Chicago:
What Is It Like to Be an Immigrant Today under This Administration?

December 8, 2025

The following is taken from a public presentation given in Chicago on November 16. The talk was given by an immigrant worker.

Whether you’re legal or illegal, it makes you feel like you are under attack. Just being an immigrant in this country, you are accused of being a criminal. That is completely disgusting. Immigrants are just workers who are part of the working class in this country, and always have been.

But we are being blamed for all the problems of society. We’re accused of taking jobs. We’re accused of stealing benefits. We’re accused of bringing drugs.

These kinds of verbal attacks have been going on for a long time. But now we are seeing an increase in physical attacks. Deportations aren’t new—under Obama, more people were deported per day than so far under Trump. But the government today is more openly racist, more violent detentions, more attempts to scare people into leaving the country. They try to scare workers by arresting them in really violent ways. ICE agents openly act like thugs on the streets, in masks, with no badges or warrants, in unmarked cars. If you are brown, look Mexican, that is a big crime for them. They will take you down to the ground to cuff your hands behind your back violently, whether you are a teenager or even an old man or woman. All this before asking anything about your papers or identity.

These are attacks on the whole working class.

Look at who they’ve arrested. The first person it was reported that ICE picked up in “Operation Midway Blitz” in Chicago was a flower vendor. Since then, they’ve arrested tamaleros [tamale street vendors], construction workers, mothers dropping their kids at school, people going to flea markets, as well as Uber drivers at the airport. A young woman teacher at a day care was dragged out in front of children. The man they killed in Franklin Park was a cook in a restaurant.

I’ve been in the U.S. for more than 40 years. In that time, I’ve worked in restaurants, on factory assembly lines. Assembling radios and various electronic parts. I have been a machine operator most of my lifetime. I’ve worked setting up injection molding machines, making plastic products. I worked as a CNC machine operator in a factory making locomotive engine parts. On my last job I was making power train parts for John Deere. Other people in my family have worked in many different factories working with metal, plastic, rubber and even candy. My family have worked in warehouses, restaurants, health clinics, the airport and CTA. In other words, my immigrant family have worked making this country run.

In those jobs, we’ve worked with all kinds of people. I’ve worked next to black workers, white workers, workers from China, India, Poland, Sudan, workers from the Middle East, even Afghanistan. In all those jobs, all of us workers had the same problems.

We were underpaid. We were overworked. We were equally exploited and squeezed to get all the juice out of us like apples.

We all worried about how to afford to pay our bills, how to raise our kids safely and how to educate them. We were all worried about how to get and afford decent health care. We all have to figure out how to take care of our elders who are too old to work.

And we all have the same enemies: the big corporations who make us work for little money. Our bosses in the companies we worked day after day are expecting more work from us for the same low pay. Then if they are not making enough profits, they turn around and close the plant or department to go somewhere else—as has happened to me four times in my working life time.

Now I’m faced with the problems of many workers my age: bad health, bad feet, bad vision, and no energy to do a ten-to-twelve-hour job. Those are the only jobs available for the type of work I have done. But even though I’m too old to keep working—I’m too young to retire. Those big bills keep coming!

But I’m not alone—most of those black, white, Chinese, Sudanese workers I’ve known have the same problems!

The capitalist class has a big crisis that is falling on workers. The cost of living is so high that all workers are living worse and worse.

So that’s the point of all these attacks on immigrant workers. The capitalists want workers born here to blame immigrants.

But attacking immigrant workers will only make things worse for all workers, even those born here.

First, by there being less workers, there will be even more exploitation on the ones who remain. And making immigrants scared will force them to accept even worse conditions—driving down the standard of living of all workers.

Plus, having all these thugs on the streets, getting us all used to seeing people get kidnapped for anything, is a preparation for more repression aimed at the whole population. Look at what they’ve done in Chicago: they raided a building in the black neighborhood of South Shore in the middle of the night, zip-tying black children and throwing them in a rental truck. They attacked white cemetery workers, journalists, young black youth who shouted at them to leave their friends alone, even the white manager of a comedy club who stood up to them.

So yes, these attacks on immigrants are attacks on all workers!

A History of Attacks

This is not the first time the capitalists have played this game.

