[[link removed]]

ICE IS TERRORIZING CHICAGO FOR HALLOWEEN  
[[link removed]]


 

Meredith Shiner
October 31, 2025
The New Republic
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Parents are fighting back. Fear and a whiff of tear gas hang over
festivities this year. In response, even people who aren’t usually
politically engaged are mobilizing. _

Political cartoon of Kristie Noem, , by Llyn Hunter (CC)

 

The group chat pings around school drop-off and dismissal time. “All
quiet at [Elementary School X],” one message says, or “smooth
sailing at [Middle School Y].” Neighbors are on heightened alert
because a federal government helicopter has been doing laps over our
communities on Chicago’s Northwest Side.

On a week when parents are typically picking up bags of candy from the
store and getting their kids’ costumes ready, all across our city
since the Trump administration launched its so-called “Operation
Midway Blitz,” Chicagoans find themselves resorting to ad hoc
communications plans like this one, often bolstered by their local
alderpeople or state representatives. They check their Signal or rapid
response team accounts on Instagram
[[link removed]], circulating hastily
created Google docs listing schools that might need extra volunteers
to help ensure that children can safely enter or exit buildings,
accompanied by an adult, since Immigrations and Customs Enforcement
and Customs and Border Protection have escalated their randomized
violence in ways that seem specifically designed to drive anxiety and
fear.

In Broadview, a suburb to the west, the fight between the Trump
administration and Chicago residents has been more dramatic, recently
leading to the bad-faith criminal indictment
[[link removed]]
of four Democratic officials protesting at the ICE detention facility
there. But the terror being inflicted upon the city as a whole is more
random and diffuse: a dad taken from a Home Depot parking lot
[[link removed]]
whose 15-year-old daughter is battling Stage 4 cancer; a junior who
never reported to his homeroom
[[link removed]]
at Benito Juarez High School; a landscaper taken from a yard in one of
the city’s whitest, most affluent neighborhoods in a cloud of tear
gas
[[link removed]]; an
overnight manager at a comedy club
[[link removed]]
thrown to the ground in front of his mother and detained for
hours; tamale vendors snatched from the streets
[[link removed]]; two
women pulled from their car
[[link removed]]
in a school pickup line in front of parents and students.

The through line here is an intimidation campaign being carried out in
front of our kids, or even targeting our kids. Maybe you missed it in
the crush of other horrific headlines, but earlier this week, after
federal authorities released tear gas just before a parade on the
city’s Northwest Side, a U.S. district court had to declare to our
federal government that children should not be tear-gassed for the
crime of showing up to holiday celebrations: “Kids dressed in
Halloween costumes walking to a parade do not pose an immediate threat
to the safety of a law enforcement officer,” U.S. District Judge
Sara Ellis told
[[link removed]]
Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino, a man who hates Halloween for
children but loves to cosplay for work every day, in a hearing
Tuesday. “You can’t use riot-control weapons against them,” she
continued. “These kids, you can imagine their sense of safety was
shattered on Saturday. And it’s going to take a long time for that
to come back, if ever.”

***

There are any number of ways that you could argue that we got to this
place, where a federal judge is scolding a petulant U.S. government
official about unleashing chemical agents on children on Halloween.
And I’m sure any number of political pundits in Washington, D.C.,
might slice up this story into a meaningless pile of polls, Sunday
morning talk-show sound bites, and savvy takes to downplay its
seriousness in favor of focusing on the economy or whatever else it is
they think is important to “real Americans.”

But I would argue that in America—where an estimated three million
children
[[link removed]] are
exposed to school shootings every year, where 16 million children who
rely on government assistance to be fed are at risk of losing those
benefits
[[link removed].]
in an indefinite government shutdown, where early childhood education
is not universal
[[link removed].]—there
is nothing more serious or damning than government dysfunction making
safety the ceiling for our children, as opposed to the floor.

Broken government has made a safe, secure, and happy childhood a
privilege, not a right. If you have ever been incensed about
governmental inaction in the face of school shootings and the trauma
they cause, then you should also be enraged that a new form of
randomized terror and collective trauma is happening in America’s
cities right now. Kids and parents are being abducted, and the
government is not just sitting on the sidelines: It’s the one doing
the abducting.

In Chicago, it is increasingly clear that even people  previously
unengaged in politics are fed up. They are taking matters into their
own hands, deciding that if the government wants to show our children
terror, they want to show them participation, community, and joy.

That’s where the school watches come in at drop-off and dismissal.
Candy drives for Halloween are also taking place across the city, like
in Chicago’s 30th ward, where the alderman’s office is working
with local churches and schools to collect and distribute candy for
kids and families too fearful to leave their homes. A recent
parent-teacher conference day at an elementary school on Chicago’s
Northwest Side was used by a neighbor as an opportunity to host one of
the many “whistle packing” parties that have popped up across the
city
[[link removed]],
with the goal of distributing whistles and zine-style instructions for
how to alert others if you see ICE agents.

