Campaign Report: Chicago Anti-Deportation Activism

CSP members from Chicago

June 11th, 2026

A report from Campaign members in Chicago on eight months of anti-deportation organizing, constitutional rights trainings and immigration activism across the city.

About eight months ago, CSP Chicago took up anti-deportation organizing as a collective civic activity. We consulted with long-time immigration activists with real-world experience in forming our initial approach, and landed on offering Constitutional rights education for businesses and homes. These trainings focused on the basic Bill of Rights liberties against government intrusion, which are afforded — sometimes nominally, and often actually — to all individuals and businesses on American soil.

We particularly focused our activities toward the role of those rights in protecting immigrant workers from arbitrary detention at their workplaces. We offered practical educational material — and in return learned from the people we met in immigrant communities across Chicago. They taught us about what really works, what is missing and needed, and how some have already been organizing and implementing a variety of protocols against deportations over many years.

Six months ago, several federal agencies, primarily Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), commenced Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago — a deportation campaign in Chicago using a set and scale of tactics that had to be seen to be believed. Several of our members participated in rapid response activities and mutual aid in support of immigrants during and after Midway Blitz, in addition to our primary know-your-rights efforts. We became first-hand witnesses to the reality of federal immigration enforcement tactics during that time, as well as to the variety of civic responses by the Chicago workers, employers, and residents to this acute period of federal intervention in the city. These responses ranged from carefully planned to spontaneous, confrontational to quietly avoidant, from effective in preventing deportations to not.

In the short time we have engaged in this activity, we have learned more than we can responsibly report because of the civil disobedience bent of anti-deportation activism and the threat federal enforcement activities pose to the life, liberty, and property of immigrant Chicagoans. However, we hope this report will outline the broad strokes of our activities, what we learned from them, and where we believe we can both help and learn most effectively going forward. We know that deportation campaigns against immigrant workers, while particularly out-and-loud lately, occur across presidential administrations, whether it is Republicans or Democrats in charge, and we plan to be involved in this activity for the long haul.

Why Anti-Deportation Activism

The Campaign for a Socialist Party is oriented toward exploring the latent potential in civil society by engaging in liberal activism and learning from liberal activists. By liberal we do not mean the issues of capital D Democrats or the way the term liberal is abused in the media, but rather voluntary organizing and association around the social needs that need meeting and the civil rights and liberties that need defending to enable society to organize itself toward freedom for all. Immigrant rights activism in general and anti-deportation activism in particular are a natural fit for this kind of organizing work. The right to travel, the right to work, the right to private spaces free from government intrusion, the right to due process — these are classic liberal concerns which socialists historically organized to protect and expand, and anti-deportation activism touches on all of them.

Anti-deportation activism also connects our organizers to workplaces in a way that rounds out CSP’s existing organizing, in areas such as education and tenants organizing, which affect workers as consumers, rather than directly in their role as producers. In that sense, anti-deportation is really about labor — about the people who produce goods and services in society, and the particular leverage they have in that role.

If you take immigration head-on without avoiding any dimension of the matter, it becomes a complex and multi-layered issue in which many reasonable, contradictory demands are at play. It is an issue that tangibly affects people locally here in Chicago — a city where many neighborhoods are 30% or more foreign-born, built by waves of immigrants over time, and where immigrants are part of the local economy at every level — and a fundamental national and international subject. Because of its complex international nature, immigration is an issue on which neither existing political party has a coherent answer, and that absence is also an opportunity. In CSP, we welcome that complexity and seek to organize from within it.

Several Chicago neighborhoods on the North and Southwest sides have foreign-born populations exceeding 30%, including West Ridge, Albany Park and Pilsen (pictured)

Finally, and perhaps most importantly for our purposes, connecting with immigrant communities means encountering robust civic-social networks that have always existed for arriving undocumented immigrants, who need to find jobs, housing, childcare and meet other needs, generally without being able to approach the government for assistance or welfare, and while earning substandard wages that make standard services unaffordable. At a time when civic life is relatively depleted, and native Chicagoans tend to rely more readily on government services than on one another, immigrant communities are often a hive of civic and social activity, led by activists who have experience organizing here in the U.S. and in their countries of origin. We chose anti-deportation activism as a core new form of CSP activism because we want to learn as much as we can from such individuals and networks.

