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| Barbara Kruger, The Art Institute |
Rey was just doing his job — cleaning up a yard in Rogers Park one morning at the end of October — when a Black Jeep Wagoneer slowed down, a group of masked men jumped out, slapped on handcuffs and dragged him into the vehicle, then drove off, taunting him as they did.
News spread quickly.
"I was heading downtown with my husband," said his boss, Kristen Hulne, owner of Patch Landscaping, with her husband Patrick, a newly-retired Chicago firefighter. "We get a call from a guy in the office: 'ICE just picked up Rey.' My other employee ran away and hid. The customer called and said, 'I'm sorry this happened; I took all your equipment off your truck and locked it away in the yard, safe.'"
It's hard enough to operate a small business. Never mind a landscaping business in a city as weather-scoured as Chicago. The federal government's war on immigrants these past few months made that task even harder for landscapers here, a "cat and mouse game" Hulne calls it, trying to both rake leaves and avoid capture.
"It's such an incredible burden on this industry," said Marisa Gora, owner of Kemora Landscapes, adding that ICE withdrawing recently is of limited comfort. "We don't know if they're going to come back in the spring."
"As landscaping contractors, we're a targeted community," said Lisa Willis, owner of MINDSpace, "Our industry associations really haven't spoken up about it. It was really disappointing."
The executive director of Landscape Illinois declined comment beyond, "we need to keep a low profile to protect as many of our workers as possible from additional enforcement."
A worry everyone I spoke with raised — if I exercise my right as an American citizen, will our increasingly-vindictive government come after me or my business? It's like living in Russia.
When a worker was abducted, everything else stops —for Hulne, it took time to locate the terrified worker who fled. The abandoned truck and equipment had to be collected. An increasingly Kafkaesque police state confronted.
"We got a lawyer that day," Hulne said. "Before I could turn around, Rey's wife was in my office crying. Fifteen minutes after that I had a call from our alderman —'Oh my God I just heard what happened....' There was this immediate mobilization of the neighborhood. It was incredible."
In my south suburb most of the guys doing outside work are Hispanic. Yard maintenance, tree trimming, snow removal, roofing, all done by hard-working, polite and fair men who speak respectfully and with an accent. I don't ask if they have "papers" and I don't particularly care. They're neither criminal nor "the worst of the worst". If they were, they wouldn't be doing back breaking jobs in all kinds of weather. ICE and CBP are wreaking havoc and causing untold harm to our communities.
ReplyDeleteThe worst of the worst are these jagoff ICE agents terrorizing decent people, pointing guns at protesters, and lying that they were hit with rocks or spit on. I wish more people called them jagoffs...
ReplyDeleteAnd screaming at people in broken Spanish and then smashing their windows and dragging them out of their vehicles and beating them in the streets, as happened back in the day during labor strikes and race riots. They did that during "Operation Charlotte's Web." Seriously? Who makes up these farshtunkener names? Somebody's kid in middle school?
DeleteHow many of them are the pardoned thugs from January 6th? I'm sure Chicagoans rightly called them jagoffs, and got their asses kicked for doing so. I call those goddamned mofos the "Icetapo".
I think calling them Gestapo or SS is more accurate!
DeleteI don’t really know the ‘crime’ business…but, I’m guessing that anyone who is good at it…you know, the worst of the worst…they’re probably not out mowing lawns or shoveling show. I don’t know…it’s just a guess.
ReplyDeleteWell-said!
DeleteOur landscapers stopped showing up for about a month. Then one day they furtively arrived shortly before dusk, busted their asses, working at double speed to beat the darkness, and left in their recently painted, now anonymous looking work truck.
ReplyDeleteThese hardworking Americans yeah I'll say it again, AMERICANS, are exactly the kind of people you want LIVING in your neighborhood.
I got kinda choked up talking to them. What they are going through, what we are going through is despicable
We are living in Joseph K's world, the world Kafka wrote about a century ago.
I've been saying it's going to get worse before it gets better for a long time now. I
think many of us have. Let's hope we are very close to the bottom, becuse it just plain hurts watching good people suffer.
I hope we've reached the bottom
Just learned Russell Brand was welcomed to the US despite sexual assault and rape charges in his native Britain complaining that his government has weaponised the justice system against him. Can you guess where he's residing?
ReplyDeleteMany of my friends and relatives have chastised me for a long time regarding me stance on republican's.
ReplyDeleteFor close to 25 years, I have hardened in my opinions against republicans. What started merely as disdain against Gingrich and his anti democratic contract for America, was compounded by Ken Starr and his crew of double standards, and then turned by the actions taken by all republicans regarding chads in Florida is now the loss of total respect and proof that they -- to the last one -- are irredeemable.
Republican's inaction as this American SS and Gestapo round up Americans is nothing more than another metal pinned onto their (now legal again) swastika clad Feldbluse.
