Al Zone Media.
Welcome to it could Happen here, a podcast where the it is the authoritarian takeover of the city of Chicago. I'm your host, Mia Wong, and today is an episode that was significantly delayed by the fact that our guests got shot in the face by riot munitions while attempting to cover an anti ice protest and an ice facility, and then her coworker was fucking grabbed by the FEDS the next day, which she was also still out at for reasons that are semi incomprehensible to me, because again,
she was just shot in the face. Since this is Raven, a journalist with the independent outlet Unraveled, which really truly is doing a lot of incredible work on the incredible proliferation of ice raids around Chicago. Raven, Welcome to the show. Oh boy, oh boy?
Is right? Thanks for that intro. Yeah, we're in the shit right now. We're in it.
Yeah, I guess it would immediately start this with you are mostly you're basically okay from my understanding, from getting shot in the face of the right munition like a week ago.
I am. I am basically okay. I have like some swelling still in my jaw. I'm going to the doctor. We'll see like if there's any soft tissue like lingering effects later on down the line. But nothing's broken.
Yeah, which, thank god, holy shit, thank god that I can really fuck you up permanently.
Like yeah, I mean it's been several weeks now of the fence just pummeling people with these stupid little pepper ball rounds yep, and like the core of it is like metal, you know, it's like this little bullet thing
with like the pepper powder on the outside. So if you shoot someone in the face with those, I mean, like we've seen horrific injuries these last few weeks, and also like people getting concussions from like you know, sear gas canisters exploding right by their heads and other things, broken bones from these really violent arrests, and yeah, it's just been awful. Not gonna lie. Yeah, I was shot at, like literally, I was like taking a photo of a
fed like an oppressed gaggle. We were all hiding behind this van while we're just like being shot at. And this guy, I mean he stared right at me and like right down the barrel of my lens, like he knew what he was doing.
Jesus Christ.
Yeah, another reporter. It was like a similar situation where these guys like fucking ambushed them. Like it was just two reporters like hiding behind a van, and these guys came up along the side of the fence and just started like shooting them in the face with these rounds.
Yeah. So, and this has been at the protests at the ICE facility in Broadview. Yeah.
Broby is like just a tiny little suburb, like just outside of Chicago. It's Stilling Cook County, majority black suburb, actually black working class, the mayors of Black woman And now this ICE facility has been there for a while. Obviously, people were protesting there weekly for like over a decade, but nothing like what we've seen these last few weeks.
Yeah. Okay, let's go back in time a little bit, because in between the last time we spoke to you and now there has been so much unbelievably horrible stuff in Chicago. I guess let's go back a couple of weeks and talk about the guy they murdered.
Yeah, so, shortly after this latest ice surge began, they sailed a man at a traffic stop. Two ICE agents who were seemingly operating completely alone, didn't seem to have any backup with them. It was just these two guys in this car who jumped down on the sky. And yeah, it feels it feels like forever ago, but of course
it was only a few weeks ago. Yeah, and you know, that's that's an example of just like a police killing that we may never learn more about because you know, it involves the FEDS, right, you know, there's no timeline under which they have to release any information or like
tell us anything about their their own investigation into it. Yeah, so that is of course really horrifying and horrifying to know there's kind of these these missing few seconds of video right where we don't see the actual shot fired yep, or shots excuse me. We can sort of piece together what happened, but you know, this happened in a working class Latino suburb, heavily Latino suburb, not not very far down the road from the actual ice.
Facility, because you were say, part of what's really frustrating about this is we can't tell you why they stopped this person, right, because they won't tell us, right, We know very little about this other than they stopped the guy. He tried to drive away and they shot him. That's like that's all we know effectively, right.
I mean they claim he had some traffic violations, which is true, but I mean, like who doesn't.
Yeah, Like, I don't know. If we're shooting people for traffic violation, this country is going to have like ten people in it by the end of it.
Like, yeah, he wasn't suspected of any like crime.
No.
I believe that it was just opportunistic, yeah, that they were just looking for an easy target, and these guys were acting like cowboys, I mean, like just doing this jump out by themselves. And and also to be clear, I mean like when they say he drove away from them, I mean some of the video that we do have it shows him slowly reversing backwards away from them. It's not like he just drove over the agents.
No no, no no, yeah.
Which is was of course their initial narrative that he like hit one of them with his car and all this stuff that of course turned out to be false.
