‘Get Down! Get Down! They’re Gonna See Us!’: Six Months of Hiding From ICE | WIRED
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At around 7:30 am on Halloween, Ava and Sam were taking their two kids to school when their upstairs neighbor rushed toward them on the street. “You shouldn’t be out right now,” she told them. ICE vans were just around the corner. Ava felt her body go numb. The day before, her coworker—another undocumented woman she cleaned houses with—told her about how she’d seen an ICE van parked behind her while she was taking her lunch break in her car. All the images Ava and Sam had been watching, the ones that popped up on their TikTok of ICE agents arresting people shopping at Home Depots and Walmarts, all the things they’d been hearing in bits and pieces from her husband’s coworkers, their caseworker, her children’s school teachers about what to do if ICE comes—it was finally here at their doorstep.
They accepted a ride from their neighbor. All day, Ava felt paranoid, like ICE was watching her. Who would take care of her young kids if she or her husband got taken? She told her boss, who ran a housekeeping business, that she felt like it was too risky to be cleaning properties; her boss agreed. At the end of the day, her boss dropped her off at home, taking side streets and alleys. Then Ava’s world grew lonelier than she’d ever known.
Photograph: Sebastián Hidalgo
The ICE raids in Chicago that have terrorized immigrant neighborhoods like Ava and Sam’s have been both highly performative and extremely random. Six weeks earlier, on September 9, Greg Bovino, the G.I. Joe look-alike who previously served as ICE’s “commander-at-large,” arrived in town with a caravan of unmarked, black-tinted vans to patrol Chicago’s immigrant-heavy neighborhoods. Three days later, ICE agents shot and killed Silverio Villegas González, an undocumented father of two from Mexico who worked as a line cook, and who had no criminal record, after he tried to drive away from them. ICE officers began lurking on sidewalks, downtown, at grocery stores, at the Cook County courthouses, in parking lots, at intersections, in alleys, and in neighborhoods like Ava and Sam’s.
By the end of September, allegedly following a “tip” about reported gang activity—later found to be a complaint about squatters—ICE agents swarmed a South Side apartment building in the middle of the night, rappelling down from a Black Hawk helicopter and patrolling the sidewalk outside with masks and rifles, arresting 37 people. They kicked down doors, leafed through bookshelves, and upturned mattresses. In November, they violently pulled a Colombian teacher from the day care center where she worked, while school was in session. It began to feel like they could take anyone, at any time. Sam started to catch glimpses of the arrests and deportations from coworkers and Facebook groups. The news trickled in through Ava’s phone, where she watched video after video on TikTok. The more she clicked, the more videos appeared.
Ava, whose name I’ve changed to protect her identity, crossed the border before Donald Trump would be sworn into office for a second time. Her husband, whom I’ll call Sam, had arrived in America in 2022; paying coyotes $12,000 he’d borrowed from family members to make the seven-day journey on foot. “It’s a very heavy, heavy decision to make the choice to abandon your children and your family,” Sam told me. “You don’t know if you’ll see your family again.” After the dangerous journey, he settled in Chicago, where he found a job in construction. He worked grueling nine-hour shifts, six days a week, bringing in roughly $600 a week. He sent as much money home to Ava as he could. When he was off work, exhausted and lonely, he’d call his wife and kids on video chats. Their daughter, a baby at the time, would throw a tantrum every time. He used to put her to bed every night; now, when her mother put her to bed, she’d reach up instinctively searching for her father’s beard. When she realized it wasn’t there, she’d cry. It took a month for her to learn how to sleep again. Their older son struggled more. One day, he came home from school sobbing. Ava asked what was wrong. He had seen his friend’s father pick him up from school on his motorbike, he told her—just like his father used to pick him up. “When will we see him again?” He asked over and over.
The family weighed their options: It was too risky for Ava to cross the border alone with such young kids, and they couldn’t afford to pay another coyote. But staying in Mexico felt equally dangerous. Drug cartels patrolled their town, recruiting kids as young as 13; police offered little protection. One day, Ava got a panicked call from her brother. His two children had been secuestro exprés, “express-kidnapped”—a common occurrence in their area of Mexico where gang members lure young kids with candy or sometimes threats, then hold them hostage until the parents pay for their release. Ava’s brother scrounged together $3,000—selling everything