What We Did

We began by talking to contacts of ours who were already doing anti-deportation activism in immigrant communities. Through our partnership with a fantastic immigrant worker center in Chicago, whose leaders we trust, we were trained to conduct our own trainings on constitutional rights and anti-deportation strategies that had already been tested and refined through that organization’s years of work. We learned, practically speaking, what had actually worked in the past in terms of asserting rights as a means for stopping deportations, as well as tactics for how to handle encounters with immigration enforcement at various types of workplaces. The worker center gave us materials to distribute to businesses and families, and taught us how to train specific workplaces for encounters with federal agents. With permission, we took that information and went out to pass it along.

We thought carefully about the following considerations in choosing areas to canvass: (1) we selected areas where a large volume of immigrants work and run businesses; (2) we aimed for areas of the city that the worker center told us they would be unlikely to reach within the scope of their work, which focuses primarily on the Latino community in particular regions of the city; and (3) we looked for areas not likely to be saturated with progressive organizations looking to get out the vote or make a political statement out of this particular season in immigration enforcement. In short — we aimed at thriving immigrant commercial areas of mixed political persuasion and a variety of regions of origin. Not hard to find in Chicago!

We had selected canvassing to challenge ourselves to have many conversations, including challenging ones, up front, but it turned out to be a surprisingly easy issue to go door-knocking about. We easily engaged almost everyone we talked to in the South and Central Asian business district where we began. We were welcomed and offered a lot of food, and the question of how workers can protect themselves from being detained while at work turned out to be extremely front-of-mind. Many businesses were already employing ad hoc strategies to keep their most at-risk workers as safe as possible. Word of our presence traveled fast, and store owners and workers had questions. People came out of stores down the street because someone inside had pointed us out.

Despite the many organizations nominally offering similar trainings in these communities, nearly everywhere we went we were the first and often only group to directly reach out. This was also true in a Southeast Asian area we canvassed, where we heard from businesses about how immigration enforcement had been plaguing the area for decades. In a neighborhood with a dense but divided mix of Eastern Europeans, East Asians, Latin Americans, and US-born people, we encountered a more mixed response but nevertheless a surprising degree of interest in learning what we had to share — and a pronounced lack of communication across groups from different regions of origin.

We often got questions we couldn’t answer, which pushed us to deepen our understanding of the arena we are learning to operate in. While most everyone was happy to have a conversation, employers were less keen to book longer trainings, except in a few instances where they knew one of our members already. We noticed that in these conversations, avoiding deportations was approached as a practical, rather than a political matter — unlike in the press and among progressives, the focus wasn’t the Trump administration, and the problem wasn’t treated as something new. We also noticed that many immigrant groups already had, as anticipated, the kind of robust communication networks among people from their country or language-group that can help people to avoid deportations. However, there was often little-to-no communication of information outside or between such groups. Given that most everyone was happy to speak with us, we began to see a role we might play longer-term in bridging those informational divides.

After these initial conversations, we booked a small number of in-depth anti-deportation trainings through our contacts from our members’ prior CSP activism, specifically to assist in planning for potential encounters with federal agents at childcare establishments and in larger residential buildings. These began as transmissions of practical information: here are your rights if someone comes to the door, here is what a judicial warrant looks like versus an administrative one, here is what to say and what not to say.