Yeah. And it's also frustrating too because you know, in the app well, I would say in the absence of better information, but it's the media. They will just straight up print you know, no matter just how unbelievably absurd the lies are, they will just straight up print Department of Homeland Security press releases as if they have anything
to do with reality whatsoever. Even as it becomes increasingly clear, even more of an it's ever been, that you simply cannot rely on police press reports to understand what happened in the situation. People will just keep printing that. And so that's the first that's the version of the story that goes out first, which is what everyone sees. Yeah, and they don't see the video where it's very clearly not what happened.
Yep. It is a maddening situation. So yeah, I mean, like that happened. And then almost immediately and like concurrently, of course, all of this other ice activity started ramping up. Yeah, and then around a week and a half ago, Bovino showed up and Border Patrol showed up, And now it's amped up even further because they're even worse than our regular ice guys.
Bovino and the Border Patrol people, those are the people who seem to have been pulled out of Los Angeles and deployed the Chicago.
Yeah, Bovino moved this sort of larger border patrol operation here to Chicago. So there are border patrol units here from you know, Arizona, from California, different places, and they've been doing sort of a combination of like just strictly cornyass propaganda ops, you know, like driving around on their boats for photos, combined with like actual terrors, like a few nights ago, hundreds of Feds rating an entire apartment building of people in the middle of the night.
Yeah, and I think we'll get to that rate in a second, because it was unbelievable, sort of gruesome and horrible. But yeah, I wanted to talk to you just about sort of what the general sort of ICE operations and then the border patrol operations have looked like in the city and what it's been like being in a place where there's just guys in mass dragging people off the street.
It kind of feels like streaming underwater and no one can hear you. Yeah, just sort of witnessing this every day. And it is still highly dispersed, right like Chicago and the metro area and the suburban counties where this is happening.
It's a huge, huge area. So, like we talked about last time, it's a real challenge to focus people's attention on because it can appear like the waters are calm like where you live, you know, like they're doing any of these very fast strike teams and this very dispersed way, so by the time you even hear about it, they're already gone. So many cars abandoned on the side of the road. Was like windows smashed out Jesus Christ, like landscapers,
work bands and stuff. You know, like people are just rapid responders are just getting to sites where someone's reported something happening, and all they find is like a busted out card and then they have to piece together like potentially what happened. And additionally, the broad view so like this ice facility where people are protesting regularly. You know, it's not set up to be a permanent detention center. It's just supposed to be like a temporary stopping point
because Illinois doesn't have overnight immigration detention. So additionally, there are like so many extra people crammed into this facility that wasn't designed to hold them. Yeah, and of course the conditions are horrible, you know, like they don't have privacy, they don't have enough bath rooms, they're not getting fed, they're not getting medication, you know, like after the kidnappings, after the disappearances, then there's this pipeline of detention horrors
that people are enduring. So this is this is why people are protesting, you know. I mean, this is why people are out there yelling at the fence. Because the people who are who are brave enough to go out there and yell at the fence or to take the pepper balls or what have you, they they are in agony. They're aware of what's happening. They're witnessing all of this and feeling like this needs to stop. And there are
a lot of people hiding in their homes. Yeah, you know, like like it it's true, Like I don't always want to make like Holocaust comparisons because I feel like that that's what we always go to. But I mean, like that's the most apt comparison that becomes to most people's mind.
You know.
They think of like and frankiding in your attic, like those kinds of things, and it's like that is literally where we are at right now. People are literally in hiding because they are worried that if they go to Sam's Club, they will be cannapped by secret police.
Yeah. I think the behavior that they've been exhibiting against the protesters too, has been very, very similar to what they've been doing to the people that they're grabbing off the street. I want to talk to you a bit about like what it's been like dealing with the way that the Feds have been attacking the protesters constantly.
Yeah, well, these guys are fucking monsters. Yeah, I'm trying to thread this needle for people of like, all policing is bad, right, Like all policing is violent, All cops are violent, But there is something different happening here as a result of the fact that there is literally zero accountability. And I'm not suggesting that like police accountability isn't a sham,
because in general it kind of is. But I think, like, you know, when you take away every single guardrail, these guys don't have to identify themselves and they don't have to answer to anyone. Yeah, their bosses aren't going to write them up. You know. It's it's kind of like with any other job, right, you know, take a city cop here in Chicago. Of course, it's rare that any of them ever actually get fired for the horrible shit
they do. But you know there's this sort of base level of knowing, like well, I got to show up to work every day with my name on my vest, and I also have like all these other bosses and all these other people who are gonna, like, you know, maybe make my day harder if I like really fuck something up, right, And so when we're talking about the FEDS,
there's just nothing. There's just nothing there. They can literally do whatever they want on top of like just not having the same level of like quote law enforcement training. I mean, we've been watching these guys for weeks like fucking hurt themselves with their papper ball guns like they live. I really are like dropping shit as they're on the process, like like watching people have made like call of duty comparisons, like prowdboy comparisons, and like it is kind of like that.
