John, it’s been barely two weeks since the Trump administration began escalating its immigration arrest operations in the Chicago area, and there is no doubt that having federal agents in our neighborhoods is making our communities more afraid and less safe. Last Friday, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer shot and killed Silverio Villegas-González during a traffic stop in Franklin Park, a suburb of Chicago. Mr. Villegas-González was a single father who had just dropped his children off at school. His death is a heartbreaking demonstration of how ICE’s militarized presence is putting communities in real danger. The Trump administration is sending ICE agents to places like schools and courts to snatch people. ICE agents are breaking into cars and violently bursting into homes. Mr. Villegas-González was denied due process and his most basic human rights. We mourn his loss and the pain his loved ones are now facing. As ICE arrests and family separations continue across our region, I wanted to update you on how the NIJC team has been working to defend our communities and access to due process in this moment: - NIJC’s detention and rapid response teams have been working to contact and provide legal screenings for over 100 people who have been referred to us by the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights' Family Support Network hotline and rapid response networks throughout the area. One of the challenges they are facing is simply finding people in the system. ICE is deporting some people within a couple of days after detaining them, and for others it takes days for their locations to appear in ICE’s online locator system. ICE is not allowing most people to make phone calls after they are abducted and disappeared into the detention system.
- NIJC’s litigation team is further reviewing case referrals and videos provided by witnesses to identify potential violations of the Castañon Nava consent decree, which limits ICE officers’ ability to arrest people without warrants. Already, the team has identified dozens of people whose arrests may have violated the consent decree
- NIJC’s Know Your Rights team has reached more than 900 people through in-person presentations since the spring. They have educated thousands more in partnership with Chicago media outlets like South Side Weekly, CAN-TV, and WBEZ.
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| We know we face a long road ahead. The Trump administration is expanding detention capacity by several thousand beds in the Midwest, with plans to hold people in immigration detention in a state prison and military base in Indiana. In the first seven months of 2025, even before the current ICE surge, the administration had detained over 500 more people in Illinois than in all of 2024. Trump’s mass deportation agenda is out of control, and we must call on members of Congress to stop funding ICE abductions with our tax dollars, restore federal funding for critical community needs, and fix our broken immigration system so that it provides fair and attainable pathways to legal status and citizenship. Take action via Moms Rising to tell Congress to fund communities, not family separation and cruelty! | |
Thank you for joining us to defend our communities. Mary Meg McCarthy
Executive Director, National Immigrant Justice Center | |