We found “training” is something of a misnomer, as these ended up being more comprehensive planning exercises requiring us to learn about the people we were assisting and work out roles in emergencies and for day-to-day functioning during periods of high immigration enforcement activity. Our trainees needed to work through issues such as: who stays front-of-house and answers the door, who goes to the store to pick up supplies when there’s a chance of being detained at the store, how do workers who live across the city mitigate the risk of detention during their commutes, who warns the others and who gets called in the event of an encounter with agents, and when and how community members and customers can help reduce risk through mutual aid and coordination. Practice getting people comfortable with what they can say and do not have to say, in a language they often haven’t mastered.

The big principle, learned from our partner organization and reinforced by our short experience, is that when it comes to federal detentions of immigrants, the process is the punishment, whether someone is ultimately deported or not — and indeed, whether they turn out to be undocumented or not. Once someone is detained, their life is already profoundly disrupted — they typically lose their jobs due to prolonged absence, they have to pay for much or all the legal help support they need (no such thing as a public defender in immigration court), the detention conditions are dire, the uncertainty is traumatic, and so forth. So, while we did learn about and provide information for how to deal with a detention in progress, and how to amass information and support to contest a detention after the fact, we learned that for many people, by the time those resources are needed it is too little too late. Everything we learned and passed on was therefore oriented toward avoidance above all, helping ensure that people at risk never come face to face with an agent in the first place.

Operation Midway Blitz arrived not long after we began our work, and some of the areas we canvassed were hit hard by it. The mass deportation effort we witnessed during this time was quite plainly aimed not at criminals, cartels, or even recent arrivals, but at people at or on their way to work, including many people who had spent decades living and working in Chicago in a completely integrated way in the local economy. We learned quickly in our canvasses that rideshare drivers were being pulled over and detained, particularly at areas like airports where high-value fares attract drivers. Then it was childcare workers on their commutes from their homes in lower-income neighborhoods to the higher-income neighborhoods where they work. Then it was parents dropping their children off at schools. Then we saw a long string of detentions of construction workers and landscapers being picked up from yards in relatively wealthy areas of Chicago.

In some immigrant commercial districts, the detentions would begin as random street-level stops of people who seemed, by their looks and location, potentially foreign. These choices of target seemed directly geared toward two things: (1) avoiding having to bother with obtaining judicial warrants, and (2) deliberately publicizing and making visible the detentions in upscale, Democrat-stronghold areas of the city (this latter was particularly underscored by the voluble presence of DHS helicopters on almost a daily basis in areas where detentions would concentrate).

Because 4th Amendment protections are relatively weak for someone in a vehicle and even weaker for someone on a lawn, compared to someone in their home or inside a building, the particular tactics used in Midway Blitz became a frontier for us to explore further how to help immigrants avoid detention, and a reason to review and modify our materials. The answer again was avoidance first, and the practical mechanics of that avoidance were and will continue to be our focus.

In general, Chicagoans seemed perturbed by the methods employed in Midway Blitz. Witnessing these tactics really did change some people’s minds in real time. It became increasingly clear that the deportations were not really aimed at solving (and will not solve) the socioeconomic issues that propelled the initial popularity of deportations among some Chicagoans, such as drug-related crime and the diverting of welfare resources from existing lower-income residents to the recently arrived migrants during the Biden term. The federal agents seemed unprepared, and were pointlessly and publicly rough, both in how they physically handled people they arrested and in their crowd control maneuvers. And the residents being detained most often seemed to be, if not citizens by law, then citizens in practice — people who work, send their kids to school, pay taxes, and participate in the consumer economy in Chicago. In real time, the whole affair felt wrong — as if people had a common sense of a violation of civic freedom when they saw it. There was a real, spontaneous will to stop these random detentions of working people, and it brought people, including residents who are not usually active in their communities, out of their private lives to help.

ICE agents detain a protester during Operation Midway Blitz on Chicago’s East Side (Oct. 14, 2025)

As such, the much-publicized rapid response networks (most commonly messaging systems created to identify and warn people about the presence of federal agents in a neighborhood) that cropped up in certain neighborhoods grew beyond the various political agendas of their founders and individual members and drew in people of a great variety of perspectives on the broader issue of immigration. We think this showed some genuine potential which could be expanded upon in the future.