It's like if you just gave a bunch of chuds, a bunch of like military and police care and we're like, all right, go out and like pretend to be a cop. And that's like literally what it feels like. And so I'm trying to spread this deal for people of like yeah, all cops suck, but like what's going on with this is like so much worse. Like they're just out there like shooting at people randomly, like and you know, for no reason. Like it is just one of the craziest things I've ever seen in my life.
Yeah, And I also I want to put this into perspectives, like you have also covered a lot of protests in the city.
Yeah, I've covered a lot of cop violence. I've been to a lot of protests, I mean hundreds and hundreds and hundreds at this point, right, Yeah, And there's just certain like things that you're used to seeing and certain there's a certain predictability sometimes to like a lot of
them movement. And what's interesting too, is like in some ways they are actually more militarized, just in terms of like their riot formations and like how tightly coordinated their units are because they practice and they train for like
crowd control stuff all the time. And then you have these just like ice chuds running around with like way more gear and they look way scarier, but they're like way less organized and way more chaotic, and there's not enough of them, right, so like they're not even like doing a good job of like backing each other up, you know, like in the field, like I'm just watching them like leave their own backs unwatched and you know, doing things that are like dangerous for them, Like they
want to act like a military unit, but they're like definitely not.
Yea.
It's I mean, people have made the comparison of like crowd boys, which I think I don't know, it kind of works in a sense like street fighters because what they're acting like, you know, yeah, it's just it's just been super violent, super awful. Chicago does not have really any experience with like these just FEDS in general, like to this level. I know that out in Portland for years now, like there have been various protests outside of the ICE or something like, there's just there's been like
a lot more a lot more FED presence out in Portland, Seattle. Yeah, throughout the past few years of protests, I've seen you know, people interact with them, and we just we've had nothing like that here. So this is also like very unprecedented like for this region.
Yeah, because usually CPD is like brutal enough that they don't you don't end up with like yeah, federal deployments and now it's like oh boy. Yeah.
Well and also keep in mind this is all happening in broad View, so like they don't even have I mean there's been there's been tensions and arguments and discussions around what's happening with their local police department and just sort of the interface here too, because it's like this tiny little police department is now having to sort of manage what's going on with this ICE facility, and they're not directly like assisting ICE with croud control, but they
are like basically setting up a perimeter around the area, right, and so then like there guys are getting to your gas and like complaining about it.
Yeah, was it brought to you the police chief, who like finally was like, oh holy shit, I've never been treated this racistly by a police officer before. I was like, oh my fucking god, Like yeah, you're just now realizing that you're the baddie, Like when it finally like happens to you, like.
Come on, oh yeah.
He he went on on like ABC or whatever and was just did hit this whole interview about like, well, ICE is disrespecting me as the police chief, and it's just like like what did you expect?
Yeah, man, you signed up for the racist organization and you were like, ah, yeah, I'm in charge of my local by local chapter of the Racist Association, so it'll never happen to be like, oh shit, you mean there's other people who are higher up in.
The racism police, Like.
God, yeah. So that's been that's just been like a weird side story to this of kind of like the mayor and the police chief and the fire chief are not thrilled about what's going on, and they're like looking into the legality quote of the fence that isis put up just like across this street that goes past their facility, which is in this kind of like tucked away sort
of industrial park thing. But there are homes like right on the other side, and you know, they've just blocked off this entire street and there's like a business on the other side. You know, it's like obviously a huge fire hazard to just like block a whole road like that. They didn't ask permission to like put this up, not to mention a hazard for the people in the detention center, which is now boarded up and has this huge fence
across the street. It's like, oh my god, if there's a fire or like an emergency and they needed to evacuate the people inside. Yeah, I mean, like obviously people would die.
It's this incredible mix of both blatant disregard for the safety of anyone involved and also just wanting to hurt people. And it's it's this incredible fusion of they are both incompetent and malicious, which is yeah.
