The Trump administration’s Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago on Oct. 4, 2025. Photo: Joshua Lott/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Before dawn, federal agents moved on Chicago’s South Shore in camouflage uniforms with rifles drawn, the thrum of chopper rotors breaking the sky. Officially, it was a “targeted immigration enforcement operation.” In reality, it looked like a military incursion into a historic Black neighborhood — home to working families, elders, and churches that have held the South Side together for generations. By the end of the night, an entire apartment building was under siege.

U.S citizens and children were zip-tied, families separated, and residents of a community that is 92 percent African American reported being met with guns and flash-bang grenades. When a Chicago alderperson went to check on hospitalized residents, she says she was handcuffed by agents.

For some, the Trump administration’s Chicago assault was a shock. But for Black Americans, none of it felt extraordinary. It felt remembered. Generational experience has taught us what happens when the state builds a weapon for someone else: Sooner or later, it finds a way back to us.

The raid wasn’t an aberration; it was a continuation, the latest verse in a long American refrain where safety is promised, and Black lives become the proving grounds. What the nation calls “targeted enforcement,” we recognize as the same searchlight sweeping back across the map.

We’ve seen this movie before, and Black communities have been telling America how it ends.

From Red Scares to Black Files

For more than a century, Black Americans have watched the United States build extraordinary enforcement tools for a supposedly narrow enemy — and then turn them inward. The Palmer Raids of the 1920s were justified as a way to root out communists but swept up Black labor leaders. COINTELPRO was sold as means to counter “subversives” but was used to wiretap Martin Luther King Jr. and raid Black Panther homes. After 9/11, the war on terror built fusion centers, joint task forces, and counter-extremism programs that soon labeled Black activists as “Black Identity Extremists.” The Department of Homeland Security grants and surplus weapons meant to stop terrorism rolled into Ferguson and Baltimore in armored vehicles.

The Chicago raid didn’t just catch “gang-linked migrants” — it detained U.S. citizens in a majority-Black area under the same machinery.

Now the same pattern is playing out with immigration enforcement. Databases, cross-deputized local cops, and DHS-led raids built to target migrants have expanded into Black neighborhoods. The Chicago raid didn’t just catch “gang-linked migrants” — it detained U.S. citizens in a majority-Black area under the same machinery.

After 9/11, Washington rewired the government around suspicion. The Department of Homeland Security absorbed 22 agencies and cast immigration as a national security threat. Programs like NSEERS singled out Muslim and Arab men for registration and interrogation before being scrapped years later. DHS-funded “fusion centers,” sold as vital to counterterrorism, were later blasted by a bipartisan Senate investigation for producing “a bunch of crap” intelligence while eroding civil liberties. Despite mounting criticism, that infrastructure didn’t disappear. It morphed and migrated into everyday policing and immigration enforcement.

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Built to hunt terrorists, those intelligence hubs eventually began circulating threat bulletins on Black activists and protest movements, labeling them“Black Identity Extremists,” and once again shifting the federal sword of authority to point toward domestic Blackness. In practice, the “BIE” label surfaced in instances like the firearms case against Dallas activist Rakem Balogun, also known as Christopher Daniels, in which the government cited his Facebook posts praising a Dallas gunman who shot police. A federal judge ultimately released him, and the case collapsed in May 2018.

After public backlash, FBI officials told Congress in 2019 that the bureau had stopped using “BIE” and folded activities into “Racially Motivated Violent Extremism,” yet leaked records show an “Iron Fist” program directing undercover surveillance of Black activistsunder the rebranded category.

Activists and civil liberties advocates are echoing the similarities to COINTELPRO all over again. The very machinery designed to guard the homeland ended up treating Black dissent as a domestic threat. Now amid waning political interest in the global war on terror, America has recast its gaze and fear to a new subject: the immigrant.

The very machinery designed to guard the homeland ended up treating Black dissent as a domestic threat.

The current crackdown on immigrants shows how this bleed-over works. ICE’s 287(g) agreements deputize local police as immigration agents. The program has ballooned in scope and reach, with DHS touting more than 1,000 partnerships. Research findsthese entanglements don’t reduce violent crime — what they do is make entire neighborhoods too scared to call the police. Meanwhile, the feds cast wider and wider nets. In 2008, the Secure Communities data pipeline was installed, funneling every American’s arrest fingerprints and biometric data to immigration databases, supercharging dragnet mistakes.