We discovered through our activity two important limits on rapid response. Firstly, a certain subset of the rapid responders were motivated by rage and/or political motivations that made them want to engage in and escalate confrontations with federal agents, when the overwhelming best option for the people most at risk is to avoid confrontation. Secondly, neighborhood-based rapid response networks often resulted in activists within a single neighborhood or cluster of neighborhoods warning one another of the presence of federal agents, but not the people most at risk of being detained, who were coming in from other neighborhoods to work and were not connected to the rapid response warning system at all, and in some cases, we learned, were unaware such networks even existed.

If these rapid response networks were maintained instead of being abandoned once political attention moves on to the next issue, broadened to include more immigrant communities, and disciplined to exclude confrontational behavior, they could become increasingly valuable and effective. Likewise for the less publicized but no less important mutual aid networks that some of our members participated in, which delivered supplies to people who, for avoidance reasons, were temporarily unable to leave their homes. Building such networks up, and organizing further around supporting people who lose significant work due to having to remain home, could be a game-changer during future upsurges in local deportation efforts.

After Midway Blitz ended and federal focus moved on, we saw deportations continue, albeit more quietly and at a lower rate. We have since revisited some of the neighborhoods where we began. One neighborhood we visited, on the more conservative Northwest Side, was barely touched at all by Midway Blitz. Another neighborhood we canvassed had experienced near-daily detentions in plain view on its major thoroughfare for a solid two months. On our return visits, we learned about the real-time practices that businesses used to protect their workers, and about how different individuals, including U.S. citizens, were affected by Midway Blitz. We learned about the economic effect of deportation drives, as local businesses lost earnings. Even when employers helped their workers to be able to show up for work, many of their customers stayed home in fear of arbitrary detention themselves.

In some cases, we found that the practices that businesses employed went beyond our training materials, protecting not just workers, but customers and passersby as well. We also had candid conversations about what did not work — what was not useful about what we offered, what we might change, and what used to work under immigration enforcement regimes in prior administrations that does not work anymore. Businesses we revisited were honest and welcoming, and we once again enjoyed great food. We will continue to return, as we know our steady presence is necessary to build the kind of trust required to effectively collaborate in this high-stakes and sensitive project.

Conclusion

All told, our work thus far has generated more questions than answers — as it is meant to; more lines of inquiry to go down, more social dynamics to explore, more interpersonal connections to deepen. As far as conclusions go, we can say that employers are broadly interested in not having their workers deported, this is a live issue for many, many regular people in Chicago, and, because this arena of activity is neither politically nor administratively saturated, engaging it is a low-barrier way to take our activists well outside the world of typical left protest-activism and into the heart of the living city.

Going forward, you will find our members continuing to canvass territories old and new, performing and improving our constitutional rights trainings and anti-deportation planning sessions with businesses and individuals, connecting with other activist groups with expertise at the nexus of immigration and the workplace, and participating routinely in mutual aid and mutual interest activities in order to expand the reach and usefulness of our efforts. There is more fertile territory for anti-deportation activism than we can possibly cover in Chicago, and because we know deportations without due process will continue indefinitely, long after 2028, we know there will be plenty of work to do going forward. We won’t be performing miracles, but we will learn.

We welcome new participants here in Chicago at any time. We also believe this type of activity can be taken up fruitfully by anyone, anywhere in the United States, and we can help you get started. You need not be an expert — just curious and thoughtful. The conversations get easier to have every time you have them, and you will get better at learning from each encounter.

Join us!

This report was contributed by Campaign members in Chicago (submitted April 25, 2026, reprinted in Sublation with permission).

If you’d like to join the Campaign for a Socialist Party (CSP), become a Campaign Reporter, or read more of our reports, please email us at campaignforasocialistpartyUSA@gmail.com or visit our Substack: https://campaignforasocialistparty.substack.com.