Furthermore, the media's refusal to call out what is going on is unacceptable. The fact that what's going on isn't front page, above the fold, news every day, is just proof that the red line we're so worried about is actually behind us.
Karoline Levitt's litteral lying yesterday is going to get someone killed. and even though that's exactly what republicans want, the media needs to be calling that out at every corner.
I appreciate you, Neil. I'm excited to share that last rail car out with you. I'm not sure how my long lost relatives who are buried in the mass graves across eastern Europe would feel about me waiting so long... but my grandfather didn't fight in France and German for me to cower in a corner now.
Only 25 years? I'm guessing I must have at least a couple of decades on you, as I can unashamedly claim sixty-plus years of hating on Republicans, going back to when they spit on Stevenson in Dallas, a month before JFK bought it. Proudly wore an "In your guts, you know he's nuts" button the first time around...in '64, during my senior year in high school. Today's Rethugs would sneer at Goldwater, brand him as a Commie, and accuse him of having Jewish ancestry.
DeleteFast forward to Chicago in '68, and five nights in the streets, and rapid radicalization at 21. Followed by the Nixonian and the Reagan Eras. Despised them both. But they look better and better in the rear-view mirror. Never really knew what pure hatred and white-hot anger were. Not until the last ten years.
Republicans are the enemy within. They are incorrigible. They are hopeless. They are fascists and terrorists. You don't negotiate with a domestic threat...you neutralize it. Unfortunately, I'm now too old for that stuff. The young'uns will have to pick up the torch.
Lots of my neighbors have lawn services. Some who can afford to do so paid the remainder of their contracts upfront and advised the landscapers not to come if it is unsafe. This, after 2 landscapers were abducted in my town in October. I think there has been an uptick in local lawn care service just this week, now that the helicopters flying above our houses have gone south for the winter.
ReplyDeleteI'm infuriated by the declared intentions of the admin to reduce crime by removing "the worst of the worst" as a pretense to bring in Greg Bovino and border control, changing the focus to an immigration roundup, instead. ICE, which previously targeted specific immigrants with warrants, wasn't deporting fast enough and wasn't terrorizing the community enough. So illegal maneuvers and Border Patrol tactics were adopted, targeting people by appearance or accent, and attempting to incite riots.
I understand that justice moves slowly, but I'm angry that the barbarians can slip out of town just as the lawsuits come down, without facing consequence. And that they move detainees around the country to similarly avoid justice.
I'm also furious that last winter, Greg Abbott shipped busloads of immigrants from Texas on false promises, then dumped them in the cold in the middle of the night without coats or means of seeking refuge. Our state scrambled to treat them with humanity. And many of these same people who sought asylum at the TX border obviously missed TX court hearings once they were moved to IL. That ICE would come to retrieve these same immigrants for missing court dates, drag them away in handcuffs with cameras rolling, using them as human props is beyond disgusting.
No arrests from the staged midnight assault on the south side, but they got great video from all their photographers who captured the scene of flashbangs and agents rappelling down the sides of the apartment buildings.
I hate that taxpayer money is used for any and all of this, including the video propaganda.
The more communities they ravage and rampage through, the more Americans see the barbarianism first-hand. This will ultimately be the undoing of Mr. Bovino, the modern-day Nathan Bedford Forrest.
No, that wretched thug Bovino is the reincarnation of Heinrich Himmler, the head of the Nazi SS!
DeleteClark St : I had Stephen Miller down as the modern-day Himmler, but willing to change. What do you propose for Stephen Miller, then?
ReplyDeleteIt occurred to me that in terms of "the worst of the worst," that could be fairly applied to the motley assortment of ICE goons brought in for these raids, in addition to the "commander" himself. These seem to be the most vicious and stupid officers, ones that apparently did not qualify for anything else. (For example, the one that shot the protester five times had been brought to Chicago from Maine, of all places, perhaps because no one closer to his home state wanted him around.)
ReplyDeleteThere was a photo recently published in either the Sun-Times or Tribune, I forget which, showing a closeup of a masked officer behind the wheel of an SUV, pointing a handgun directly at the photographer. Above his mask, his eyes were wide with fright. It didn't look like he was expecting the situation he was in, and had had no training on what to do when confronted by unarmed civilians with cameras.
Dressing up in costumes with masks gives them the feeling of anonymity and freedom to abuse others, though they're also too dumb to realize that showing sleeve tattoos or slapping a Yankees baseball cap on top makes them easily identifiable in videos for future prosecution. Their leader Gregory Bovino seems no more honorable or trustworthy than the rest of them, documented as flat-out lying in court about his own actions, even when, for example, widely-available videos show him throwing tear gas at raids where he said he did no such thing.
There has probably always been a sub-culture in the military of the stupid and venal, personnel with limited skills and no useful potential, but suddenly they have a purpose they can fulfill, and now they're gathered together and roaming around in daylight, no longer hidden away as the embarrassments they are.