How Chicago’s Immigrant Rights Groups Plan to Hold the Line on Sanctuary Policies

On Inauguration Day, thousands marched through subzero temperatures in downtown Chicago to protest the imminent threat of immigration raids on their city. Multiple weekend reports had indicated that President Trump would order raids on Chicago within hours of returning to the White House, fulfilling a warning by Tom Homan, Trump’s nominee to lead U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, that he’ll make Chicago one of the first places that he targets. 

Immigrants’ rights advocates in Chicago have been bracing for such raids for months. No raids were reported as of Wednesday, but neighborhoods with large immigrant communities froze in place, with many residents fearful of the havoc they would wreak. Compared to his first term, Trump’s team “has a better understanding of what tools are available to them, and they’ll have that larger understanding of what they can and can’t do, and what they can do to make it more effective,” says Nubia Willman, chief programs officer at Latinos Progresando, a group that provides immigration services in Chicago.

But these organizations have also had time to prepare. Many of the same advocates say they’re pleased with the vast set of protections that Chicago city government, as well as the state of Illinois, have passed since the first Trump administration to ban local agencies from assisting with arrests and deportations and to bar police from sharing sensitive information with immigration authorities. 

Since Trump’s victory in November, they’ve focused on getting public officials to double down on those sanctuary protections. They’ve worked on strengthening their coalition and urging people in office to hold the line as the blows begin to land. Trump has vowed to slash funding and prosecute politicians in sanctuary cities, including Chicago, to force them to dismantle local protections.

“We don’t plan on backing down,” Leone Jose Bicchieri, founder of Working Families Solidarity, a group that promotes labor rights in the Chicago region, told Bolts. “I think the right thing to do for the state and the city is to not back down to the feds. You can’t set that precedent.”

Just days before Trump’s inauguration, local politicians were tested by a proposal from within to weaken the ban on Chicago police from cooperating with ICE. The proposal, sponsored by council members from two predominantly Latino areas, Alderpersons Silvana Tabares and Ray Lopez, would have allowed local police to work with ICE to target immigrants with certain criminal charges. 

The rollback was soundly defeated by vote of 39 to 11 at city council last week after a broad coalition of immigrant rights organizers, labor groups, and other allies rallied against it. 

“They want to make an example out of Chicago, make it ground zero for mass deportations. Well, I’ll tell you what: we do need to make Chicago an example—of people finding their courage and their backbone,” Leo Pargo, a community organizer in Chicago, told city council members before the vote. 

---

Chicago has had some degree of sanctuary protections since 1985, when then-Mayor Harold Washington restricted city employees from investigating residents’ legal status and barred cooperation with federal immigration authorities. The city council strengthened those protections by designating Chicago as a so-called Welcoming City in 2006. During Trump’s first term, immigrant rights groups worked with Mayor Lori Lightfoot to close loopholes in prior ordinances that allowed police to help deport people who were under investigation for certain crimes, or who were listed in the Chicago Police Department’s notoriously inaccurate gang database. 

Brandon Johnson, the current mayor, reaffirmed his support for these policies in a press conference last week, saying, “The fear that has found its way in the city of Chicago because of the threats that are coming from this incoming administration, the people of Chicago can rest assured that the full force of government will do everything in its power to protect the residents of this city.”

Illinois has passed protections of its own over the years, most notably the Illinois TRUST Act, a 2017 law that mirrors Chicago’s municipal ban on local law enforcement helping federal agents, applying it to police forces throughout the entire state. 

Illinois also became the first state to outlaw private immigrant detention centers in 2019; two years later, the state further limited the number of beds available for ICE to detain immigrants in the state with a law that blocked sheriffs from contracting with ICE to detain people facing deportation in local jails. Some Illinois jails were earning millions a year through these contracts. The state also barred sheriffs from joining the 287(g) program, which authorizes local deputies to act as federal immigration agents. 

Such policies cannot stop ICE from launching direct enforcement actions using their agents, like the raids that Trump’s team may soon launch in the city. Trump this week signed an executive order that allows agents to arrest people even in sensitive areas like churches and schools. 

