‘Get Down! Get Down! They’re Gonna See Us!’: Six Months of Hiding From ICE

The ICE raids in Chicago that have terrorized immigrant neighborhoods like Ava and Sam’s have been both highly performative and extremely random.

Six weeks earlier, on September 9, Greg Bovino, the G.I.

Joe look-alike who previously served as ICE’s “commander-at-large,” arrived in town with a caravan of unmarked, black-tinted vans to patrol Chicago’s immigrant-heavy neighborhoods.

Three days later, ICE agents shot and killed Silverio Villegas González, an undocumented father of two from Mexico who worked as a line cook, and who had no criminal record, after he tried to drive away from them.

ICE officers began lurking on sidewalks, downtown, at grocery stores, at the Cook County courthouses, in parking lots, at intersections, in alleys, and in neighborhoods like Ava and Sam’s.

By the end of September, allegedly following a “tip” about reported gang activity—later found to be a complaint about squatters—ICE agents swarmed a South Side apartment building in the middle of the night, rappelling down from a Black Hawk helicopter and patrolling the sidewalk outside with masks and rifles, arresting 37 people.

They kicked down doors, leafed through bookshelves, and upturned mattresses.

In November, they violently pulled a Colombian teacher from the day care center where she worked, while school was in session.

It began to feel like they could take anyone, at any time.

Sam started to catch glimpses of the arrests and deportations from coworkers and Facebook groups.

The news trickled in through Ava’s phone, where she watched video after video on TikTok.

The more she clicked, the more videos appeared.

Border Patrol agents took Ava’s DNA and biometrics and confiscated her passport.

They did a body exam and made the family strip down to their innermost layers.

But Ava still felt that the Border Patrol agents treated them warmly.

“I didn’t think they were rude or cold or harsh,” she recalled.

She’d heard the interview could take all day, but by noon she was free to walk out of the building and into Texas.

She called Sam, who booked the family plane tickets to Chicago.

He gave her instructions on what to do at the airport, where everything was in English—a language she’d yet to grasp.

She navigated it in a maze of confusion, pulling out her boarding pass every so often so someone could point her in the right direction.

After the plane dipped to the misty ground at Chicago’s Midway Airport, they cleared customs and found Sam waiting for them.

“I was so happy,” Ava told me.

“After you don’t see your family for two years, it was thrilling.” Sam added, “ We hugged each other very, very tightly.”
Chicago was cold, and a little overwhelming.

But it was beautiful.

They took a drive by the lake.

“It’s so big!” their daughter squealed.

The kids had lots of questions: What temperature was the lake?

Could they swim in it?

When ?

Soon after she arrived, the family splurged on an Uber to Chicago’s sprawling downtown, where they stared at themselves in The Bean, a life-size lima-bean-shaped piece of public art that reflected the city skyline behind them.

Their daughter had been diagnosed with a developmental condition, and they’d managed to find a clinic to assist with her special needs.

They started taking English classes.

Chicago’s harsh winter turned to spring, which yielded a beautiful summer.

Every day was memorable.

“We still felt comfortable enough to go out, go for walks, go to the store, get groceries,” Ava told me when we met at her place last December.

And then, nearly a year into her new life in America, the ICE raids began.

“Right now, frankly, we’re just really scared.”
The family lives in one of Chicago’s many Spanish-speaking neighborhoods, which have historically been friendly to immigrants.

The neighborhood, once lively, was barren.

When I arrived at Ava’s front steps last December, the doorbell went unanswered even though we’d set an appointment.

Outside the house, every shade was drawn—as if nobody lived there at all.

After confirming through her caseworker that it was safe to let me in, Ava opened the door.

She wore a soft pink sweater with a bow in her hair and smiled warmly, offering instant coffee and biscuits as we sat at her dining table.

The bedrooms in their apartment were separated by a sheet hanging from the ceiling.

It was a week before Christmas, and they’d draped a stream of tinsel over the windows.

