact a state requirement for service as a sworn police officer. In my muni, it's explicitly not: all that's required is authorization to work.
Second, it's not the job of EJs to judge whether people are citizens or not. The median EJ in Cook County, for what it's worth, is 45 years old.
Do you think it's impossible that there are undocumented folks living under false identities and/or stolen SSNs casting votes in elections? It's a yes or no question.
To put it another way, do you believe non-citizens in this country illegally (and thus already breaking the law), have some sort of deference when it comes to obeying election laws?
Thankfully we have the spry 45 year old election judges to oversee it all.
No, having served as an EJ a couple times in Illinois now and understanding how the system works, I'm confident that there is no material amount of non-citizen voting happening in Cook County.
> But this notion that roving bands of assassins are driving down the street looking for browns is likely an exaggeration (made worse by misinformation on social media).
Assassins? Nobody said that.
But my friend I can assure you they are, in fact, driving down the street and taking people who “look suspicious.”
(They also are doing more targeted things - both are true.)
> Something like > 30% of ICE agents and > 50% of CBP officers are Latino themselves. It's incongruent with the narrative being presented.
Nearly 100% of the people enslaving India were Indians, employed by British Easy India Company. Its just 3,000 british people from Great Britian with bad teeth that enslaved an entire country for ~200 years. People will do ANYTHING for a paycheck. The ethnicity of those employed means jackshit.
Or people actually like and care about the people they transact with whether their grass gets mowed next week or not. Yeah, for some well off suburban folks, their closest impact might be someone who works for them. Doesn't mean they don't care.
(And frankly, I'd rather my money goes to someone who really needs the money, not a corporate service.)
In a way, the article understates how bad it is. I live in Chicago, and in my neighborhood every lamp post (and mailbox, and other surface) has a poster detailing your rights. “Fuck ICE” (and related) signs all over. Most businesses and a lot of houses in my neighborhood have signs explicitly stating that ICE is not welcome inside without a warrant. My coffee shop regularly has free whistles to take, so you can help alert others.
Just a few days ago I was working at a coffee shop and got a rapid response notice that ICE was about a block from me. I got a few more that day, all within a few blocks of my house.
It is incredibly stressful. I married people, have kids who are not white - they are a target. I pray every day that the next daycare raid isn’t my sons daycare, that ICE doesn’t stop my husband as he goes to work, that my mother-in-law doesn’t get snatched off the street when she walks to Target.
I'm an immigrant in Chicago (fortunately not one of the racial groups they're targeting) and I follow it pretty closely - yeah it's all really happening. I saw kids get taken away in front of where I live and others just a few streets down
In the northern suburbs of Chicago, we often hear helicopters circling. A gardener was taken on my block. The home owner told the masked agent he didn't have permission to be on his property, and the agent pointed a gun at him.
If you suspect anything is exaggerated, you can look to dozens of videos posted online of how these people act and speak. They roll in caravans of unmarked SUVs. Last week they rolled up to an elementary school (https://www.reddit.com/user/rubinass3/comments/1ol319f/ice_d...).
Things feel bad to me in a way (I suppose I'm fortunate to be able to say) they haven't until now. I normally can see the "other side" of issues but I can't fathom how this is what anybody wants. I'm angry and I'm sad.
My kids school has started doing drills with the students in what to do when ice shows up. Like they do for tornadoes. They need to because ICE is using schools as raid locations every day.
The children might be citizens, but ICE seizes them so that the immigrant parents have to show up and claim them.
Chicago schools are reporting lower attendance as a result.
We just had a case where a daycare provider was hauled out despite having her papers in order-she was subsequently released.
Priests being shot in the head with pepper balls, intentional accidents being caused by agents. And when they do something so egregious that they might face charges, they runaway to other states with vehicles and evidence.
I look forward to everyone in these organizations facing accountability. And not just the thugs on the street but the leaders first all the way to the top.
Under the auspices of civil disobedience I refer people to Beverly Hills Cop and the bananas scene. Also, Bass Pro Shops sell liquid skunk smell. It would be a shame if it were to end up in vehicles or on the outside air vents of cars. No damage, just annoying.