When the Great Depression hit in the 1930s, they also attacked immigrants. They used immigrants as scapegoats for the massive unemployment of that time. In the first years of the 1930s, they deported more than a million people to Mexico, including many who had been born in this country. They rounded up whole families and put them on rail cars. They claimed this would create jobs for people born in this country.

But that did nothing to stop the Depression. Unemployment for people in this country kept growing after that, hitting an all-time high only after all those deportations. Companies kept cutting wages and benefits in general. They kept speeding up workers to try to regain their profits.

The only thing that turned around workers’ situation at that time was when workers finally came together and started to fight. In the 1930s, finally, workers led massive strikes that built the unions in the mass production industries, like the UAW that I used to be a member of. Those unions were built when workers confronted their real enemies: the corporations and the government that backs them, not other workers.

What this is teaching us is that only when workers organize and understand who our real enemy is and if we pull together to organize and fight against all these evils of society in the capitalist system there will be a real change. That’s the only way it will happen.

Workers Fight Back

It’s not clear if the attacks on immigrants today will work. Just recently the “Border Czar” Tom Homan announced that they were going to hire another ten thousand agents by the end of the year. Some people, neighborhoods and whole communities have come together. When ICE showed up on the border of Pilsen and Little Village, people were scared, running and yelling. But a crowd of brave people gathered and shouted at the agents to get out of the neighborhood. They were even joined by some young gang bangers. A woman even said, “Those gang bangers are joining us. I never felt so good to have them around.”

In Brighton Park, after agents hit a woman’s car and then shot her, a whole crowd gathered immediately. They were screaming that ICE were shooting at people in their neighborhood, so the crowd started throwing bottles and rocks and whatever they could find at agents’ cars, while the agents were throwing tear gas at people. That was the only way to drive them off.

On the East Side, after ICE crashed into another car intentionally, another big crowd gathered and again drove them off. In Albany Park and most recently Little Village, crowds again drove ICE off, stopping them from grabbing many immigrants.

Many businesses like restaurants and stores, at least in the Mexican neighborhoods, have joined to stop the ICE agents from coming inside their properties by posting “No ICE Allowed” signs in their premises, though sometimes the agents ignore these signs.

Neighborhood groups have also organized rapid response teams of volunteers. They keep an eye when and where ICE shows up in an area. When ICE is in Little Village, the rapid response teams come around the neighborhood to warn people, blowing whistles, shouting in the streets, asking people to stay inside the house because ICE is in the area.

No Solution from Democrats or Republicans

The Democrat politicians like Governor Pritzker or Mayor Johnson say that they are on the side of the immigrants and that they will do anything to help the immigrant workers. A Federal Judge cited the ICE boss in Illinois to tell him that they could not use tear gas or pepper spray on the crowds and they had to wear a body cam during any activity they have. But Greg Bovino and his people do not care; they keep doing it and keep trespassing into private properties, breaking into people’s cars and tossing pepper gas on people. It just happened in Little Village last week. ICE agents sprayed pepper gas at a passing car of a young family hitting a one-year-old baby in the eyes inside the car.

Community groups in Little Village just gathered last Tuesday, November 11^th in front of Police District 12 to protest against CPD. They are asking the CPD chief to investigate and stop protecting ICE. When there is a raid, the police get there to “make sure ICE agents are safe,” and they harass the protesters. The community and activists are saying to the police of Chicago that if they are not going to help the people, then leave us alone to defend ourselves.

Chicago is supposed to be an immigrant sanctuary city, and if the city politicians really wanted to help, they could enforce the laws and would have already arrested Bovino for different violations. But that is not going to happen.

Trump’s government and the right-wing media are saying that thanks to the ICE activity, crime is down in Chicago. They are saying that shootings are down 35%, robberies are down 41% and homicides are 16% down. But when reporters asked them where they got their stats, the government had no answer. No doubt, these are just lies, like all the other lies they tell.

Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans want to do anything about the problems workers have. They can’t say that workers have the right to a job, a decent retirement, healthcare, or a cost of living we can afford—because to actually get those things we would have to take back the wealth the corporations have stolen from workers’ labor. The only people who can do that are the workers ourselves. Instead, all they can do is try to get workers to blame other workers for our problems.

To defend our people, our neighborhoods and ourselves, we need to be organized as one class—no matter our background or what we look like. That’s why we need our own Working Class Party.