Sam, who appeared briefly to shake my hand on his way to work, had taken to biking there as fast as he could, even in below-zero temperatures with a freezing windchill, because it minimized the amount of time he would be visible outside.

The rest of the time, they hide inside.

“I just feel a sense of despair,” Ava told me, fighting back tears.

“And stir-crazy.”
Yet for all the Orwellian levels of surveillance ICE has at its disposal, the apparent randomness of many immigration raids suggests an agency unready to harness its own godlike technologies.

ICE officers have stormed farms, construction sites, apartments, offices, grocery stores, cafés, and intersections, searching for undocumented workers in crude, sweeping dragnets.

They have stopped people on the streets—many of whom are American citizens—based on the color of their skin.

They have mistaken mothers for gang leaders and a Hmong refugee for a sex offender.

They have accidentally detained US citizens at gunpoint.

They’ve forced so many families like Sam and Ava to hide.

“Now we’re inside all the time,” Sam told me.

They were scared to take their trash out.

“You don’t know if you’ll see them along the way or encounter them on a walk.

You don’t know if you’ll be able to come back.”
Ever since ICE first appeared in Chicago last fall, the mood had grown tense and paranoid.

But the resistance was strong too.

Signs had appeared in windows as if in a political election: HANDS OFF CHICAGO.

Restaurants in Hispanic neighborhoods began locking their doors during business hours, and some posted signs banning anyone wearing a balaclava or mask from entering.

Chicagoans took to wearing whistles around their necks to be able to alert the public if an ICE officer was seen.

Residents honked horns and pulled out their phones if an ICE van was spotted.

Protesters appeared all over the city and outside the ICE facility in Broadview, a suburb away.

ICE agents responded with a force seen in authoritarian countries: tear gas and body-slamming people to the ground.

One woman, a US citizen named Marimar Martinez, was shot five times by a Border Patrol agent for driving “aggressively” while protesting.

(“Five shots, seven holes.

I take pride in my shooting skills,” the agent allegedly texted his colleagues after news of the shooting broke.) Ava and Sam kept hearing about all of this from their apartment, in trickles, through social media.

Sometimes, Ava felt responsible.

One day, at the end of January, she woke up to the news on TikTok that agents had shot a man—an American man—in Minneapolis.

“I’m seeing they killed another man, and I feel terrible,” she told me.

After Ava stopped working, the family started worrying about money.

Sam reduced his lunch hour to 30 minutes, which brought in a little extra cash each week.

But their daughter’s special-needs appointments cost money, and so did rent, groceries, and laundry.

Ava realized she’d need to try to work again.

“I’m afraid,” Ava said.

“But we have necessities.” She created handwritten résumés with her name and number and her experience and began dropping them off at Spanish-speaking stores nearby: at the local laundromat, a bakery, a taqueria.

She explained on the forms that she didn’t speak English but that she was a fast learner.

“I know it’s a risk,” she told me.

“I feel unsure if I’m safe, but we have to go out.” The alternative felt riskier.

Since September, when the raids began, they’d stopped doing anything outside as a family.

If one of their kids had a performance or presentation at school that was open to parents, one of them always stayed behind.

Their daughter was still too young to grasp what was going on, but they saw how the stress was overwhelming their son.

He’d grown withdrawn and took, increasingly, to his phone.

He struggled to understand the English in his classes.

He started having nightmares.

One evening, in the middle of the night, they awoke to the sound of their son screaming, as he ran into the kitchen and hid in a corner.

“Get down!

Get down!

They’re gonna see us!” he yelled.

Confused, they realized he had been sleep-walking.

Every morning, they awake as a family around 7 am.

Ava makes the kids toast and Choco Milk, and instant coffee for herself and Sam.

She does her daughter’s hair and gets her dressed for the day.

Then Sam walks their son to school.

When he returns, they have a couple of hours together before he has to leave for work.

In those brief hours, everything about their life is normal and calm, mundane even, as if there was no border between the walls of their house and the ever-watchful eye of the world outside.

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