Police arrested 14 mothers outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing center in Broadview Friday morning in the latest act of civil disobedience outside the west suburban facility that’s become a major flash point of opposition to the Trump administration’s “Operation Midway Blitz.”
Just after 9:30 a.m., the women, a group of moms from the western suburbs, hopped the concrete barricades that have proliferated around the processing center, sat down in the middle of the street and held hands. Illinois State Police troopers, Broadview police and Cook County sheriff’s police immediately walked over, hauled each person off the sidewalk and put handcuffs on them. None of the protesters appeared to resist their arrests, which took about five minutes to complete.
As police walked the women down Beach Street toward the boarded-up processing center, a caravan of cars bearing American flags, “Hands off Chicago” signs and other anti-Midway Blitz imagery rolled past, honking their horns and blowing whistles.
While the charges and names for the women arrested were not immediately available, the majority of people who have been arrested at demonstrations around the processing center have been charged with misdemeanors and released. Some of the charges have been more serious. Last month, a congressional candidate was one of six people federally indicted for allegedly conspiring to forcibly impede an ICE agent and resisting arrest, and a University of Chicago professor is facing felony charges for allegedly spitting on a state trooper.
As police began to process the women on Friday, another woman grabbed a megaphone and yelled that the women had “exercised their First Amendment rights in opposition to what this government is doing to our communities.”
“Stop abducting our community members,” she said. “Stop separating families.”
But despite the arrests, the mood of the protest remained upbeat. Someone in an inflatable dinosaur costume held a sign that read, “Hey ICE/CBP, google ‘Nuremberg.’” Other demonstrators chanted and sang in both Spanish and English.
Another person banged a drum as the crowd chanted at the state and local police standing in the middle of Beach Street. Federal agents, whose pepper balls and tear gas put a national spotlight on early demonstrations outside the building, were nowhere to be seen. A federal judge in Chicago on Thursday issued a sweeping injunction that puts more permanent restrictions on the use of force by immigration agents.
“Quit! Your! Job!” protesters called.
“Be a social worker!” a man interjected.
“Quit! Your! Job!” the chant continued.
“Be an office worker!” the man responded again.
“Quit! Your! Job!” A keytar pealed in the background.
“Be an engineer!”
Meanwhile, Mayor Brandon Johnson on Friday invited an independent panel at the United Nations to visit Chicago and investigate what he described as human rights violations during President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown throughout the Chicago area.
“We cannot do this work alone, though. And that is why I call on this council to hold the federal government of the United States to the same standards of accountability you apply elsewhere in the world,” the mayor testified before the U.N. Human Rights Council via video conference. “No country should be above international law. Human rights are universal, or they are meaningless.”
Sitting in front of the American and Chicago flags, Johnson also called on the body to convene a special session to discuss the Trump-made “crisis” in the U.S. It was his latest public maneuver to hit back at the White House, after signing a flurry of executive orders seeking to ban federal agents from city property and concealing their identities. So far, Department of Homeland Security officers have trampled on those orders, but the progressive mayor is now seeking an international arena to go after the president.
“The federal government’s immigration enforcement has been marked by violence and an assault on the dignity of all Chicagoans,” Johnson said after summarizing some of the week’s headlines on immigration raids hitting a day care center, O’Hare International Airport’s rideshare lot and small businesses across the city.
In Broadview, about 100 clergy and congregants from the city and suburbs gathered Friday to also condemn recent raids and called for more humane treatment of detainees inside the facility at the first gathering of the “Faith Over Fear” coalition.
Packed onto one side of the street behind concrete barricades, they sang, said prayers and read a letter asking federal officials to give clergy access to the processing center so that they could meet the spiritual needs of detainees held inside.
One woman, Joann Montes, quoted from the book of Leviticus in her prayer for “our brothers and sisters (who) are being held captive here.”
“The foreigner residing among you must be treated as a neighbor born,” she said. “Remind us that faith and grace are not passive.”
Illinois state troopers looked on from the street as the crowd sang in Indigenous languages, in Hebrew, in Spanish and in English.
At the end of the gathering, the clergy walked toward the edge of the concrete barricades as the crowd chanted “walk with power, walk with love,” trying to deliver their letter to the building itself. Instead, they met with Broadview Chief of Police Thomas Mills for several minutes as the group continued to chant. Mills took the letter and called into the facility to make the request on their behalf.
After 30 minutes, Mills called again. Surrounded by clergy, Mills could be seen leaning over his phone and shaking his head.
The Rev. Michael Pfleger piped up, with a whistle around his neck and an arm around Pastor Matt DeMateo. He said the processing center was a federally run facility and that the people inside were entitled to religious support.
The answer from inside the building, Mills said, was still no.
