From the UWF Executive Committee (10/3/2025)
UWF denounces the Trump administration’s ongoing campaign of terror against our Brown, Black, and immigrant neighbors. Each day, our city and state are facing new horrors at the hands of Trump, DHS, and their authoritarian foot soldiers. Majority Black neighborhoods throughout the city were harassed and traumatized by Trump’s troops. In South Shore, whole families were dragged out of their apartments in the middle of the night by masked agents. Neighbors were disappeared outside of a homeless shelter in Bronzeville. In the west side neighborhood of East Garfield Park, federal agents detained a Black man in a choke hold. Families are being torn apart in our parks and outside schools. Chemical weapons are being hurled at journalists and peaceful protestors holding signs in front of the ICE detention facility in the Black-led village of Broadview.
As federal agents escalate operations in predominantly Black neighborhoods and continue their unprecedented harassment of residents in immigrant neighborhoods of Chicago this week, we know our fates and our safety are intertwined.
Brown, Black, immigrant, and unhoused communities are being surveilled, criminalized, and brutalized as federal agents are given free range to racially profile. Trump has made it clear he wants to use Chicago as a military training ground, and it is every day people who are paying the price for daring to imagine a better future for themselves and their families. Let’s be clear: it is the ongoing violence of ICE’s occupation that is making us less safe.
The mass deployment of federal agents and troops to our cities will be remembered for what it is: a fascist directive to unleash terror on everyday working people in service of white supremacy and the Billionaire Right’s looting agenda. The money we want for care, they want for cruelty.
Chicago experienced a 60-year low in violent crime this summer because we organized to demand investment in root-cause solutions and we elected a mayor and council members who are following through with those investments in violence prevention, youth jobs, mental health and affordable housing. These are inconvenient facts to a racist regime that loathes the public good and wants to privatize every facet of our lives. Federal funding for food, medical care, and education are being cut off to fund ICE’s attacks, Trump’s occupations of Black and Brown communities, as well as the largest transfer of wealth to the 1% in history.
Federal agents are not welcome in our city. Trump and his troops are not welcome in our city. The Billionaire Right and their war on the rest of us are not welcome in our city. Chicagoans will continue to care for each other and resist these racist attacks. We will never kneel to a wannabe dictator.
We will stand with our neighbors who are providing mutual aid and rapid response, and who are educating our neighbors to know and defend our rights. We demand city and state officials tax the rich and invest in our communities to keep our city safer.