But throughout the nation, ICE heavily relies on the collaboration of local police and sheriffs to identify and investigate immigrants who may be undocumented and detain them until federal agents collect them. Immigration experts say that, in places without that cooperation, ICE operations are severely limited.

For Felicia Arriaga, an immigration scholar and assistant professor of sociology at Baruch College, sanctuary protections reduce arrests and deportations by forcing ICE to work alone. She told Bolts, “The sheer number of people that are then being apprehended through those operations are much smaller than the number who would have been arrested through the jail enforcement model.” 

She added, “ICE field teams don’t have enough people to go out and arrest all of the people Trump says he is going to.” 

Arriaga was involved in immigrants’ rights activism in North Carolina during the first Trump administration, a time when many counties canceled contracts with ICE. The federal agency responded with raids that swept hundreds of people, and many Chicagoans suspect the Trump administration’s focus on their city is similarly driven by retaliation. 

“Raids are used as a fear tactic,” Arriaga said. “It is meant to try to deter people from trying to limit collaboration.”

Chicago advocates say they’ll now need to be vigilant to make sure that local and state officials actually enforce sanctuary protections. 

“It’s one thing to have laws in the book, but you also have to go through the motions of ensuring that folks are doing things appropriately,” Willman said. Bicchieri agreed, urging Chicago leaders to “remind these agencies officially not to cooperate, but also unofficially make sure their members are not privately trying to give the information about folks and make sure that they’re sanctioned if they do.”

Chicago Police has affirmed officers will not coordinate with ICE and that the department will comply with the Welcoming City ordinance. But there is worry that not all officers are aligned behind the brass. Immigrant workers have previously sued off-duty cops for beating, searching and detaining them outside a neighborhood Home Depot. Some officers have been accused of sexual misconduct involving new arrivals sheltering at a police station. John Catanzara, the head of the Chicago police union, has derided the city’s protections for immigrants.

Elsewhere in the state, the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois sued the sheriffs of Ogle County and Stephenson County in 2019 for defying the TRUST Act. The cases involved immigrants who were arrested for minor issues, like driving without a license or without insurance, then detained for up to three days after they already paid bail so that they could be handed over to ICE. The sheriff’s offices eventually agreed to a settlement that included payments to the drivers, ACLU spokesperson Ed Yohnka told Bolts.  “There is no reason for any elected official at the state or local level to violate that law because Donald Trump or Tom Homan tells them they should,” Yohnka said.

One test may come if the Trump administration responds with threats to withhold federal dollars, as it did last decade. Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for many of the executive policies the president has already unrolled since Inauguration Day, advocates for withholding grants from cities unless they comply with federal immigration enforcement and agree to detain people on ICE’s requests. 

The Department of Justice on Wednesday also instructed federal prosecutors to investigate public officials who “threaten to impede” immigration enforcement. 

The city of Chicago sued the D.O.J. in 2017 over conditions it tried to impose on public safety grants, which have traditionally been a key source of federal funding for local police, courts, drug treatment, and other initiatives. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the city in 2018, determining that federal agencies cannot arbitrarily condition funds. According to the ruling, “the power of the purse rests with Congress, which authorized the federal funds at issue and did not impose any immigration enforcement conditions on the receipt of such funds.”

Yohnka hopes that courts protect sanctuary policies from new attacks. “The courts can still play an important role in upholding and protecting the rights of a local government to decide what they are and are not going to do,” he said.

---

The political climate in Chicago around immigration has shifted in recent years. The efforts to house and resettle new arrivals have stirred animosity among some Chicagoans, and the usual scramble between communities for limited resources has been worsened by Texas Governor Greg Abott’s Operation Lonestar, which has bussed tens of thousands of immigrants and asylum seekers across the country, including to Chicago, with little coordination to allow receiving cities to prepare. 

While Chicago’s shelter system was initially overwhelmed by the influx, Mayor Brandon Johnson this month reiterated the city’s commitment to managing the arrivals without resorting to deportations.  