Right, which is not a great combination.
No, let's talk about this raid in South Shore. Yeah.
Well, you know, we don't have a we don't have a ton of details on the true extent of this because it happened at one in the morning. So two nights ago, hundreds and hundreds of federal agents showed up to an apartment building in the South Shore neighborhood, which is a predominantly black neighborhood where a number of newly
arrived migrants settled because there's cheap housing there. Yeah, so when Governor Abbott started busting people here a few years ago, that is one place where you know, a number of people found housing. And unfortunately also too, there's like a lot of slum lords down that way.
Yeah, cheap housing means shit in Chicago. Yeah, of course, Okay, I uee tents organizing that shity. I have seen shit that, Like I have seen people sewage like running out of their bathtubs. I have seen I have seen places with no electric like literally no electricity, no lights, no running water, like actually literally like frozen solid in the winter and no one can contact the landlord. And those were in parts of the city that were like not even that
badly off. The apartment that I had there almost fucking killed me from dust inhalation, and like that's like that's like a like a normal cheap apartment. It gets so much fucking worse. The pictures from like in side of the apartment, not even just the parts were like, yeah, the doors are blown off. It's like these apartments fucking sucked because they're run by they're run by fucking slanlords.
And yeah, like the housing situation in Chicago, so much of it is so shit is never going to get repaired because these landlords don't give a shit because they can just keep a distracting money from it because you know, one can go anywhere else.
And yeah, yeah, I mean these people were living in really bad conditions. I've heard that like a lot of people were like scrippled, quadrupled up in units. You know, I don't. I don't know what it looked like before it was rated. Yeah, but it's like virtually empty now. I mean like there there were some and to be clear, like what happened to back up a little bit, you know, they hundreds and hundreds of FEDS showed up with this building in the middle of the night and reportedly detained
everyone in the building. So there were like, yeah, you know, people in the building who aren't immigrants, like black people who live in the neighborhood. You know. There was one woman being interviewed on broadcast who's like an older black woman, you know, who was just like, yeah, I was like detained by the FBI, you know, like in the middle of the night, like asking me if I'm a citizen. You know, Like, it's just absolutely fucking wild that this happened.
Also as of today, granted this might change by the time your podcast is.
Out, importantly, So we're recording this the night of Wednesday, October first. Who fucking knows what we'll have learned about this or what will happen in between this and when it comes out probably Monday, probably there will be new horrors. If you've heard about like the horrors in Chicago, and it's not in this episode. It's probably because it happened after we recorded. Things are happening at a terrible rate.
Yeah, So as of today, Wednesday, October first, I could not find a story on the sun Times or the Tribune website about this raid. And I think, yeah, of course, a lot of people want to indict mainstream media for not covering things, which like is fair sometimes. Don't get me wrong, They've been trying. Things are happening so fast now, and there are so many horrible things happening every day that like no news room can keep up.
Alert red alert. They did finally get a story up five minutes ago, so mid I checked the book. They got one up. They got one up.
Is the tribute the.
Suntimes sometimes sometimes.
Okay, okay, well it only took them two days. Okay, sure, I haven't read it yet. Maybe maybe it's a good story. I don't know, maybe they went really in depth.
It's not terrible. Yeah, it doesn't actually seem I mean, it's pretty long. I mean I'm going I'm gonna read one quote from it to get people and understand. This is, like I actually think is pretty representative of like the Independent media covers that I've read of it aren't federal agents and military fatigues busted down their doors overnight, pulling men, women,
and children from their apartment some naked residents. Witnesses said, that is the thing I've seen in everything report about this, is that a bunch of people just literally didn't have clothes on because they were drag out of their bed. They were like fucking naked children, like naked, like people holding naked babies being pulled out of their fucking apartments Like Jesus fucking Christ God.
And this was like such a huge number of beds that like the buses were rerouted around the scene. I mean, like there's questions. There's questions right now over like the level of CPD involvement in like protecting the scene. And this was not just ice. There were a ton of FBI and a ton of ATF.
Yeah, yeah, which you know, it's like, okay, what what what is the FBI doing right now? They are fucking dragging naked children out of their fucking homes, like out of their fucking apartment at one in the fucking morning.
Yeah, and they were they were in in fucking moving vans like Patriot front, Like.
Yeah, fucking horrible. I mean, like I got I over seeing a statement where it was like they were denying that they had loaded any immigrants into moving vans.