> I look forward to everyone in these organizations facing accountability. And not just the thugs on the street but the leaders first all the way to the top.
Unfortunately, the chances of this happening are minuscule, even if the executive branch ever changes hands in the future. The other party is too moderate, and doesn't have the backbone or courage to see it through, nor the patience and attention to detail to get them all. They'll be tied up in subpoenas, testimonies in front of Congress, hearings, hearings about hearings... Meanwhile, the people (both in leadership and boots on the ground) who are doing this today will slink back to normal life. The ringleaders will slide into comfy roles in think tanks, corporate boards, and lobbying groups. The hired thugs will go back to working as mall security and bouncers, hoping nobody remembers the time they cosplayed as Bond villain footsoldiers.
It's all really happening. Pretty much every meeting with friends touches on what their recent sightings or stories of ICE terror have been. Everyone who hasn't seen it first hand has a second hand story.
Absolutely everyone I talk to is against ICE's actions and that is the thing giving me hope that it will be defeated by the citizenry.
Did you look at the links he posted? Have you seen the news reports he linked to? This is all actually happening right now. Please, read all he linked to an watched the videos of ICE kidnapping people violently.
Have you been ignoring the reports? This is a small slice of the carnage the government has unleashed. They've detained at least 170 US citizens so far for hours or days, shot numerous US citizens, killed US citizens, killed tens of people in detention, the detention center conditions are torture so people intentionally self deport, the people who are deported disappear, are never heard from again ...............
I live here, and Pritzker says the right things then does the wrong things. He sent the Illinois State Police to help protect ICE from protestors as Broadview, freeing up their resources to attack and kidnap people. In half the videos you see out there his state police as assisting ICE. We have Chicago Aldermen out in the streets and in the hospitals getting arrested and assaulted, we have candidates for congress like Kat Abughazaleh being indicted for protesting, and then Pritzker is giving speeches and going on podcasts while not even stopping his own thugs from helping ICE.
He doesn't have a spine, he has an election strategy.
Right now, I agree pretty strongly with this. In particular: Pritzker is the command in chief of the Illinois State Police. But the ISP is very conservative and fairly MAGA, and ISP has staffed protests pretty aggressively. Pritzker has in theory the ability to reorient ISP away from policing protesters and towards protecting them from DHS, and he has pointedly not done so.
Even if he's just OK, doing a replacement-level competent job of being a governor dealing with a problem he himself did not have a hand in creating, this is his opportunity to demonstrate leadership during a crisis, and he's flubbing it. He's asking (we assume) for the highest job in the land, so he doesn't get to ask to be graded on a curve this time.
The fact that everybody has just become okay with the fact that police forces are actively far right agitators is outrageous. If cops are desperate to smash skulls because they hate brown people then we need to completely dismantle and rebuild all of the police forces from scratch because it is impossible for them to be anything but violence machines.
We have violent hate gangs staffed with military equipment, with the authority to kill, and with minimal care for the actual law.
Curious about the random Kat Abu comment at the end there? I know nothing about her background, but it certainly seems like she's using her campaign to actively help her local community directly and immediately. And in times like these, we could certainly use more political candidates who are willing to be tossed around by DHS.
She doesn't represent the district. She picked it off a map, while living in (I think?) DC, hoping to replicate what AOC had done in New York --- knocking off a geriatric institutional Dem in a safe blue district. What really got me was that she moved to Chicago to run for CD9, and didn't even move to the district --- she moved to the Gold Coast (IIRC?), far outside CD9 (which is Rogers Park, Evanston, and the near north suburbs).
There's a word for this (carpetbagging).
Then more broadly there's the question of what a Representative is for. Is it "designated protester for the district"? If so, she's the leading contender. It's my belief that "most effective on-site protester" is not in fact the job of a congressional representative.
It'd be one thing if the choice was between Kat Abu and a staid machine Democrat. But CD9 is naturally progressive, and she's up against Daniel Biss, a progressive with a real track record of getting things done (and unquestioned ties to the district). What I think she's really going to do, best case, is split the progressive vote.
No, she moved there some months after her boyfriend Ben Collins became the CEO of The Onion, which is headquartered in Chicago. This is very easy to verify, they're not secretive about their relationship.
