Neighbors warn neighbors as fear of ICE ripples across Chicago

People from the community and activists link arms in protest after reports that a woman was shot amid increased ICE activity in the Brighton Park neighborhood of Chicago, Oct. 4, 2025. Neighbors warn neighbors as fear of ICE ripples across Chicago; parents are standing guard at schools, and restaurants have stopped delivering food or simply closed. (Jamie Kelter Davis/The New York Times).

By JULIE BOSMAN

The signs in Spanish are taped to windows in storefronts all over Chicago: “ICE NO ES BIENVENIDO AQUÍ.”

Warning networks have been operating all day, every day, as people who spot agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement on the streets text friends and neighbors or begin streaming urgent cautions on Facebook Live.

Even tourists have been drawn into the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, startled by the sight of federal agents marching in camouflage last weekend through the city’s upscale Gold Coast, near the famed Magnificent Mile.

What began quietly in Chicago one month ago as a promise by the Trump administration to increase arrests of immigrants without legal status is now being felt all over this city of 2.7 million people and in the broader metropolitan area encompassing millions more.

Tensions are flaring up like small, intense wildfires. At elementary schools on the West Side, parents have organized to stand guard at dismissal time. Some construction businesses are keeping their warehouse doors open to keep an eye out for ICE agents. Owners of small businesses are doing their own deliveries, to protect their Latino employees from driving through the city streets.

In Edgewater, on the Far North Side along Lake Michigan, a neighborhood Listserv lit up with worries Sunday over a helicopter circling the area. Could it be ICE, one person asked. Is there anything we can do, asked another.

Neighbors came out onto the streets of the Southwest Side on Saturday after a car crash involving federal agents and two motorists, who the Department of Homeland Security said were pursuing the agents recklessly. ICE agents responded with pepper balls and tear gas; the crowd, shouting and waving anti-ICE signs, remained until the federal agents finally left.

Restaurants have cut back hours or stopped making deliveries altogether, unwilling to risk the arrest of their employees.

“We can’t ask anyone to risk their safety just to serve bagels,” one restaurant, Bagel Miller, explained in a Facebook post explaining its closure last weekend.

Berto Aguayo, a lawyer and advocate for immigrants, described a month of rising tensions, political organizing and outright fear, as President Donald Trump’s dragnet ensnared U.S. citizens alongside immigrants.

“Our family gatherings are filled with crying and trying to figure out how we get past this moment,” Aguayo said. “People are being terrorized. People are being attacked. That’s what it feels like.”

When he visits his mother’s home in Back of the Yards, a neighborhood on the Southwest Side, he said, he sees far fewer people walking around than usual. “Every single person who looks brown is scared,” he said.