Yeah, which like maybe that's I don't know, maybe only the FBI. Yeah, beautiful malls.
Like I don't know. Yeah, I'm also just like haunted by like what other reports that I saw where they were talking about like they separated all of the black people into like one van and all of the non black people to another one, And it was just like, oh God, like these people. There's another thing. I think this is in the story that you that you wrote about this or they literally like a fed literally said fuck them kids.
Oh my god, I don't I deuinitely didn't write that, but I believe that someone said it.
Yeah it was Oh my god.
I believe it. I'm I'm I mean, I'm glad to hear that. Five minutes ago the Sun Times covered it.
You know, Yeah, they finally got around to it. Yeah, good for them.
To be clear, like they probably interviewed a lot more people than we had capacity to. You know, it's been obviously a huge challenge to even cover all this stuff, like as this tiny random weirdo ass news outlet, like yeah, and we're still figuring out as we go, but yeah, I mean this this I am still it has done two days and I am like still trying to wrap my hat around this raid, this specific raid, because it's just, yeah,
so horrific that this happened. And of course, like the timing, like they knew what they were doing by timing it in the middle of the night. Of course.
Yeah, I'm gonna fucking ref the Times article because I've just been reading it while you've been doing it, Like Watson, this is someny. Lists across the street said she saw agents dragging residents, including kids, out of the building without any clothes and into HU haul vans. Kids were separated from their mothers. It was heartbreaking to watch, said Watson, even if you're not a mother, seeing kids come out buck naked and taking from their mothers. It was horrible.
They're literally ripping kids from their fucking mothers at one in the morning and throwing it apparently allegedly throwing them at U haul vans.
Like, yeah, I mean, this is like psycho shit. The last three weeks, four weeks has just spent a gradual progression of like the most evil shit you've ever seen in your life. I don't even know what to say about it anymore, honestly, because it feels like it feels like our only way of grappling with things like this is by making comparisons to other things. And I don't know that that is really helping anybody right now. But
you know, it's it's it's ethnic cleansing, it's genocide. It's like literally I was just saying earlier today when like when you drill down to it, like they're disappearing like vast majority Latino men are there are some women. It's not only men, but like they are definitely targeting like mostly Latita men, and like these are people who are migrating here from Central America who are like if you look at their lineage, mostly like indigenous to this fucking
continent on like white people. You know, it's just an extension of like the American project, like of the white nationalist like extermination of the people indigenous to the AMAS. Like that is literally what's happening like right now. So yeah, it does not feel like I don't know, like like enough people get it to the level that they should.
Yeah, well, and that's I think. Like one other thing I wanted to talk to you about was like the way the press bubble has worked around this, where again, the fact that federal agents dragged naked children from their homes at one in the morning in the third largest city in the United States, that is a story that is hitting the mainstream Chicago press today two days later, and I think the only national coverage of it that I've seen are from people who are basically like repeating
the scoop that was given to this, like unhinged UFO outlet. Who were the people that got the exclusive Oh yeah, right into this yet Oh oh god, no idea what hold on? Hold on? Let me let me god fuck Okay, I'm very excited to tell you about this is so unhitched.
I saw like the propaganda video that they made about it.
Yeah. So the group that got like the exclusive like press release thing from the Feds, which is basically being like reprinted by Newsweek, who are just a joke at this point, Like their description of it is like a federal agent's repelled from black cop helicopters and the rooftop Chicago residential buildings targeting trend to Agua gang members, according to news Nation, and I was like, what the fuck
is news Nation? Like, I've I have a pretty good grasp on like all of the weird right wing news outlets, I'd never heard of this one. I looked them up at the first like, big thing that I saw about them was that, well, ay, they are the people. They're the person that Chris Cuomo went to after he was
like publicly disgraced as a journalist. And the second thing I saw about them was that their big thing is that they like quote unquote take UFOs seriously, and these are the people who were given like the exclusive scoop on this is like the UFO outlet.
That is so funny. That is when I watched the propaganda video that we were watching about it, Yeah it was News Nation. I just thought it was like, I don't know, some right wing outlet like any other.
That's why I thought too that looked at it, and like the Wikipedia article was like just when there's a section titled UFOs, I was like, what the fuck?
Great? Great? I didn't know about the UFO connection. I mean I saw them. I saw their reporters like actually at the protests, like interviewing like the one guy in a maga hat who showed up to counter protests, Like, of course that's who they interview.
Yeah, of course, of course.
So that's good to know that they are UFO weirdos.
