Immigrant worker and father Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez was shot dead in the Chicago suburb of Franklin Park on September 12 after he was stopped by ICE agents in his vehicle. The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), alleges in a public statement that he was shot after he “resisted arrest, attempted to flee the scene and dragged an ICE officer a significant distance with his car.”

The Villegas-Gonzalez family has since launched an online fundraising page, writing: “What ICE agents did to him was cruel, especially just after he had dropped his sons off at school.”

The fatal shooting comes amid Trump’s crackdown on immigrant workers in the form of “Operation Midway Blitz”, an immigration enforcement escalation announced by DHS on September 8. The Trump administration has officially described the operation as targeting immigrants DHS claims have criminal records. Trump’s DHS has presented the operation as retaliation against “sanctuary city” policies, local measures in more progressive areas designed to protect immigrant workers from ICE raids. The administration has used the effort to sharpen its attacks on what it calls “Democrat-run” cities, with Chicago singled out as a prime target.

“It goes a lot deeper than him calling it ‘Democrat-run.’ Chicago is and has for generations been first and foremost a working class city,” Elias Decker told Peoples Dispatch. Decker is an organizer helping to plan actions against ICE operations in the Chicago area, and is a lifelong Chicago resident. Chicago is called “‘the City of Broad Shoulders’… because of the power in our immigrant working class communities.” In 2024, immigrants made up about 22% of Chicago’s population, with the largest communities coming from Mexico, Poland, and India.

Chicago residents respond

On Saturday, September 13, around 100 people gathered for a vigil for Villegas-Gonzalez in Franklin Park, the Chicago suburb where the shooting took place. Many mourners were immigrants and members of Chicago’s Latino community.

Residents have been staging days of protest against Trump’s immigration crackdown. Local organizers have been holding regular “noise demonstrations” at night outside of hotels where DHS agents are reported to be sleeping, under the slogan “no sleep for ICE.”

On Monday, September 15, military veterans, VA healthcare staff, faith leaders, and local elected officials staged a rally to oppose the use of the Edward Hines, Jr. VA Medical Center as a staging site for ICE operations in the Chicago area. “ICE has been given a green light to target our community members including veterans. The VA is a space for healing not to stage racist raids on our community. We don’t want ICE in the VA. We don’t want ICE in the Chicagoland area,” said Aaron Hughes, a National Guard veteran and member of About Face: Veterans Against the War.

Third immigrant worker death highlights deadly pattern in ICE raids

Villegas-Gonzalez’s killing marks the third casualty of the Trump administration’s mass deportation machine. Two other immigrants have been killed amid ICE raids this year, the first being 57‑year‑old farmworker Jaime Alanís, who fell nearly 30 feet from a greenhouse roof after being pursued by ICE agents during a massive raid at his place of work in July. Alanís’ death sparked protest and prompted Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum to consider legal action against US immigration raids.

Last month, another immigrant worker died after attempting to flee from ICE agents in California. 52-year-old Carlos Roberto Montoya was pronounced dead after being struck by a vehicle on the 210 freeway in California, a large interstate highway with four lanes in each direction, while fleeing an ICE raid on a Home Depot in Los Angeles County.

“ICE’s operations, which today resulted in ICE killing Mr. Villegas-Gonzalez, jeopardize the safety of everyone, citizens and non-citizens alike, and disrupt the very fabric of our communities,” wrote the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights in a statement the day Villegas-Gonzalez was killed.

A thorough analysis of ICE’s history of deadly shootings in the past six years, written by Lila Hassan and published in The Trace, reveals “a rogue force whose officers recklessly fire their weapons.” Public records obtained through a suit showed that ICE officers had fired weapons 59 times between 2015 and 2021, resulting in 23 deaths and 24 injuries. The report found no evidence that any ICE agent was ever indicted for these shootings.

The post Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez: the third casualty of Trump’s mass deportation operation appeared first on Peoples Dispatch.

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