January 30, 2026
A letter from Jamie Kalven:
I wrote the following essay in mid-November toward the end, at least for the moment, of “Operation Midway Blitz,” the occupation of Chicago by Border Patrol and ICE agents. Two and a half months later, it has in certain respects been overtaken by events–above all, the federal siege of Minneapolis and large-scale civil disobedience by that city’s residents. In other respects, those events have sharpened its central theme: the indivisibility of fundamental constitutional rights.
It has been said that history doesn’t repeat itself but that it sometimes rhymes. The killing by federal agents of Renee Good and Alex Pretti–white U.S. citizens–in the midst of a merciless assault on immigrants in the city where police murdered George Floyd is such a time.
“Even in the darkest of times,” Hannah Arendt once wrote, “we have the right to expect some illumination.” She went on to observe that “such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and in their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances.”
Those words resonate in our dark times. For three months this fall, masked Border Patrol and ICE agents in battle gear conducted immigration raids in neighborhoods across Chicago. Their stated mission was to make those neighborhoods safe by apprehending “the worst of the worst”–undocumented violent criminals who prey on those who live here. The reality was a chaotic dragnet operation of indiscriminate racial profiling and a theater of cruelty. When community members came into the streets to protest, they were routinely met with tear gas and pepper spray.
From the perspective of the Trump regime, these actions are not abuses. They are the mission. They send the intended message. When an interviewer on “60 Minutes” asked the president whether ICE raids “had gone too far”—--citing incidents in Chicago in which agents threw a young mother to the ground, used tear gas in residential neighborhoods and smashed car windows–he replied, “I think they haven’t gone far enough because we’ve been held back by judges.”
Elected officials and the civil rights bar have indeed seized every opportunity to bring legal challenges, and federal district judges have resoundingly affirmed fundamental constitutional guarantees of due process and freedom of speech and assembly. This robust legal response is rooted in no small part in the arguments, history of practice, and working relationships developed over many years of collective effort to advance police accountability and transparency in Chicago, work in which the Invisible Institute has been deeply involved.
For the moment, the siege of Chicago has relented. The future is uncertain. Will a greatly enlarged federal force return in the spring, as promised by the Department of Homeland Security? Will legal constraints prove enforceable, in view of the fact that federal agents on Chicago streets repeatedly and openly violated the terms of an injunction imposed by a federal judge?
Despite these uncertainties, the vigorous judicial articulation of constitutional principles has been heartening. Even more heartening–a source of flickering illumination amid the growing darkness–has been the way Chicago residents in neighborhoods across the city have defended those principles in action by attempting to protect their neighbors and to bear witness to the abuses committed by federal agents.
Neighbors have reached out to neighbors to create rapid response networks, develop mutual aid strategies, and establish autonomous communication channels for sharing information. This dynamic process has opened up space for civic imagination and generated continuous innovation in tactics of community self defense.
The symbol of such neighborhood-based resistance is the whistle. Widely distributed across the city and now worn by many residents, whistles are blown when Border Patrol and ICE agents are sighted. The resulting sound has layered eloquence. It is an alert, an expression of care, and a protest that this is not normal and cannot be allowed to become normal.
The mobilization of neighbors, propelled by moral clarity that what they are witnessing is simply wrong, suggests the possibility that there may emerge a broad and diverse movement in defense of human dignity. At the same time, it should give us pause to recognize that comparable abuses by law enforcement have long been tolerated when they are committed in those areas of the city cordoned off by our form of racial apartheid.
The journalistic practice that gave birth to the Invisible Institute began twenty-five years ago in late stage high-rise public housing, where we regularly documented misconduct by police akin to that committed by ICE and Border Patrol agents today: gross violations of due process, warrantless searches, indiscriminate sweeps, egregious excessive force (often practiced as sport), incommunicado detention, massive corruption, undisguised racism and gratuitous cruelty–all committed with an air of impunity and shrouded in secrecy.
In its final phase, high-rise public housing was the epitome of hypersegregation and racial disparities in policing: the extreme case that makes visible the larger phenomenon of unconstitutional policing in disfavored neighborhoods that the Invisible Institute continues to investigate in an effort to better understand how state violence perpetuates inequality. Yet somehow those human rights violations, no matter how thoroughly documented, have long been normalized.
I raise this not to diminish in any way the profound decency of neighborhood-based resistance to Border Patrol and ICE but rather to highlight the possibility that those energies will mature into a mass movement–a movement of neighbors–grounded in the conviction that basic human rights are indivisible. As we navigate an uncertain future, that possibility deepens our understanding of the Invisible Institute’s mission and nourishes our resolve to produce work that provides flashes of illumination in dark times.
