Four agencies are joining forces to form the Elgin Area Immigrant Alliance, a group that vows to create strategic ways to educate, empower and support the immigrant community as federal agents continue to descend on the area.
“Migra Watch,” made up of volunteers from made up of Casa Michoacan, Centro de Información, YWCA Elgin, and Chicago Workers Collaborative, is canvassing neighborhoods to hand out Know Your Rights flyers, connect people with legal help and assist with paperwork.
“We provide similar services, but there is a lot of demand,” said Maya Pena, director of Casa Michoacan. “We started talking about ways to work together and collaborate.”
The alliance held its first public town hall meeting Thursday night at Bethlehem Lutheran Church.
One of the biggest concerns they have is immigrants not knowing what to do if they encounter an agent for U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, Pena said. The fear is “paralyzing,” she said.
Knowing their rights remains one of the most important things that need to be committed to memory, she said. If detained, don’t say anything: “It can save lives. It can save families from being destroyed,” she said.
Right now, Elgin’s large Hispanic population has made its one of the top three communities ICE is targeting, according to Amairani Jarvis, a community organizer for Centro de Información who’s also involved with Elgin Area Rapid Response, which is part of the Illinois Coalition for Immigration and Refugee Rights.
“We’ve been seeing families targeted at home, out in the public and at the workplace,” Jarvis said. Agent are using “tactics where they are boxing family members in their cars and then forcibly removing (them),” she said.
ICE agents may be wearing black-and-green uniforms but sometimes they’re in regular street clothes, she said.
“A huge problem is they are completely covering up their face,” Jarvis said. “One thing we started noticing is they are wearing body cameras; that’s something new.”
They’re also driving a wide variety of cars, not just black vehicles with tinted windows that had been common earlier during “Operation Midway Blitz,” which started in early September in the Chicago area, she said.
“Some ICE vehicles even display the Mexican flag on their cars. It’s starting to get difficult to identify who is ICE and who is not,” Jarvis said.
There were 200 ICE sightings in September and 40 confirmed arrests, she said. “But that’s all we saw. The actual number is unknown, unfortunately,” she said.
One day last week, there were 1,000 calls to Rapid Response’s hotline, said Cinthya Rodriguez, who moderated the town hall meeting.
“It’s clear from these numbers, which continue to break records for the hotline every week, that ICE activity is hugely widespread, but it is also clear neighbors are looking out for one another,” Rodriguez said.
Teams are chronicling ICE detentions and helping families affected by their operations, she said. They’re “critical to shining a light on ICE’s brutal practices,” she said.
Team members videotaped a raid last month on Chippewa Drive in which two American citizens were taken into custody, Rodriguez said. The arrests were cited in a ruling this past week that found ICE agents had illegally arrested 22 people, she said.
“We know that the federal government is not releasing accurate information or statistics on what they are doing, so we’ve taken it upon ourselves to compile data on who’s being detained, how many people are being detained, and what rampant violations of law are happening at the hands of the federal government,” said Tovia Siegel, director of organizing and leadership for The Resurrection Project.
The Resurrection Project is part of the Midwest Immigrant Defenders Alliance, which tracks requests for legal assistance by people ICE has detained throughout Illinois.
In just one week, from Sept. 28 to Oct. 4, the alliance had 108 requests, Siegel said. There were 853 requests since January.
Of those arrested, the majority were Mexican nationalists who had been in the U.S. between two and 10 years, Siegel said. A majority of those requesting legal assistance were men, she said.
“Immigration enforcement is increasing rapidly across the state of Illinois, and we are seeing tactics that are cruel, that are violent and that are continuing to escalate,” Siegel said. “People have had their rights violated left and right.”
State Sen. Cristina Castro, D-Elgin, is an Elgin native and a second-generation Mexican American.
“It hurts my heart to see all this,” but it also makes her mad and that motivates her to take action, she said.
“We have to fight for those who really can’t fight right now,” Castro said. “We have to be their face. We have to be their voice. We have to warn them of imminent danger. We have to be their defenders.”
Gloria Casas is a freelance reporter for The Courier-News.