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, 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 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 whose 15-year-old daughter is battling Stage 4 cancer; a junior who never reported to his homeroom 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; an overnight manager at a comedy club thrown to the ground in front of his mother and detained for hours; tamale vendors snatched from the streets; two women pulled from their car 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 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 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 in an indefinite government shutdown, where early childhood education is not universal—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, 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, 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 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, 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 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 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.
