“Every morning at 7:30 a.m. and again at 2:30 p.m., I check the streets around my daughter’s school for masked men in SUVs,” said Marta Popadiak, who lives on Chicago’s North Side. “No family should have to live like this.”
Popadiak is one of the many Chicago parents who’ve joined an ICE patrol in their neighborhood to keep their children, and their neighbors’ children, safe. With whistles around their necks in case ICE vehicles are spotted, they walk groups of children safely to and from school buses.
ONE Northside, part of the People’s Action Institute national network of grassroots community groups, has helped organize these informal networks of neighbors helping neighbors across the city’s North Side, in coordination with the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIIR).
This initiative has quickly grown into a powerful, citywide coalition of churches, schools and neighborhood organizations. Together, volunteers source and verify information about ICE raids, then flood affected areas with concerned citizens.
“So many people are getting off the sidelines, and into the arena,” said Hannah Gelder, a mother of two elementary school children who organizes with ONE Northside. “Significant numbers of people are activating, getting involved, and taking new risks.”
On November 5, armed agents chased a daycare worker into a local childcare center, Rayito de Sol, as parents were dropping off their children for the day. That evening, more than 450 community members took part in a rally ONS helped organize with 47th Ward Alderman Matt Martin at the Northcenter Town Square, holding anti-ICE signs and chanting, “No hate, no fear. Everyone is welcome here.”
“We had masked ICE agents follow a daycare educator into the daycare, where there were parents. There were children,” Martin said at the rally. “They dragged an educator outside of her place of employment. As they were doing so, she said, ‘I have papers.’”
ONS has helped mobilize hundreds of volunteers and raised tens of thousands of dollars to help families whose loved ones have been detained, or who can no longer shop for groceries or pay rent because of the ICE raids, which began after Labor Day in Chicago as part of “Operation Midway Blitz.”
ICE has used increasingly aggressive tactics as part of the blitz, with agents rappelling out of airborne helicopters to raid an apartment building, tear gas, shooting protesters and detaining journalists.
When President Trump began threatening to send National Guard troops to Chicago in late August, ONS leapt into action.
“We began getting in touch with all our allies to identify what gaps were needed,” Gelder explained. “We decided to focus on three strategies: Know Your Rights education, rapid response, and neighbor-to-neighbor solidarity. Our goal was always to make it so that people vulnerable to federal agents – immigrants, young people, Black folks, the unhoused – can minimize their exposure while they’re here.”
ONS is helping set up “whistle brigades” and “sanctuary teams” across Chicago’s far North Side. More than two hundred people attended ONS’s inaugural rapid response launch meeting in September. More than 100 people have shown up each time for Know Your Rights canvassing shifts, many for the first time, and there are 375 ONS volunteers fielding and fulfilling urgent requests for support from families online.
“We are just one piece of an incredibly large and robust program happening around the city; thousands of people are doing incredible work right now,” said Gelder. “It’s incredible to see how many people have a good heart.”