“What you saw from the Governor of Texas was an attempt to break our spirit here in Chicago. We rose above that attack and we actually built a system of care for Chicagoans and those seeking refuge in the city of Chicago,” Johnson said at a press conference last week after the defeat of the measure to walk back the protections for immigrants. 

Abbot’s Operation Lonestar was aimed at stoking grievances in sanctuary cities to chip away at the public support for immigrants by “creating perceptions that certain groups were getting access to resources that others are not,” Lee told Bolts. Many Republican leaders, including Trump and Abbott, have similarly scapegoated immigrants for problems with violence and drugs, despite overwhelming evidence that the rates of crime and incarceration among immigrants are far lower than that of citizens. 

“They saw Chicago as being a welcoming city, and they wanted to exploit and make an example out of us,” Lee said. “The root of this is in this national anti-immigrant movement that sought out Chicago as being an obstacle to what they wanted to achieve.” 

He added, “In the process, they have sown division and pitted communities against one another.” Javier Ruiz, a board member for the Pilsen Alliance, a neighborhood group based in Chicago’s Mexican community, says there’ve been tensions in the city’s Mexican communities towards the influx of asylum seekers from Venezuela. Some of that surrounds the federal work permits that have been issued to many new arrivals, while many longtime residents have never been able to get the papers needed to step out of the shadows, he said.

Immigrant rights organizers and labor groups have worked to counter the divide-and-conquer tactics by building a broad coalition of working class people to fight for better jobs, higher wages, adequate community investment and affordable housing, said Willman, of Latinos Progresando. To build unity, his organization has built the Excellerator Fund, a joint venture with the Greater Auburn Gresham Development Corporation to invest in Black and Mexican-led neighborhood groups, businesses and programs on the South and West Sides, like the Ballet Folklorico de Chicago, dedicated to preserving Mexican traditional dance, and the South Merrill Community Garden.

“These coalitions are doing the work on the ground of building those bridges together. They’re working to find the resources and then sharing those resources in equitable ways to support the needs that are unique for each community. So this allows folks to learn from one another, to build community together, to go and advocate for resources together,” Willman said. 

Labor groups are also readying their immigrant members to exercise their rights as workers. Working Families Solidarity, which works across eight predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods on the South and West Sides of Chicago, helps members recover unpaid wages by connecting workers with legal aid and applying direct pressure campaigns on employers who refuse to pay, Bicchieri, its founder, told Bolts. Some workers are exploited because their immigration status makes them vulnerable, he said, and organizations can step in to hold employers accountable.

Antonio Guttierez, co-founder of the group Organized Communities Against Deportation, says his group has worked with the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights to set up 18 hyper-local rapid response networks that send volunteers to investigate tips about ICE activity. Despite being inactive for years, the network has grown to over 1000 participants, he said; and while some are new volunteers, some teams are being reawakened after initially forming during the first Trump administration. OCAD’s hotline has received dozens of tips about ICE agent sightings, as well as hate messages and deliberate misinformation that has made it hard for operators to manage the volume of calls and decipher which tips are real, Gutierrez said. 

Since inauguration, the rapid response teams have proactively sent out volunteers as early as 4AM to scout locations where federal agents have staged operations in the past. None of this scouting discovered major operations on Trump’s first day in office, Gutierrez said. 

Chicago organizers in recent months have also doubled down on circulating know-your-rights trainings and webinars aiming to reach immigrants that may be under threat of arrest. They have been distributing flyers and cards to remind people they do not have to consent to a search, that they have the right to contact their families and an attorney, and that they do not have to disclose their immigration status with officers. 

The city has also helped spearhead know-your-rights workshops at various locations across the city, in English, Spanish, and French, as the mayor has advertised on his social media. Some of the events were hosted by prominent local politicians like U.S. Representative Chuy Garcia.

Gutierrez stresses the importance of the right to remain silent, explaining that federal agents often have little information about the people they encounter during raids and traffic stops, so officers try to get verbal confirmation that a person is undocumented. 

He said, “Knowing those rights can definitely make the difference between whether someone is detained or not.”