Rehem approved of approved media outlet, the UFO guys.
Oh, I mean, the the the official like like DHS line on this entire thing is that trend Aragua was this, Like this entire apartment building was a trend dea Arragua.
I don't just like no, it wasn't like like.
It's literally just the same fucking thing that Israel does about hamas right when they're like, oh, yeah, this hospital that we're.
Bombing, Yeah, it's a.
There's hamasoles underneath. I mean, it's like the exact same shit.
Yeah. The connection you made earlier to this functioning as an extension of like the genocide that founded this country. I think it might have been Hannah or want okay, I want to attribute this to her at Hannah w Rent, which is like it's kind of a mess because of her.
Don't do not ever look up Hannah rent stuff on segregation, or actually maybe do if you want to see the worst argument you've ever seen in your life, where like famed intellectual Hannah or Rent says that segregation is like a defining quality of like a free society.
Oh no, I'm not like a super expert on Hannah Rent, but I definitely did not know that.
So oh yeah, no that people. People don't.
I'll say this, Waite, people do not be bringing that shit up. Everyone else is like, oh.
God, holy shit. You were like a major subagregation, like intellectual who got brought out to be like segregation is actually good, nose is free association. But I think it might have been her, It might have been someone else. I've been trying to look for who had this idea, and I haven't been able to find who it was. And I vaguely remember being a Rent, But fuck her.
This is a little bit A very long while. Up was saying, like, there's an idea that I ran into back when I was in my sort of like days in the academy about the way that societies reflect their
founding violence. And you know, the sort of like the founding violence of the United States is the genocide vidicious people and slavery, and you look at what they're doing right now, You're just watching sort of in miniature that violence just being replicated over and over again, where like you're tearing fucking mothers from their children in the dead of night, and it's the same people, right, Like this is an apartment building where almost everyone is black, and
the people who aren't black are immigrants, right and obviously like some of them are both, but like you know, but like you're just like watching the founding violence of this country just being played out over and over and
over again every night. And it's this thing where like I don't think on a fundamental level that this thing that we've built, this sort of like this conception of what democracy is, like this conception of what the state is, this conception of like what this country is is going to survive this moment. Either it's going to change completely or the part of it that was nominally a democracy is going to be consumed by the part of it that's just doing this genocide over and over again. I
don't know. I quote this song a Lot Song of Choice, Peggy Seeger. That's about the rise of fascism that I think about a lot that has like one of one of the lines is today the soldiers took away one, Tomorrow they may take away two one April they took away Greece, but surely they will never take you. And yeah, they're just fucking taking people away in the night, right now, Like that's that's the stage of this where we're at.
And either something fundamentally changes or right, you know, like that the end of that song is either like they take you or at the end they don't take you because they know you didn't care, right.
And I mean, look, I've been I've been covering civil conflict and violence, you know, like more or less for the last five years. Right, I was at January sixth, like literally in the middle of the mob. I've seen a lot of shit.
Reporting on it.
Make this very clear, reporting on it.
Clear why I was there. I was not part although my FASCI stalkers might insist I was part of like an antipa conspiracy to right, But but you know, I've seen a lot of shit the last five years, obviously, and I think this particular moment feels like, yeah, like we're kind of you know, like we're a marble at the top of like a spiral, and it's like either we're going to keep rolling down or or somebody like jams it or takes the marble off, you know, like there's just this is a this is a spiral, Like
there are so many factors that are going to contribute to this getting worse if we do not significantly alter course. And I think, you know, this feeling that we have locally of like we're screaming underwater and nobody can hear us. I'm sure is share a sentiment that is shared in LA, that is shared in DC, that is Sheridan. Yeah, all of these cities all over where ICE is doing similar shit. It can make us really angry. I mean, I've been really angry at times in the last month about the
lack of like attention whatever. But then I think about how everyone is overwhelmed because there's so much horrible shit happening every day on so many places, Like we just can't keep up anymore, Like none of us can keep up.
Yeah, Like I mean, like I'm in Portland right now, and like it's my job to keep track of this, and I can't tell you at this exact second whether a federal diploma to Portland is honor off. I think it's currently off. But also by the time you're listening to this, who the fuck knows? And like yeah, like right, I don't know. There's an Android line about how it's easier to hide a thousand atrocities and it is to hide one because you can just keep ramping the tempo up exactly.
