LITTLE VILLAGE, Il. — The moment I got out of my Uber ride in this West Side Chicago neighborhood, the noise was everywhere.
Honks. Cursing. Screeching tires. Revving engines. Whistles. So many whistles.
Immigration authorities were sweeping through — again. And people weren’t having it.
Old, young, Latino, Black and white, folks shouted warnings from cars and from businesses like a game of Telephone across 26th Street, the heart of this historic Latino community. One of them was Eric Vandeford, who glanced in every direction for any sign of la migra.
“We all surrounded them earlier trying to get someone and they just left,” the 32-year-old said. He looked down 26th. “I gotta go,” he snapped and jogged off.
I arrived at 9:30 in the morning hoping to grab breakfast before interviewing Baltazar Enriquez. He’s president of the Little Village Community Council, a long-standing nonprofit that has added to its mission of organizing food drives and fighting against environmental racism to face off against Trump’s deportation machine.
Instead, I found myself in a chase to keep up with immigration agents.
Residents watch federal agents as they make a stop in the Brighton Park neighborhood of Chicago. Federal agents participating in Operation Midway Blitz engage in daily patrols through the city’s neighborhoods and surrounding suburbs searching for undocumented immigrants.
(Scott Olson / Getty Images)
Over the last two months, la migra has swept throughout Chicago but has swung its hammer with gusto on Little Village, known as La Villita by residents and considered the Mexican heart of the city. Imagine the density of Pico-Union with the small-town feel of Boyle Heights and the fierce pride of South L.A., then mix in murals and nationally known Mexican restaurants — Carnitas Uruapan, Taqueria El Milagro.
It’s a charming barrio, and it’s been under siege, like many other neighborhoods in the Windy City.
Immigration agents have staged operations in the parking lots of local schools before grabbing undocumented immigrants and citizens alike. When Border Patrol commander-at-large Gregory Bovino swung by in late October, he tossed a tear gas canister toward a group of protesters filming him, a move so reprehensible that a federal judge issued an injunction banning such force the morning I was in Little Village.
Now, the rumor was that Bovino was cruising around with a caravan.
He’s the man the Trump administration tasked with its deportation deluge in Southern California this summer before moving on to Chicago. In L.A., Bovino mostly mugged for the cameras, like the time he oversaw an invasion of an emptied MacArthur Park in July with the National Guard parked on Wilshire Boulevard. Bovino said it was necessary to stop transnational gangs, but he nabbed no one.
In Chicago, Bovino has dialed the cruelty and spectacle to 11. Residents have responded in kind in a way I haven’t seen in Southern California. Sure, Angelenos have organized block patrols and group chats and enlisted the help of politicians and nonprofit leaders just like Chicago.
But we don’t have the whistles.
They’ve become the fall soundtrack of the Windy City to the point organizers are holding “Whistlemania” events to hand them out by the thousands. Chicago has a radical legacy that predates L.A. by decades — anarchists, socialists and immigrants were fighting back against government-sponsored thugs when L.A. was still a relative cow town.
The suburban apathy that has kept too many Southern Californians on the sidelines as immigration agents sweep into our cities was nowhere to be felt in Little Village. People poured out of businesses and their residences. Others looked out from rooftops. The intensity of their pushback was more concentrated, raw and widespread than almost anything I’ve seen back home.
It wasn’t just the activists on call — block after block was ready.
Honks and whistles went off toward the west. I ran toward them and met Rogelio Lopez Jr. He was going inside grocery stores and discount marts to let people know that el hielo — ICE — was nearby.
Federal agents, including from Border Patrol and the Bureau of Prisons, stop a resident and request to see his proof of citizenship in Chicago. The man produced the required documents and was allowed to go free.
(Scott Olson / Getty Images)
The 53-year-old Little Village resident was enjoying lunch with his father at Carniceria Aguascalientes the day Bovino unleashed his mayhem nearby. He and other customers bolted to confront the Border Patrol bigwig.
“I’m sure he was thinking, ‘Here’s this guy standing in front of my force with a stupid little whistle in my territory.’ No, you’re in our territory.”
A minivan stopped near us and rolled down its window. “We lost them by Central and 26th!” shouted 32-year-old Mariana Ochoa from the back seat as she held her son on her lap. Joining us now was a masked 18-year-old college student who went by Ella and is a U.S. citizen along with her parents. She rattled off all the locations where her WhatsApp group had spotted ICE that morning. Lopez texted them to his own group.
Ella took a call from her mother.
“I’ll be back home soon, Ama,” the college student said in Spanish. “Love you. Stay inside.”
Angry residents gathered on street corners. Many had whistles — pink, black, orange, green — around their necks. Lopez handed one to Juan Ballena, who immediately used it — a shrill, reedy blast soon answered by others.
He waved up and down 26th Street. “Look at the buildings,” said the 61-year-old. “Closed. Closed. Closed. These migra are ruining a beautiful town.”
Nearby, 64-year-old Flavio Luviano stood outside his wife’s bistro with a whistle in one hand and a laminated know-your-rights card in the other. Business is down — and so is trust.
“I always have the door locked,” said the dual Mexican and U.S. citizen in Spanish. “People will come who aren’t from here and say, ‘Let me in’ and I tell them, ‘No, only with a warrant.’ They get angry, and I say, ‘I don’t care, we need to protect the people we know.’”
