ICE in Chicago

Plus Tom Homan's promise

Greetings from Chicago, where it seems that ICE cannot wait to wreak havoc on protesters and press alike.

For weeks, protests have taken place outside of ICE’s facility in Broadview. National attention was drawn to the protests when an ICE agent was filmed picking up Democratic congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh and throwing her to the ground.

The police chief says that 75% his force is dedicated to crowd control, and that his officers were gassed by ICE while investigating a car running into a pedestrian. Yesterday, ICE backed protesters into the street, where local police were. In this video of ICE throwing a protester to the ground, you can see a few local officers in the back, at best wearing N95s and sunglasses to protect from tear gas.

As yesterday’s protest fizzled out, ICE could have easily gone inside and done whatever work their jobs entail. Instead, they remained committed to staying behind a fence and occasionally popping out to tear gas and shoot paintballs at the dwindling group of protesters who were not trying to crawl over the fence and onto ICE property. Tonight a larger protest is planned, and the impression I and a few other journalists have is that agents were saving their energy for this one.

Last weekend, MSNBC reported the FBI had recorded Tom Homan, current border czar and former acting director of ICE, taking $50,000 from undercover agents in September 2024. Believing the agents were running a business, Homan suggested he could help them secure contracts under a second Donald Trump administration.

Weeks after the FBI sting, I saw Homan speak at the Rod of Iron Freedom Festival, an annual event thrown by a gun cult (read my write up of the weekend in The Nation). His speech was fairly standard, ranging from calling AOC the dumbest woman in Congress to defending child separation. But one thing had stood out to me at the time — a bizarre insistence that “Tom Homan isn’t being paid.”

At one point during this speech, Homan said that Alejandro Mayorkas, then the Deputy Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, should be impeached. Someone in the audience shouted out, “he should be hung.” This was a type of audience response I heard throughout 2024, including at the truck convoy rally in Eagle Pass, Texas, which I covered for Daily Dot.

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