I don't know. I'm not a historian. I'm just a journalist, so maybe you would know better than me. But I feel like we are literally already in a civil war. We just don't know it yet, or like we're waiting for like some specific thing to like prove it, you know, like I don't, I don't know. I think generally nobody knows until it's like already, you're already in it. To me,
it feels like we're in it yea. But I also wonder if that's just the cognitive effect of like us being here literally in it because so much is going on, and then thinking like, well, if the ice surge subsides two months from now, is it going to still feel this way? I don't know. I mean, to me, it feels like we've got several more years of the Trump regime at least if we look at this in the sense of like, well, they're escalating, and then also this
is going to keep going for over more years. Yeah, that's a terrifying concept. Yeah, where do we go from here if it's just gonna like get even worse?
Yeah, And I don't know. I think I've been there a lot recently.
I don't know.
It's the thing I've been telling listeners of this show is that, like the upside of all of this is that everyone hates them. Yeah, oh yeah, Like their proof of ratings are so bad. Everyone fucking hates them, and all of this stuff is hideously unpopular. And the giant economic collapse that is very obviously going to happen when the giant AI bubble that is like that is like a third of the US's GDP pops what it inevitably
does because it doesn't make any money. They're doing all of this in a situation where the economy still appears to be functioning, and when that shit implodes on them, shit is going to be even worse for them than it is now. But also, like, on the other hand, unless people do things about it, then it doesn't really matter how popular or not they are as long as
no one is willing to stop them. And I guess that's like the last thing I kind of want to close on is about like, can you talk a little bit about like what you've seen organizing wise that you can talk about that have been effective.
Well, I think people here are still figuring it out these protests outside of the ice facility. You know, there has been a lot of autonomous organizing. Chicago does not have the same entrenched autonomous organizing culture that you see in like Portland or Seattle for like a ton of reasons, yeah, which are like beyond the scope of this episode in one series of the history the history of organizing in Chicago,
and like how we're in this specific moment. You know, it's important to remember, like this is a city where like the FBI murdered Fred Hampton, Right, it is bad. So there's a lot of tension between organizing factions about how they want things done, and a lot of it is fear driven for a good reason, because people are terrified, and yeah, they're still figuring stuff out. I mean, I think for lack of a better firm. Last Saturday, people
got their shit rocked by border patrol. You know, they were so violent, they were so aggressive, they were just so out of hand, just like immediately too, I mean it was just like zero to sixty instantly, like there was just a Saturday we saw them just immediately tear gas and shoot at people over nothing, like nobody was doing anything and they just assaulted the crowd with like the most tear gas I've ever seen in my life.
So I think folks were definitely underprepared for that. But that doesn't mean that it's like insurmountable to resist something like that. I think there are questions surrounding the best way to protest this specific building because of the location, and it's tough because it's not in Chicago. It's hard to get to for some people.
Yep, yep.
But I don't want to I don't want to write anybody off. I mean, I think people are just still figuring things out, like it's it's ice is adapting, border patrols adapting, and so then organizers also have to adapt, like it's like this tennis match, right yeah, yeah, And so you know, we are also very much here. Our activists are not used to like a huge and our press also by extension, are not used to like a huge amount of chemical weapons.
Chicargo doesn't use tear gas like historically, like they just beat people right or like shooting with right munitions, like they don't tear gas, and I think I was literally always told, like growing up in the city as an activist, was like, if they start using tear gas, they're once its way from shooting you, right, And they finally did it in twenty twenty, which is the first time I anyone had seen it in like decades, right, And the fact that like they're just doing it all the time now,
like Jesus Christ.
Well, the Feds, I mean we saw this in la like at the beginning of this summer, where like Border pat Role specifically just has this enormous amount of chemical weapons that they like I don't know, maybe maybe they're going to expire soon and they have to use them all. Like like I don't know, I don't know what the rationale there is other than just being evil. Yeah, but it's like literally their first voice of like they're just I mean, they're fucking enjoying it. They're fucking enjoying it.
They're enjoying yeah, shooting at people to your gassing them playing g.
I Joe Like yeah, I mean, I will say it does also raise the question, like how much of this stuff do they actually have, because like twenty twenty they went through decades of stockpiles, right, right, And like this is the thing that, like, I don't know, someone who has a lot of time and as an investigative journalist should try to go track down how much of the countries tear gas supplies they've been able to replenish, because they used a lot of it on us in twenty twenty.
