As Black Chicagoans and as organizers, we are alarmed to hear that, weeks into President Donald Trump threatening Black and brown communities in Chicago with military invasion and weeks into calls from community leaders across the city opposing these threats, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have shot and killed a man in the suburbs and media reports have already spread misinformation that seeks to paint him in a negative light in a way that is all too familiar to us.
Whether it’s police officers making traffic stops when they see someone “driving while Black” or ICE stopping brown people who they think “look like immigrants,” the tactics of racial profiling all too often lead to violence and do not keep us safe. And whether it’s police killing Black people or now ICE shooting someone they believe is an immigrant, any loss of life should be cause for us to rethink the most militarized approaches to safety. These approaches do not stop violence; they simply add to it.
While the Trump administration has cut massive amounts of money for hospitals and school lunch programs, they have enabled billionaires to pocket our tax dollars — leaving too many people vulnerable and without what they need to survive let alone thrive — and put billions into efforts to force communities to live in constant fear. Racist threats of military presence have no place in making our city and state safer, restoring those resources do.
Our shared collective interest is in investment in what our communities need to be safe, stable, whole, and free from fear — that means jobs and guaranteed income, healthcare including mental healthcare, education and youth programs to start.
We resist attempts to divide and distract us, and history has proven that increased law enforcement will almost always come back to hurt Black communities. We oppose police killings when it happens in our communities, and we oppose it now. We have opposed mass criminalization when the War on Drugs failed to make our communities safer, and we oppose this policy now.
The cycle of mass criminalization and incarceration of the past several decades has led to thousands of our loved ones in prisons, as opposed to treatment centers; parentless households, leaving many of our youth to raise themselves; and communities starved of basic resources. Now, we can either repeat that cycle and use police and prisons as catch-all responses to problems, or we can establish a new cycle that centers on care, repair, and economic investment.
While the unified voices of community, faith and political leaders have been successful at stopping Trump’s proposed National Guard takeover of Chicago, we are seeing that he has moved on to targeting other Black cities, that there is already an increased ICE presence in the Chicago area, and that the threats still loom.
We support the removal of ICE agents from our communities and oppose any future deployments of National Guard troops or other federal agents. Instead, we — along with the coalition of dozens of Black community organizations and legal advocates that we have organized in the past couple of weeks — demand that our public dollars be spent on solutions that actually make us safer.