Three blocks toward the east, the horns and screams and whistles I had heard an hour ago were going off again. ICE had just passed by.
The stocky Enriquez stood in the middle of the street trying to clear cars whose drivers had tried to block off what they said were undercover immigration agents. People around him were scrambling in every direction while on their phones letting others know what had just happened. “I got their … license plates on my phone!” a woman yelled to no one in particular.
Most had whistles around their necks.
Wearing Crocs, a puffer jacket and sweats, Enriquez looked like a defensive end about to start a training session.
Soon, we were off again.
Border Patrol agent Gregory Bovino speaks with other federal agents during a gas station stop before resuming immigration arrests in Chicago.
(Jamie Kelter Davis / Getty Images)
Esparza and the driver, Lissette Barrera, sped up and down Little Village’s narrow tree-lined streets, many with signs that read “Hands Off Chicago” inside the city’s flag scheme. They alternated between blowing their whistles, pounding on the car horn and yelling “¡Anda la migra!”
Immigration agents always seemed a few minutes ahead. Reports via texts said they were asking people about their legal status. Some were detained.
We finally parked underneath the Little Village Arch, a colonial-style gateway crossing over the part of 26th Street where Uber dropped me off earlier. A crowd was waiting for Enriquez to hear his game plan: “No ramming, no throwing, no nothing. Just follow and film.”
A Chicago police officer passed by. “Ya se fueron [They’re gone],” he told Enriquez very matter-of-factly. “The whistles worked.”
Steven Villalobos pulled up in a raised truck with a giant Mexico flag flapping from its cab. It was his first-ever protest.
“I’ve been seeing this for months and enough was enough — I had to join,” said the Little Village lifer. Near him, Amor Cardenas nodded.
“It sucks that my mom can’t even go to … Ross, bro,” said the 20-year-old. She was still in her pajamas. “You don’t understand this feeling of terror until it’s in front of you. Then, there’s no turning back.”
Barrera and I jumped in the back seat of another car as Enriquez took the wheel. She opened a bag of Sabritones and passed it to two other passengers. The four of them had just returned home on an overnight bus from Washington, D.C., where they participated in an anti-Trump protest at the National Mall.
Enriquez drove slower. He and a volunteer named Lille logged on to Instagram and livestreamed from their respective phones to an audience of about a thousand.
“Those who have papers, come out and patrol,” he said in Spanish in a deep voice. “Those who don’t, stay inside.”
“Tell Baltazar that I’m going to buy him a caguama,” Lille said someone had commented. A tall boy of beer.
For the first time all morning, Enriquez smiled. “Make it two.”
The 46-year-old Enriquez was born in Michoacán, came to Chicago without papers as a child and received his American citizenship thanks to the 1986 amnesty. He cut his activist teeth with the Assn. of Community Organizations for Reform Now, better known as ACORN, before becoming the Little Village Community Council vice president in 2008.
A rapid responder blows a whistle to warn residents of an approaching caravan of federal agents in Chicago.
(Scott Olson / Getty Images)
Espinoza said the idea of using whistles to alert people about ICE in Chicago started in Little Village but came indirectly from Los Angeles. During a June Zoom call, Enriquez heard activists say they couldn’t communicate with one another while protesting outside the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown L.A. after their cellphones suddenly stopped working.
“So I thought we needed low tech to beat that if it happened here,” Enriquez said as we cruised past a city-owned lot where ICE had staged operations weeks earlier. Signs now said immigration agents weren’t allowed. “People at first thought the whistles were a joke. But then we used them once and la migra took off — and it spread like wildfire.”
We were now in nearby Brighton Park. He was following a tip that Bovino was approaching residents himself.
“They just tear-gassed someone!” someone yelled over the phone. “They’re taking people right now.”
The call cut short.
Enriquez tried to speed back to Little Village but hit construction traffic. Barrera jumped out of the car to grab two traffic cones. “To trap pepper balls when ICE fires them,” she explained.
Another call. “They got my son,” a woman quietly said in Spanish.
“Go to the [Little Village Community Council] office and we’ll help,” Enriquez replied.
“I can’t go out. I don’t have papers.”
When we passed an elementary school off Western Avenue, Barrera screamed in Spanish, “Take in the kids because la migra is driving around!” Teachers immediately blew their whistles and rushed their students inside.
Amid the Trump administration’s Operation Midway Blitz, residents watch a parade while celebrating Mexican Independence Day in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood on Sept. 14.
(Brandon Bell / Getty Images)
ICE was out of Little Village — for now. Enriquez logged back on to Instagram Live.
“Good job, guys. Stay on their ICE nalgas.”
We took a right on 26th toward the Little Village Community Center’s small office. “We’re going to take a break,” Enriquez told his audience. We’ve gotta get pizza for everyone.”
Bilingual signs taped to the storefront window read “ICE OUT!” and “Free Whistles.”
“It was just supposed to be the bad people that they were going to target, they told us, but that didn’t happen,” said Nayeli Girón, a 24-year-old student. She wore a jacket that read “Southwest,” the name of a nearby neighborhood. “Every day it’s a different story. That’s why we need to stand up.”
Enriquez told everyone to gather around.
Time to learn how to defuse a pepper ball.