And like, I mean, this is I don't know if
it is famous. I guess bicycles. It's kind of a famous story that one of the one of the South Korean military dictatorships was taken down by a student like protest movement that calculated exactly how much tear gas the police had and did this thing where they would do these marches where they would a whole bunch of people would show up and the police start characterizing them, and they would just slowly keep her treating and keep her treating until they ran the state out of tear gas.
I mean, I know, I hope to see that level of strategy in America.
Yeah, law, Like, you know, like nothing, nothing, nothing is impossible with the power of really really pissed off students.
Yeah, I don't know, I mean, I don't know what the I'm not familiar with the manufacturing process for these kind of like how long does it take the like replenish and where do they source it?
Yeap, this is this is one hundred percent a Hey, I know a bunch of journalists listened to this podcast. If what if you wants to go do this, you would be doing a great service to everyone in this country.
Like, right, I'm like assuming that it's not made in the United States and they're like importing these things a hu.
Huge amount of American American tear guests ends up like all over the world because we're one of the big suppliers of it.
Okay, well, then I was mistaken. The popper ball gun dispenser company apparently is based in Lake Forest, so it's actually local.
Oh interesting, Yeah, yeah, since you're kind of oh well.
It's just like a glorified paintball gun basically.
Yeah. The thing I've been getting from listening to you talk about this and from talking to other people is that like, both part of what's making this so horrible and also maybe where they fail is that these people
don't know what they're doing. They just like violence, right, and liking violence and being willing to hurt people is a very effective short term strategy for causing violence, right, but it remains to be seen whether it's an effective long term strategy for like holding power and accomplishing their goals.
Yeah, I would agree with that for sure. It feels like it feels like there their operation is brittle, like it wouldn't take a lot to like impede it. But because they are so violent and so out of hand, that just like the slightest resistance, it's still really challenging to figure out. I mean, and to your point earlier about everybody hating them, I mean, that is palpable.
I have heard the anger and the rage pouring out of people at these guys, you know, like, of course it's palpable how much people hate them, how much what's going on.
Of course they're struggling to hire. Of course they're all wearing masks because they're fucking terrified they're going to be docs, you know, like they know that they're hated. But that's also a double edged short because I think knowing that every but he hates you anyway, well, that's just also sometimes going to make you even more violent because you don't care anymore.
Yeah, and I mean I think the traditional social movement gambit has been like the more people can see how violent they are, the more people will go out to resist them. And I think right now we're in this scenario where because of the sort of media blackout and like the media bubble that's been put around this, it just hasn't been getting out the things that they've been doing.
And I think that is also a thing that you random listener can do things about in terms of like, hey, tell people you know that, like, yeah, there's like a thing a federal occupation of a city and they're like dragging naked children screaming from their homes, like tearing them away from their parents. Like that's a thing that you can like, that's the thing you could directly do. That is a very very low lift.
Yeah, and also countering this like national guard misdirection thing that is just like constantly going on where it's like every fucking two days, Trump and Pritzburgh are arguing about you know, one hundred troops coming to town who are essentially just infrastructure for ice. They might block some roads, but like they're not the main threat.
Yeah, yeah, do you have anything else that you want to tell people? And then also where can people find and support your work as you go hopefully not get shot again.
Well, I've resigned myself to the fact that I get shot again. But they can find us.
At Unraveled on all the social platforms, you know, Unraveled, press dot com. And I think the only other thing I want to say is, you know, as bleak as this episode sounded, we do have to keep the fighting spirit alive and not just like yeah, resign ourselves to total dumerism. We have the moral high grounds, like we are doing the right thing and they are not.
Yeah, and we can win this.
I want to close on the story that came to mind when you said that, which was the story of the liberation of Turin in World War two, where Turin was like, you know, like one of the great industrial cities of Italy and it's directly under the occupation of
the Nazis. By the end of the war and ahead of the Allied advanced the city plans and uprising, and the SS commander who is running the city explicitly tells them, if you like, if you do this, we will turn this into another warsaw And they do it anyways, and they beat them. All of these factory workers who had had guns smuggled in successfully do an uprising and defeat like an SS panzer division and just kick the shit
out of them and liberate Turin. And you know, those were people facing odds that were so much worse than the ones they were facing today. They were facing a straight up military occupation by the SS, and they beat them,
and they've read themselves. And you know, history is replete with dictators who thought that their occupations would last forever, until one day the Americans were withdrawing from Iraq, and the only thing that's eternal is their fear of the uprising, the will one day destroy them.
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