When Rights Aren’t Real: What Fascism Looks Like in America Right Now

I keep seeing people outside Chicago saying things like, “ICE is only going after criminals and gang members.”

That is not true. I’m watching what’s happening here, in my neighborhood, with my own eyes. ICE is parked outside of our schools, churches, and grocery stores. They are in our parks on nice days.

Non-white parents are afraid to walk their kids to school. Families are afraid to go to the grocery store. People who have done nothing wrong, U.S. citizens, are being harassed in my neighborhood, detained, and in some cases, deported, based on the color of their skin.

ICE is operating under “arrest first, prove your innocence later.” Legally, you can’t “deport” a U.S. citizen, but that hasn’t stopped ICE from shipping American-born citizens away to foreign countries.

Dan Bovino of Border Patrol said, on Sunday in River North, to Chip Mitchell from WBEZ, ICE is going after people based on how they look in relation to white people or if they speak another language. Let that sink in.

It doesn’t matter if you’re here “legally” or not, if you don’t look white or sound white, you have no rights in this country. If you don’t look white, the federal government is actively targeting you—harassing, detaining, and intimidating you.

70% of my neighborhood is non-white. We speak 40 different languages in our schools, in my neighborhood alone. My (very white) husband speaks 3 different languages. We live in one of the most racially and ethnically diverse neighborhoods in the country.

And I’m watching the federal government escalate its campaign of terror against my community, in an American city. (Where’s those 2nd amendment folks now?)

First, it was “violent criminal aliens.” Then any “illegals.” Then visa and green card holders. Now it’s U.S. citizens who look brown or anyone who speaks another language. Who will the fascists target next?

And if non-white people or people with accents have no rights in this country, no one has rights in this country. So much for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

For more than 230 years, the 4th and 5th Amendments have protected people’s rights in the United States. And for over 150 years, the 14th Amendment had reinforced those protections.

But today, we face a government that will not honor the Constitution or the fundamental rights of Americans and visitors to this country.

We have a government that is violating the constitutional rights of its people every single day, and I’m witnessing it in my neighborhood.

American citizens and legal residents are being swept up into jails for days and weeks, with no access to legal counsel, medications, or even a phone call to family. Military helicopters circle over my house every day now.

My neighbors are living in fear. They are not criminals. They’re parents, kids, hard-working people, and right now, many of them are afraid to step outside their doors into their own community.

I don’t feel safe either, now that masked, armed men are in our church parking lots and parked outside daycares, waiting to abduct random people.

I don’t feel safe when masked, armed men casually point loaded weapons at people going to work or school or teargas passersby just walking their pups.

It’s not “law and order” to body slam a 70-year-old man, a citizen, to the ground at the bus stop as he tries to “show his documents.”

It is not “tough” nor “patriotic” to zip-tie a 3-year-old American child, sobbing in fear at a gun in her face and a masked man shoving her into a van, after separating her from her parents.

It is not “American” to abduct children, American-born, U.S. citizens, walking to school in the morning because they don’t “look” American to you.

If you don’t live here, stop downplaying what’s happening. Or denying what’s happening. It is happening. And it’s happening right here, in my neighborhood.

Yesterday, ICE was harassing people outside of Roosevelt Highschool at 8:15 a.m., a few blocks away from me. School staff are now patrolling the perimeters of our elementary schools at drop-off and pick-up. Kids are terrified they’re going to be kidnapped.

White mothers are walking our brown neighbors’ kids to school to protect them from armed, masked men. Just pause and think about that. Armed, masked men. That does not happen in democratic societies.

This isn’t about immigration. It is fascism. It’s about using fear to control a population by terrorizing people in their own communities.

Last night in Bronzeville, nearly 300 armed secret police stormed an apartment building in the middle of the night, without warrants.

They used flashbang grenades to force their way into every home, holding women and children at gunpoint, dragging families and kids from their beds, some of them naked. Crying children were separated from their parents, zip-tied, and forced into vans.

The entire building’s residents, many of them U.S. citizens, including a blind Army veteran, and many of them children and mothers, were kidnapped for hours with no explanation.

“Where is the morality?” one resident of that building said, “Where's the humanity? One of the agents literally laughed. He was standing right here. He said, ‘f*** them kids.’”

This should enrage everyone. When those in power refuse to uphold the law, it is a direct attack on the rights and freedoms of every single person in this country.

When the Constitution stops protecting people, we are no longer a free country.