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One 2011 independent analysis found that the system had led to false hits and culminated in the arrest of 3,600 U.S. citizens by ICE. A 2018 Los Angeles Times investigation found ICE had to release more than 1,480 people from custody after they asserted U.S. citizenship. Other analyses estimate thousands of citizens have been wrongfully targeted by detainers. The point isn’t that every raid snags the wrong person — it’s that the system is designed to view these unconstitutional detentions as collateral damage.

And Black people, historically over-represented in the criminal legal system and targeted by law enforcement officials, knew we’d eat the collateral most.

Black organizers have been warning about this for years. The Movement for Black Lives explicitly called for ending deportations and the 1996 crime–immigration laws that knit policing to banishment. The Black Alliance for Just Immigration has documented how immigration detention is “anti-Black” in its outcomes. And long before the rest of the country learned to say “surveillance state,” Malkia Devich-Cyril wrote and organized about the way targeted spying on Black neighborhoods would metastasize into mass surveillance.

It’s About Flexing Power

Many Americans were sold a comforting bargain: If you’re innocent, government “vetting” will sort it out; body cameras will guarantee accountability; and an attorney will fix any mistake. The reality is rougher.

Immigration courts are civil, not criminal. That means there is no general right to a government-appointed lawyer, and most detained people go to court alone. As for body-worn cameras, the best meta-analyses find mixed or null effects on police use of force and accountability. And “vetting”? Ask the U.S. citizens who’ve been cuffed, jailed, or even deported by mistake how that worked out.

But most of all, on the street, the liquid dialect of “reasonable suspicion” and “probable cause” will always bend hardest toward the poor, the immigrant, and — most of all — us. Too often, those lessons are learned at the wrong end of a police door ram, or in the back of a van.

And it’s not effective.

Here’s the part national TV pundits won’t tell you: Chicago’s shootings and homicides have fallen dramatically this year. Through the first half of 2025, homicides are down roughly a third and shootings nearly 40 percent, with independent analysts calling it a historic decline. Federal claims that heavy-handed immigration raids are a necessary crime-fighting tool don’t square with the city’s own data. The crackdown isn’t about safety; it’s about flexing power.

We know “them” becomes “you” sooner than you think.

Black voters aren’t a monolith in our beliefs, but we have long voted cohesively when the stakes are existential. Political science calls it “linked fate.” History calls it survival. Survey work and decades of elections show Black voters remain the most reliably aligned bloc against authoritarian drift — not because we love any party, but because we recognize the pattern when the state builds machines of exception and promises to deploy those tools only on “them.” We know “them” becomes “you” sooner than you think.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones once reminded readers that the real outlier in American electoral life is the Black vote — no other group, including Asians or Latinos, votes with such cohesion. Her point was simple: We have always recognized the stakes most clearly.

Decades of polling show that issues of criminal justice and policing have remained top concerns for Black voters, because our safety and freedom have always been the first to be tested when state power expands.

After Trump’s reelection, far fewer Black Americans took to the streets — or even to social media — to protest. Instead of marching, many watched quietly, feeling a sharp sting of betrayal: betrayed that our persistent warnings about white supremacist power went ignored, and betrayed by the system that insists on invalidating our lived experience until it becomes everyone’s problem. Some Black women publicly expressed a tactical withholding — “stepping back,” “rethinking our role,” “not showing up in the same way”— because the emotional weight of being the reliable backbone in a democracy that constantly disfranchises you is too heavy. Particularly without giving them rest, pause, or reflection to their words.

During Trump’s second inauguration and early policy blitzkrieg, Black organizers didn’t pivot to spectacle; they braced for bleed-over. They’d already watched terrorism authorities spill into protest monitoring; already watched immigration powers swallow due process; already watched fusion centers and data-sharing as routes to harass communities over unmerited suspicions. They also watched red-state leaders preside over higher gun deaths while labeling liberal big cities as lawless war zones — facts we reported here at The Intercept. That context makes what happened in South Shore feel less like an aberration and more like the next link in a chain.

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Listen to the voices who warned you: the freedom-movement veterans who endured COINTELPRO; the Muslim organizers targeted after 9/11; the Black immigration advocates who saw detention’s cruelty up close. The lesson isn’t merely solidarity, it’s self-interest. The tools built for “others” always come home.

Black America has always been the first to feel the temperature drop in the room of democracy. We have mapped this country’s overreaches with our bodies and our ballots. When we speak of raids, of suspicion, of the quiet erosion of rights, we’re not predicting — we’re recalling. Listen to Black people. The warning isn’t a sermon; it’s a survival manual.

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