Mia Wong (32:46)
Yeah. And these are just, you know, these are just regular people who suddenly at one in the morning, a bunch of explosions start going off. There's a whole bunch of pictures that you can see in, in various articles about this of doors torn off their hinges. The agents did a. I think this is a classic Chicago police tactic, but, you know, they just went through and just started grabbing everyone's stuff and tearing through it and throwing it onto the ground. There were Black Hawk helicopters, like, constantly circling this just random apartment complex. There was a massive FBI presence alongside Border Patrol and ice. It's also worth mentioning that independent outlet Book Club Chicago, which is one of the very sort of prominent independent local media outlets there, obtained a picture from a neighbor who was like, next to the raid that show Chicago Police Department on the scene, which they are expressly forbidden, like by state law, from assisting in immigration enforcement. It is worth reading this article in order to see this. Quote, we did not participate in or assist with any immigration enforcement, spokesperson Maggie Hyun said in a statement, followed immediately by pictures that clearly show a CBD car on the scene of this raid. Yeah, this raid is a really significant escalation of force in a city that has, I mean, has already seen ICE literally shoot someone and kill them. But yeah, I'm going to quote this from Tribe, which is another independent news outlet, in collaboration with Unraveled Press. Veronica Castro of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights at a press conference said, quote, this looked like hundreds of masked agents knocking down doors and dragging families out in the middle of the night holding babies that were unclothed. Castro added, so they are dragging people from their homes in the middle of the night holding naked babies because people haven't had time. Like, they're not giving people time to even put clothes on something. You see a lot in the accounts of this. I'm going to read some more from an account from abc. As I got to my unit to stick my key in the door, I was grabbed by an officer and I said, what's going on? What's going on? He never actually told me. He said I was being detained, said Alicia Brooks. Neighbors like Ebony Watson say they ducked for cover as they heard several flashbangs. They was terrified. The kids was crying, people was screaming. They looked very distraught. I was out there when I seen the little girl coming around the corner because they was bringing the kids down too. Had them zip tied to each other, Watson said, that's all I kept asking. What is the morality? Where is the human? One of them literally laughed. He was standing right there. He Said fuck em kids. So that is what these raids are looking like now. It is again also worth noting that like this is, this is a very significant escalation of force. They are zip tying children to each other as they drag them from their homes at one in the morning and saying fucking kids. Yeah. And this also marks what seems to be a pretty large pivot away from the areas they had been targeting before, which tend to be the suburbs and the outlying areas and into very, very majority, the majority black parts of Chicago. And we're going to talk more about this next week with journalists who's been on the ground. Yeah, I mean for example, a couple of hours before we recorded this episode. So there are sparse details, but there is a video that shows the feds just two hands on neck choking a black man in East Garfield Park. It's deeply unclear why this is happening, but they are just doing this now. And what we have so far, we don't know why they were doing this. But this is also something I think is very alarming. This was also reported by Tribe. There was a video from the scene where an agent is recorded saying, just so you guys know, this is not an immigration enforcement action. The agent goes on to say they were responding to a robbery in progress. All we know about is there was a car crash and they just started choking this guy. It's unclear exactly what's going on with this. There probably will be more details by the time this episode is going out. But the feds are just doing this stuff every day in Chicago. I mean just randomly choking black people on the street and this massive hideous raid in South Shore are pretty significant escalations in places they haven't been targeting before. And it's hard to see this ending anytime soon or things getting any better from here, especially with the sort of, you know, as you were mentioning earlier, there hasn't been really any sign of like an intensification of federal violence in Portland, but in Chicago there absolutely has been and it's horrible.
