2025 will be remembered by most Chicagoans for the arrival here of the Border Patrol, which joined agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement in aggressive enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws, as directed by the president of the United States. Accompanied by protesters wherever they went, the agents arrested people throughout the city, often in ways more associated with military-style governments.
As part of our annual review of the year, here is our look back at what the Tribune Editorial Board had to say about their action. In this edition, we are focused on what happened in the later third of the year.
Trump’s bellicose words before an audience of generals who must follow his orders don’t give us comfort. Chicagoans have the constitutional right peacefully to protest their government and should feel safe when doing so without worrying about use of force by a National Guard member or any other member of the Armed Forces in need of “training.”
Which brings us to the second major issue with Trump’s remarks. Our city — or any other American city — should not be a “training ground” for troops ultimately enlisted to fight foreign adversaries. President Trump, Chicagoans are your fellow Americans.
Oct 1: A sun-soaked Sunday in downtown Chicago is marred by a Trumpian show of force.
A beautiful early fall weekend in downtown Chicago. Sun-splashed lakefront. Families enjoying the museums and city sights. Packs of men in military fatigues carrying high-powered long guns and seemingly stopping people on the street based on the color of their skin.
Which of those images doesn’t belong?
On Sunday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents made a performative show of transforming an otherwise peaceful downtown into something out of a bad movie. Masked and menacing by design, they tromped around Millennium Park, patrolled the Magnificent Mile and manned boats traversing the placid waters of the Chicago River.
And for what? Why?
Gregory Bovino, the chief patrol agent for the weekslong Chicago operation that ICE is calling Operation Midway Blitz, didn’t substantively answer questions posed to him Sunday by journalists reporting on the scene. But we think we understand what was at work.
We believe this was essentially a provocation, a response to sharp criticism from Gov. JB Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson and a blunt demonstration of the truth that our state and local politicians essentially have no say over where these federal agents choose to go.
This is a moment for Gov. JB Pritzker to show leadership beyond calling President Donald Trump names and exhorting ordinary folks to document on their phones what the federal agents are doing. We understand that the governor is building his political brand nationally as a preeminent leader of the Democratic Party resistance to Trump, but a higher priority must be keeping Illinoisans safe. And in that task we believe he and state law enforcement can do considerably more to assist a village of less than 8,000 that seems understandably overwhelmed with being the focal point of anger around the ongoing federal immigration-enforcement surge in Chicago.
There’s a need to separate protesters from ICE agents, and state and local police are in our minds best equipped to accomplish that. Pritzker said Monday that he understands Trump intends to send 100 federal troops, National Guard or otherwise, in response to the Broadview issues. Trump on Tuesday reiterated that “we’re going into Chicago very soon.”
If state and local police were establishing designated protest areas around the detainment facility that facilitated ingress and egress for federal vehicles without coming into contact with demonstrators, there would be no justification for federal troops — and likely no legal way for Trump to deploy them.
Oct. 7: Ice-related chaos intensifies. The editorial board urges calm from public officials.
The Chicagoans who are aghast at the chaos the ICE incursion is creating in our city. The public officials who are trying to remain cool in the face of such pressure, some more successfully than others. And even Chicago police officers who are catching intense heat from the right in following state and local laws that don’t allow them to cooperate with ICE in enforcing federal immigration laws in the absence of a warrant signed by a judge — even after more than two dozen of them were exposed to ICE-sprayed chemical agents while responding to a scene involving the federal agents.
The entire spectacle leaves all of us distraught.
In a statement over the weekend, the Civic Federation, the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, and the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce called for cooperation from the Trump administration with law enforcement in Chicago rather than more provocations. “National Guard troops on our streets … have the potential to sow fear and chaos, threatening our businesses’ bottom lines and our reputation,” they wrote.
We have said much the same before, and continue to believe that military deployment against the wishes of local officeholders would be counterproductive at best and dangerous at worst. Any military deployment, if necessary, ought to be done in close coordination with local law enforcement. Under the present circumstances, that appears highly unlikely.
Friday lunchtime, a guy was walking his fluffy dog at the corner of Henderson and Lakewood streets in Chicago’s leafy Lakeview neighborhood. On any other sunny, autumnal Friday, such a stroll would have been as calming and uneventful as the city gets.
But on this most recent one, the man found himself at what looked like a scene from the TV show “Chicago Fire,” which has filmed on and around this very block: he came upon screaming, yelling, fighting, spilled blood, tear gas canisters and masked federal agents in military-style fatigues moving their vehicle backward down a one-way street as an infuriated neighborhood repelled them with all the force its collective voice could muster.
The man responded in kind: screaming and hollering at the agents as they took a man away from a $300,000 renovation of a classic Chicago three-flat, even as he tried to keep hold of his dog. He didn’t care what the worker allegedly had done nor did he care about his immigration status and even if he had, no one would have explained. The man just wanted the invaders gone.
Had someone happened on this scene without the context of an immigration enforcement operation happening over the strenuous objections of the residents of an American city, they would not have believed their eyes, any more than they would if they had happened on a similar scene in the Old Irving Park neighborhood where, as the Tribune reported, “residents were tackled and tear-gassed as children prepared for a Halloween parade.” Little Village and Southeast Side residents, among others, have experienced the same.
Let that sink in, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. A conservative from South Dakota should understand that man’s impulse is to defend his homeland from invaders.
If you are radicalizing the Chicago guy with the poop bag and making kids in wizard hats rub their eyes, then, Madam Secretary, you are not doing your job very well. And if you don’t think that is happening, well, you are wrong. We watched it happen in real time.
As the telltale signs of autumn envelop us, familiar sights have cropped up in Midwestern neighborhoods. Much as golden and crimson leaves adorn the trees, we’ve decorated our homes to suit the season.
Some of us have opted for a more subdued nod to the harvest, setting out pumpkins and potted mums, while others have gone whole hog on Halloween. We know many young families who turn after-dinner walks into a bona fide neighborhood tour, hunting for the best-decorated houses to ogle. Larger-than-life skeletons — some as big as trucks, torsos erupting from the ground — have become suburban staples alongside massive Bluey inflatables, not to mention life-sized zombies and scarecrows that jump out at you when you walk by. This is what life is meant to be like in the fall around these parts.
There’s comfort to be found in the predictable and thus we welcome a moment that deserves protection. Nothing should interfere with trick-or-treat rituals or other neighborhood festivities.
So we were glad to hear U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis express a similar sentiment this week.
“I do not want to get violation reports from the plaintiffs that show that agents are out and about on Halloween where kids are present and tear gas is being deployed,” she told U.S. Border Patrol Cmdr. Gregory Bovino Tuesday.
Had you just woken up from a deep sleep, you’d be amazed that such a judicial pronouncement was even necessary. But as Halloween 2025 arrives, this is where we live now.
After making this the the most fraught Halloween we can remember in Chicago, Border Patrol Cmdr. Greg Bovino evidently has decided to try to render the 2025 Christmas season one to remember for all the wrong reasons, too.
Bovino and dozens of his Border Patrol officers returned to the area in recent days and resumed their practice from earlier months of snatching at least one tamale vendor off the street and patrolling Home Depot parking lots, where migrants look for daily work.
In Forest Park, Bovino was heard to say, “We love Chica-ho-ho-ho,” as drivers honked their horns in anger. “Merry Christmas, if I don’t see you again,” Bovino called out to another unhappy crowd.
The return of Operation Midway Blitz, which apparently won’t run nearly as long as the weekslong effort in the fall that badly disrupted peace of mind and ordinary commerce in Chicago, appears to be a performative reminder to Latino communities throughout the area that federal immigration authorities will be returning again and again.
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