The Fears of the Undocumented

Last Sunday, at a Spanish-language mass at St. Paul’s Catholic Church in Pilsen, on the Lower West Side of Chicago, Father Arturo Pérez spoke of our moment. “Nobody is more important than anyone else,” he said. “What happens to one happens to all of us. What one suffers we all suffer.” Outside, ICE raids had begun. They were hardly secret. The Drug Enforcement Agency had announced on X that they were conducting raids in Chicago in partnership with the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security. Phil McGraw, better known as Dr. Phil, was embedded with the border czar, Tom Homan, in a command center at an undisclosed location and in the neighborhoods where the raids were conducted, covering them live on Merit TV, his new conservative media platform.

In a segment called “Behind Closed Borders” McGraw displayed a map of Chicago that showed where targets were thought to be situated, and read aloud the various crimes that they had been convicted of. To hear McGraw and Homan talk about it, ICE was only after sex offenders, gang members, and murderers. In other media appearances, however, Homan had seemed to allow for the possibility of wider sweeps. Suggesting that anyone who had entered the country illegally could get arrested, he told ABC News, “If you’re in the country illegally, you got a problem.” He has talked about the possibility of “collateral arrests,” which could happen if an undocumented immigrant was with one of ICE’s targets at the time of arrest. And he has also stated that, over time, ICE will “open the aperture” of their operations. The Administration echoed Homan. When the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, was asked how many of the thirty-five hundred undocumented immigrants arrested by ICE in the past week have criminal records, she responded, “All of them, because they illegally broke our nation’s laws.” (Entering the country without inspection or admission can be a misdemeanor or felony, but being undocumented in the U.S. is not by itself a crime. Many undocumented immigrants enter the country legally but then violate the terms of their visas, and most immigration cases are heard in civil rather than criminal courts.)

The raids in Chicago were expected to begin the day after Trump’s Inauguration. In the outlying town of Cicero and the southwest neighborhood of Little Village, businesses catering to the Latino community were open—restaurants, grocery stores, Western Unions—but the streets were relatively empty. It was hard to say if this was more a result of ICE or the subzero temperatures. Some parents kept their kids home from school, or had friends who are U.S. citizens pick them up. Some adults stayed home from work. For the sake of children who might return from school to find that their families had been taken, one undocumented parent told the Chicago Tribune, “All we can do is take all precautions and stay home as long as we can.”

Local news and social media lit up when federal agents attempted to enter a public elementary school in the Back of the Yards neighborhood, on Chicago’s southwest side. School officials, believing that the agents were from ICE, rebuffed them and put the school on lockdown. Bogdana Chkoumbova, Chicago Public Schools’ Chief Education Officer, invoked the Illinois TRUST Act and Chicago’s Welcoming City Ordinance, saying that CPS schools don’t inquire about a student’s immigration status, and wouldn’t coöperate with ICE. Later reports clarified that the agents were from the Secret Service, and that they were there to investigate an unspecified threat related to the government’s TikTok ban. In a letter sent to families on Saturday, Pedro Martinez, the C.E.O. of Chicago Public Schools, said, “While this incident was due to a misunderstanding, it reflects the fear and anxiety that is present in our city right now.”

I talked with an undocumented woman from Veracruz, Mexico, who told me that she is “very afraid” that she’ll get deported. She crossed into Texas three years ago, and travelled straight to Chicago, where she had family. She found work washing dishes at an Italian restaurant. She supplements her income by selling tamales, mole, and other traditional Mexican dishes out of her apartment on weekends, and sometimes cleans houses. She met her husband, who is also undocumented and works in construction, on Facebook. Unlike her, he arrived in the U.S. about twenty years ago, and he believes that Trump is right to want to rid Chicago and other American cities of criminal immigrants. Her husband tells her not to worry, because he doesn’t think anything will happen to her. “I do calm down,” she said, “but I always think about it.”

I also spoke to the child of undocumented immigrants, who said that he had bought his parents AirTags, so he could follow their movements in case they got picked up. He had them sign a power-of-attorney document, giving him control of their property for twenty years, which, he estimates, would cover the period his father might have to wait before reëntering the country if he is sent back to Mexico. He also gave his father a week’s wages, so that he could stay home from work; the son told me that he had lied and said that he had received grant money to help the family. “I knew he wouldn’t take it if he knew it was coming from me,” he said.

Last December, Homan told a Republican group at a holiday party that the mass deportations Trump promised during his campaign would “start right here in Chicago.” But the fear felt by the city’s immigrants did not begin then. It is a more or less permanent condition. “The bad thing is that the anxiety has been there for a while,” Ambassador Reyna Torres Mendivil, the consul-general of Mexico in Chicago, told me. “It consumes the emotional aspects and mental health of the community.” As undocumented immigrants build homes they’ll never be able to afford, prepare food, bus tables, clean office buildings, and care for kids—both others’ and their own—they live with the fact that they could, at least in theory, get deported at any moment.

Dana Rusch, a professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of Illinois Chicago and the director of the university’s Immigrant Family Mental Health Advocacy Program, told me that, since Trump was elected, and especially after his Inauguration, her patients have come to their sessions, often in tears, and asked questions like: “What if my dad doesn’t come home? What if they pick me up on the street? What if ICE comes to my school? What if my parents have to go back, and I’m all alone? What if something happens when we come to the clinic?” For years, Rusch noted, there have been threats of raids and removals, and each one produces anxiety. But in recent weeks, she said her patients’ distress was striking. People “who had been doing well with their coping skills are now overwhelmed by a sense of fear.” What they’re experiencing, she said, is a compounded stress; the latest manifestation of years, if not decades, of fear.

The Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (I.C.I.R.R.) is one of several organizations that prepared for the raids. They’ve hosted informational “Know Your Rights” workshops in immigrant-dense neighborhoods, instructing community members about what they should do in the event of encounters with ICE officers. (You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to refuse entry to your home.) With other area groups, I.C.I.R.R. filed a lawsuit against ICE and the Trump Administration, claiming that the raids were retaliatory because of Chicago’s status as a sanctuary city.

Organizing against the raids is also taking place within Chicago’s Latino and immigrant communities. Neighborhood Facebook pages have quickly become important sites for immigrants to share information. Once the raids were announced, several community members posted about ICE sightings. One asked community members if they knew of immigration lawyers or rapid-response groups whom they could go to for help. Another recommended barricading doors and installing home-surveillance cameras.

Facebook also became a place for immigrants and their families to share their anxieties and to debate the new Administration’s true intentions. Echoing McGraw and Homan, some wrote that Trump only sought to deport criminals. Even after Trump announced that schools, churches, and hospitals will no longer be off limits, some speculated that ICE would only enter them to pursue a criminal immigrant seeking refuge inside. (So far, there aren’t any confirmed reports of ICE making arrests in these “sensitive areas,” but Homan and other Administration officials have defended the policy shift.) Some confident posters told people who were afraid that the arrests would be more sweeping to stop spreading mamadas, which in this context means something like “bullshit rumors.” One poster said that community members couldn’t live in fear. His recommendation was that they should “stay alert, but don’t enclose yourself in a bubble.” Another tried to make light of the situation: “Fake it til u make it