I don't care. She had never once lived in the district before declaring her candidacy for it, and only somewhat recently moved into the district --- after starting her campaign for it. I don't care who her partner is.
Think about the message that campaign sends: nobody, in one of the most progressive districts in the country, is as qualified to faithfully represent its progressive ideals as Kat Abu, who has neither ever lived there nor ever held elective office. To me, that's a campaign of contempt for the district.
I've seen the videos of her getting shoved at Broadview. Her immigration politics seem in line with the district. My response to that is: stand on Noyes and Sheridan and throw a rock. You'll hit someone who has identical immigration politics to her.
IL CD9 gets to decide, not me (I'm in CD7). But I do have an opinion!
One thing to consider though - while I would normally agree with you on the job description of a congressional rep, there are some moments in history where performative-protest-as-candidate can do more good than ill. I think we're in one of those times, and I'm glad she's able to use the congressional platform to put the executive branch's policies and actions on display.
It's kind of too late for quick action. You're not going to turn the attitudes of Law Enforcement on a dime. We need a decades long effort to eliminate MAGA, White Supremacy, gangs, lawlessness and thuggery from thousands of local and state police forces nationwide. These attitudes have so thoroughly infiltrated policing for so long, it's going to take deliberate restructuring of these institutions and personnel replacement to resolve.
That attitude sounds like a really good way to be Brandon Johnson, the least popular mayor in the United States.
Pritzker can either solve the problem or he can't. It's fine if he can't. I couldn't solve it. Few could! But if he can't, he's not qualified to be President, a job that will send him harder problems than this. It's fine for him not to be President. Most people (waves at the Oval Office right now) shouldn't.
The NYPD all but threatened to kill Bill de Blasio's daughter when he tried to bring them to heel. I'm limiting myself to being furious at the fucking freaks terrorizing my city instead of creating new shit to get mad about. There's plenty as is.
He does not. People working in public service law could have told you that long before Trump won the election. That's sort of not on him; it's its own political power center. But that's his problem to solve now.
> He sent the Illinois State Police to help protect ICE from protestors as Broadview, freeing up their resources
You're literally saying the quiet part out loud.
So many people here are complaining that ICE is arresting US citizens, but you literally admit that they're interfering. And yes, it's illegal to "forcibly assault, resist, oppose, impede, intimidate, or interfere" with a federal officer. See https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/111
You can do up to 1 year in prison for minor offenses, or up to 20 for using weapons and causing injuries.
When we say they're arresting US citizens I'm referring to the brown people they're picking up off the streets purely for being brown. The lawncare guy they picked up the other day, on film and with paperwork, wasn't protesting or interfering with anything.
You're just making things up to justify this fascist take over.
It's not an exaggeration. People have been kidnapped by these armed masked idiots within two blocks of my house twice, and those are just the closest cases I know about. Go check out the /r/Illinois subreddit [0] to see what's happening.
It's a forum run by venture capital if that tells you anything. The "tech right" were one of the reasons Trump won this past election. It describes a voter bloc consisting of Libertarian/Thiel/Musk types who are very motivated by: immigration (H1B), deregulation, increasing their wealth, and gaining more power.
I live in the Chicago area and can confirm. Landscapers are afraid to work because they keep getting abducted off people's lawns. Out in the suburbs, a roofing crew was abducted mid-roof replacement, ICE left a hole in someone's house trying to abduct people working for a living.
Not at all exaggerated. The agents are lying about anything and everything even when there's evidence. One of them threw tear gas out of the window of their SUV because they were pissed to be stuck in traffic. They'll hit and run parked cars and flee the scene.
I live in Chicago and it is a BIG city. I've seen, in real life, none of this. But the online reports are legion. I think, like a lot of things, you can choose what reality you want to inhabit and find anecdata online to support any of it. During the Obama adminstration the right wing whackos came up with theories about black helicopters and UN camps and the rest. This may be _slightly_ more factual as the Orange Troll is more purposefully playing a media game, but I'd still take these reports with a grain of salt.
Can folks who live in Chicago confirm/deny/comment on the extent to which this article gets it right?
(I have no reason to believe that it's an exaggeration, but I sincerely hope that it is.)