A new grassroots group, Moms for Democracy
[[link removed]], has emerged from a
living room in Lincoln Park, co-led by a former staffer to the late
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Regan Lachapelle. Lachapelle, who
came to America from Canada and was inspired to work in Congress after
a high school field trip to Washington, did not fully realize what she
was starting last spring, when a group of 14 local moms gathered at
her home and she started writing down their ideas on her second
grader’s easel.

Some of the mothers in the group organized a drive to collect candy
from their neighborhood and deliver it to an elementary school in
Little Village, home to a 75 percent Mexican population
[[link removed]] and one of the
communities hardest hit by ICE. Tuesday night, they hosted their own
whistle-packing event. And earlier this month, a pre–No Kings
protest family rally in Chicago’s Oz Park drew more than 1,000
people [[link removed]], many of them
children, who designed posters, chalked the sidewalk, and blew bubbles
as their parents talked about what democracy means to them.

“For me, and this is the case for all the women participating in
this, we see this moment as showing our kids that we showed up, that
we stood up for our rights, for our freedom, for our ability to
participate in our democracy, and for kids to enjoy the same
privileges of that democracy that we did,” Lachapelle said.

She said she often encounters people who feel like the barrier to
entry to engaging in politics is too high. But other moms are quickly
learning that their skills and their presence is enough to get
started. “The spark of hope and the spark of action is a threat,”
she said, to an administration that is counting on fear. “It is the
thing that helps to inspire people collectively, and the moms
participating here are feeling that and they’re all able to bring
their own skills and their own abilities to this.”

***
For most people, the rubble of the East Wing of the White House is the
most potent symbol of the utter destruction created by the Trump
administration. But for me, it’s 16-year-old Ofelia Torres, a
Chicago girl with Stage 4 bone cancer, posing for a portrait in the
_Chicago Tribune_
[[link removed]]_
_with her mother, Sandibell Hidalgo, on their living room couch. Her
father, Ruben Torres Maldonado, was taken by federal agents in the
parking lot of a Home Depot in suburban Niles. The family also
includes a 4-year-old boy, Nathan.

_Tribune _reporter Gregory Royal Pratt wrote that this Chicago family
is currently “fighting cancer and the United States government,”
two battles no parent should ever have to consider, especially not
concurrently. “We came because this is a great country, because our
lives were gonna be better,” Hidalgo told the_ Tribune._ “He
belongs with her, and especially in this portion, because we don’t
know if she’s gonna make it.” On Thursday, Maldonado was released
on bond
[[link removed]] as
he awaits his deportation hearing.

But however Maldonado’s case proceeds from here, what’s happening
now will impact people in Chicago for the rest of our lives: Ofelia is
a member of a community, a high schooler with friends, a girl with a
young brother who might not fully grasp what’s happening to him now
but will one day be old enough to google his name and piece together
how his childhood was inalterably impacted by a series of the worst
events imaginable.

As Chicagoans carry their whistles in their pockets, alongside our
kids’ trick-or-treating bags tonight, we know that some are risking
more than others, that some can speak up and others cannot, that some
of us are protected by how we look. But we also are hoping that if we
are out in big numbers, if we put signs where people have been taken
by ICE, if we organize and support each other enough, we can
counterbalance all the horrible things our kids are absorbing right
now. Maybe we can even prevent one person from being taken or keep one
family together.

In the absence of certainty about how this will all play out or when
it will end, we are starting to coalesce around truths that cannot be
distorted or obscured by partisan politics or warped by propaganda:
Our kids should be able to enjoy Halloween because childhood is not
frivolous. Our kids should live without fear of their friends not
showing up to homeroom, because their friends matter. Our kids should
live without fear that their family will be attacked by the government
like cancer is attacking their bodies, because they need their dads as
they go through chemo.

But our kids also will never know another America but this one. Where
their federal government consistently failed them, their neighbors,
without any real instruction on how to do it, showed up to try to let
them know they are valued and loved.

_MEREDITH SHINER_ [[link removed]]_
is a contributing editor for The New Republic and a communications
consultant based in Chicago. She covered Congress and national
politics in Washington from 2009 to 2016._
_The New Republic_ [[link removed]]_ was founded in 1914 to
bring liberalism into the modern era. The founders understood that the
challenges facing a nation transformed by the Industrial Revolution
and mass immigration required bold new thinking._

_Today’s New Republic is wrestling with the same fundamental
questions: how to build a more inclusive and democratic civil society,
and how to fight for a fairer political economy in an age of rampaging
inequality. We also face challenges that belong entirely to this age,
from the climate crisis to Republicans hell-bent on subverting
democratic governance._

_We’re determined to continue building on our founding mission._

_Sign up_ [[link removed]]_ for a TNR
newsletter on politics, climate, culture and more._

* Immigration and Customs Enforcement
[[link removed]]
* chicago
[[link removed]]
* Kristi Noem
[[link removed]]
* children
[[link removed]]
* Parents
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Bluesky [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]