In the small hours of Tuesday morning, military helicopters hovered over a south-side Chicago apartment building, and federal agents in vans, trucks and military vehicles congregated outside. On cue, the G-Men leapt from the helicopters, and rappelled down the side of the targeted building, as dozens of other personnel stormed in from the streets. All told, a jaw-dropping 300 agents were involved in this sadistic, no-expenses-spared public theater, which, DHS claimed without providing evidence, was aimed at rooting out Venezuelan drug dealers. They kicked in doors, lobbed flash-bang grenades, shattered windows, ransacked apartments, and rounded up any residents they encountered, including US-citizen children of undocumented residents and US-citizen adults who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The victims of the operation were zip-tied and herded out onto the streets—amongst them, according to bystanders, two naked children who were tied together—and into federal vehicles. One of the agents was asked by a protestor why they were targeting children. He reportedly replied, “Fuck them kids.” Then they were whisked away.
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On Saturday, as protests escalated, a female protestor was shot by federal agents in the Brighton Park neighborhood. Later in the day, Governor Pritzker said he expected the Administration to soon send in 300 national guard troops, under federal command, and Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem announced she would be deploying additional “Special Operations” officers into Chicago.
This isn’t Latin America during the dictatorships and death squads of the 1970s and 1980s. This isn’t Berlin in the 1930s. This isn’t Kristallnacht, in November 1938. This is the United States of America, the land of the free, in the fall of 2025. This is America’s third-largest city, against whom Donald J. Trump has unleashed military force.
As commentators such as the Chicago-based political writer Rick Perlstein pointed out, DHS propagandists used footage of the Tuesday night raid to release a bone-chilling video. To martial music, it showed humiliated, hog-tied brown immigrants being rounded up; the effect was similar that achieved by Hitler’s image makers, who used footage of humiliated, impoverished, disease-struck Jews in the ghettos of occupied Europe to dehumanize them. Perlstein dryly noted on X, “this is how liberty dies.”
Over the past couple of weeks, as the Administration has targeted Chicago under operations Midway Blitz and At Large, the behavior of ICE and other federal agencies has increasingly come to resemble that of an occupying army in a hostile metropolis. Federal snipers perch atop the ICE facility in Broadview and fire tear gas, baton rounds, pepper bullets and rubber bullets into the protesting crowds below. Photographs of the backs of victims hit by these rounds resemble images taken of torture victims in Syrian or Russian prisons in recent years. From buttocks to neck, they are studded with huge red welts. Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem and border patrol head Greg Bovino recently showed up at Broadview with a production crew, not to rein in their out-of-control agents but to film yet more propaganda videos.
Hundreds of men and women and children have been arrested around the city in recent weeks. Video footage of the armed agents invading these communities, patrolling the streets in full military gear, are barely distinguishable from imagery of American military units in Iraq or in Afghanistan in recent decades. There is a swagger, a braggadocio redolent of the conqueror.
Similar scenes are now unfolding in Portland, Oregon. Indeed, this past weekend the Guardian reported on plans to unleash the 82nd Airborne Division, which specializes in parachute drops and forcible entries, onto the city, an extraordinary step toward realizing Trump’s fantasy of militarily occupying Blue metropolises.
In the MAGA-leader’s disgraceful, full-on-fascist speech to the top military brass, who had been ordered by Pete Hegseth to assemble at Quantico last week, he told them to get ready to train new recruits in cities around America, and to pivot to “the war from within” when thinking about who their enemies were. He would, he indicated, order military deployments into one city after the next in the months to come, presumably with a mission to do more than simply clean up city waste, paint fences, and prune trees, as the Army Times reports that many of the National Guard deployed into DC have been doing since August.
You can sweet-talk this any way you like, at the end of the day the trajectory here is pure, unvarnished, authoritarianism.
Years from now, tens of millions of Americans who stood silently by and pretended not to know what was happening in 2025 will likely make every effort possible to distance themselves from the morally indefensible actions being conjured up by Team Trump. We didn’t know. We thought they were only going after criminals. We weren’t told what was going on. We had no way of seeing the truth. It was all carried out in secret. We were only obeying orders.
None of those disclaimers will hold moral water. If you don’t know after eight months of this lunacy, it is because you are making an active effort not to know. You are deliberately turning blind eyes to what is going on, refusing to watch the video footage, to read the testimonies, to listen to the cruel words. If you don’t know, it is because you have made a decision that it is simply easier, more convenient, to put your head in the sand.
