This is really sad to read!

Can folks who live in Chicago confirm/deny/comment on the extent to which this article gets it right?

(I have no reason to believe that it's an exaggeration, but I sincerely hope that it is.)

I live in Chicago, and this article doesn't even scratch the surface of how bad it is. My wife went to the beach yesterday for 10 minutes to try and rest from the chaos and a fucking black hawk helicopter buzzed by her. They literally fly over my house daily.

People, US citizens included, are literally being abducted. People have been shot and killed by masked agents. People have had their children abandoned on the side of the road after being kidnapped. Just today they raided Little Village with hundreds of masked troops. I'm in a dozen signal groups to get alerted about where things are.

What scares me the most is how few people seem to actually know what is happening here. I talk to people outside of Chicago, and watch the news, and I don't see or hear about anything that's going on here. I tell them what's happening and they are shocked.

It is impossible to convey what is happening here, how scared we all are for this country, and how much things seem to escalate every single day that this goes on.

Edit: This post has been flagged and hidden, just demonstrating how much this country wants to pretend this isn't happening. It's unflagged now, but the fact that anyone would want to hide what's happening here shows how bad things are for all of us.

I live in Oak Park, just outside Chicago (and adjacent to Broadview, where the major regional ICE detention center is).

We have daily ICE sitings, and approximately every-other-day ICE detentions or arrests. It's a constant presence.

What it means psychologically depends. If you're someone who could visually be mistaken (perhaps in bad faith) for a Latino, it's a very big problem. ICE/DHS routinely stops people based on their visual appearance, it takes 15 minutes for them to work out that you're present legally, and throughout the whole thing you have hanging over you that they might just decide to detain you at Broadview anyways, which is a nightmare even assuming your eventual release.

If you're not someone like that --- at least where I live --- you can mostly ignore what's happening, if that's what you want to do. People are basically living their lives. About the closest an ordinary white/Black family here gets to direct disruption is needing to make special arrangements with their landscaping people.

In a way, the article understates how bad it is. I live in Chicago, and in my neighborhood every lamp post (and mailbox, and other surface) has a poster detailing your rights. “Fuck ICE” (and related) signs all over. Most businesses and a lot of houses in my neighborhood have signs explicitly stating that ICE is not welcome inside without a warrant. My coffee shop regularly has free whistles to take, so you can help alert others.

Just a few days ago I was working at a coffee shop and got a rapid response notice that ICE was about a block from me. I got a few more that day, all within a few blocks of my house.

It is incredibly stressful. I married people, have kids who are not white - they are a target. I pray every day that the next daycare raid isn’t my sons daycare, that ICE doesn’t stop my husband as he goes to work, that my mother-in-law doesn’t get snatched off the street when she walks to Target.

It’s bad.

I'm an immigrant in Chicago (fortunately not one of the racial groups they're targeting) and I follow it pretty closely - yeah it's all really happening. I saw kids get taken away in front of where I live and others just a few streets down

The abuse of power there is ridiculous

In the northern suburbs of Chicago, we often hear helicopters circling. A gardener was taken on my block. The home owner told the masked agent he didn't have permission to be on his property, and the agent pointed a gun at him.

If you suspect anything is exaggerated, you can look to dozens of videos posted online of how these people act and speak. They roll in caravans of unmarked SUVs. Last week they rolled up to an elementary school (https://www.reddit.com/user/rubinass3/comments/1ol319f/ice_d...).

[Here](https://x.com/LongTimeHistory/status/1986936912134000877) is a particularly hard to watch video of ICE tackling a nonverbal man.

Things feel bad to me in a way (I suppose I'm fortunate to be able to say) they haven't until now. I normally can see the "other side" of issues but I can't fathom how this is what anybody wants. I'm angry and I'm sad.

If there's a silver lining, the community is fired up. The mayor of Evanston talked with an awesome woman who was detained while peacefully protesting (https://danielbiss.substack.com/p/daniel-biss-talks-with-det...). It's a weird and sad time.

My kids school has started doing drills with the students in what to do when ice shows up. Like they do for tornadoes. They need to because ICE is using schools as raid locations every day.

It's all really happening. Pretty much every meeting with friends touches on what their recent sightings or stories of ICE terror have been. Everyone who hasn't seen it first hand has a second hand story.

Absolutely everyone I talk to is against ICE's actions and that is the thing giving me hope that it will be defeated by the citizenry.

Have you been ignoring the reports? This is a small slice of the carnage the government has unleashed. They've detained at least 170 US citizens so far for hours or days, shot numerous US citizens, killed US citizens, killed tens of people in detention, the detention center conditions are torture so people intentionally self deport, the people who are deported disappear, are never heard from again ...............

It is really bad. A glimmer of hope is a governor with a spine.

https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/the-new-yorker-radio-hour/...

worse, here's the chicago ICE commander performing a nazi salute to taunt people and then pretending he was playing rock paper scissors when he saw he was being recorded. https://www.reddit.com/r/chicago/comments/1os3ez6/greg_bovin...

Every bit of it is true and there's more that he doesn't mention, probably because it's not as well documented yet.

Did you look at the links he posted? Have you seen the news reports he linked to? This is all actually happening right now. Please, read all he linked to an watched the videos of ICE kidnapping people violently.

https://chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/2025/11/05/daycare-...

I live in the Chicago area and can confirm. Landscapers are afraid to work because they keep getting abducted off people's lawns. Out in the suburbs, a roofing crew was abducted mid-roof replacement, ICE left a hole in someone's house trying to abduct people working for a living.

It's not an exaggeration. People have been kidnapped by these armed masked idiots within two blocks of my house twice, and those are just the closest cases I know about. Go check out the /r/Illinois subreddit [0] to see what's happening.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/illinois/

Not at all exaggerated. The agents are lying about anything and everything even when there's evidence. One of them threw tear gas out of the window of their SUV because they were pissed to be stuck in traffic. They'll hit and run parked cars and flee the scene.

I live in Chicago and it is a BIG city. I've seen, in real life, none of this. But the online reports are legion. I think, like a lot of things, you can choose what reality you want to inhabit and find anecdata online to support any of it. During the Obama adminstration the right wing whackos came up with theories about black helicopters and UN camps and the rest. This may be _slightly_ more factual as the Orange Troll is more purposefully playing a media game, but I'd still take these reports with a grain of salt.