CONFRONTING ICE AT BROADVIEW DETENTION CENTER
In these distressing times, it’s important to show up, to bear witness to injustice, to blend your voice with others in protest. Fascism has come to Chicago, wearing a mask, showing no badge, carrying no warrant, riding in an unmarked car, hidden behind smoked glass.
Yesterday, Saturday October 26th, my wife Victoria and I made our second trip to the Broadview ICE Facility, 12 miles west of downtown Chicago and a 45-minute drive from our home in Evanston. After the elation of being among the 250,000 American patriots at the “No Kings” rally in Grant Park the week before, we felt the need to return to the place where Kristie Noem’s brownshirts were committing their ongoing crimes against our Constitution.
These are the buses in which our unfortunate neighbors will be transported — to where?
On the drive to Broadview, we talked about the ton of money that Trump and his sadistic sidekick Stephen Miller have poured into their mass deportation regime. We wondered how many pardoned January 6th felons, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters and other right-wing militia thugs jumped at the chance to reap a $50,000 bonus and get paid to brutalize and terrorize marginalized, powerless immigrants – especially black and brown folk.
The ICE goons are in the distance, wearing masks. The County and Broadview officers are in the foreground. It’s an uneasy, forced partnership.
The ICE yahoos get to wear masks, carry guns, use tear gas, hit people with batons, break down doors, and do things no real cop can do. Due process? Not for our American Gestapo. Probable cause? How about just the color of a person’s skin? Show us your papers? I could go on…
When we got to the Broadview ICE facility, the protest location had been changed. The last time we were there, protestors lined one side of the driveway where the masked ICE thugs drove their unmarked cars into the detention center. We were able to confront the ICE goons as they came and went.
We couldn’t see into the various vans, sedans, mini-buses, and all the other smoked-glass vehicles to see who they’d snatched off our neighborhood streets. Transparency? That’s just something Republicans talk about when investigating Democrats. But when Trump, Miller and Noem want to make thousands of people disappear without a warrant? Move on. There’s nothing to see here.
This time, the protest zone had been moved to a spot about a hundred yards from
another facility entrance. We could see the ICE vehicles enter and leave – but they didn’t have to drive past us. They didn’t have to look at us. They didn’t have to hear us. They didn’t have to feel our rage. But we expressed ourselves anyway.
Some of our fellow protestors expressed themselves in creative ways. There was the guy with the bald eagle head who wore only his red-white-and-blue underwear and a pair of boots on this cold, autumn day. Three handmaidens stood silent witness. There were lots of funny costumes. How threatening could a man in a pink conical cap riding a unicorn be?
The folks in the middle were the County sheriffs and the Broadview cops. They were there to maintain order – especially the Broadview mayor’s 6:00 pm protest curfew. We tried to remind them that our First Amendment rights to assemble and engage in free speech do not have an expiration date – or hour. We asked them why they don’t wear masks, but the ICE goons do. We asked them if they knew what was going on in the detention center. We asked them, as professional policemen, if they were comfortable protecting guys who were arresting people without a warrant and affording them no due process.
The cops that stood between us and ICE answered none of our questions. But, boy, did they look uncomfortable. They could hear the constant honking as car after car passed nearby, blaring their support of our protest. The people in those cars are their constituents, their fellow citizens — the people they are sworn to serve and protect. Small wonder those cops looked uneasy.
It was well past 6:00 pm when Victoria and I left the protest and went home. I’m not sure how long the stalemate lasted. There were still hundreds of protestors in no mood to leave quietly. Next time, we’ll stay to the bitter end.
Go to Broadview and see for yourself.
Democracy dies in darkness.
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