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NERMEEN SHAIKH: Federal agents continue to carry out raids across the Chicago area. On Wednesday, armed ICE agents in black vests chased a teacher into a Spanish-language day care and preschool in front of children and parents. In video of the incident, the teacher can be heard screaming as the agents dragged her out of the school.
Democratic Congressman Mike Quigley said the teacher was a trusted member of the community with a work permit. Chicago Alderman Matt Martin denounced the ICE raid, saying, quote, “If they can do this at a day care where children are, where will they not go?”
This comes just days after a federal agent in Evanston, Illinois, was filmed repeatedly punching a man in the head while he was pinned to the pavement. Moments earlier, an agent had pointed a gun at a group of bystanders.
BYSTANDER: Put the gun away! Are you going to shoot people?
AMY GOODMAN: Evanston’s Mayor Daniel Biss has launched two investigations into the actions of the federal agents. Biss has harshly criticized Trump’s immigration crackdown and has taken part in protests outside the Broadview ICE jail. On Wednesday, a federal judge ordered improvements at Broadview after reports of inhumane conditions. During a protest outside the ICE jail in Broadview in September, Biss was hit by tear gas.
Biss joins us now from Evanston, where he’s served as mayor since 2021. He’s now running for Congress to fill the seat held by Democratic Congressmember Jan Schakowsky, who’s retiring.
Mayor Biss, thanks so much for being with us. Why don’t we start off — I mean, there are so many stories right now in Chicago, but you’re the mayor of Evanston. Talk about the two investigations that you’ve launched.
MAYOR DANIEL BISS: Well, on Friday, which was, by the way, Halloween, ICE and CBP were all over Evanston. It was a terrifying day. I couldn’t go two minutes without a notification coming up on my phone: They’re at this corner; they’re at this corner; they’re grabbing this landscaper, and so forth. And they were doing what they usually do these days, which is drive around town looking for someone working on a lawn whose skin is not white, and grab that person and abduct them. And so, the rapid responders were out in force, and there was a lot of activity, and I was driving around trying to do what I could.
And then, in the early afternoon, the following thing happened. The vehicle, which was driven by a CBP agent, for whatever that’s worth, that had been driving around the region and was being followed by residents — which is what happens all the time because our community is rising up against this invasion — they decided they don’t want scrutiny, they don’t want to be followed, they don’t want to be observed, they don’t want to be videotaped, and, most of all, they don’t want to be criticized. They appear to have acted deliberately to cause an accident. They jammed on the brakes right after going through an intersection and to force the car following them to rear end them, which, of course, created a scene. And there were people who gathered, who were watching and who were yelling at them and blowing their whistles and screaming. And then they appear to have just started beating people up for no reason. And folks may have seen these videos, that have gotten a lot of attention, including one where they’ve got this young man on the ground, and his head is on the asphalt, and they’re literally punching him in the head. And then, after a while of this, they jammed three people into their vehicle, abducted them, drove them around, and eventually, later on, released them.
So, if you think about it — and I very much appreciated the quote that you played from Mayor-elect Mamdani a few minutes ago — if you think about it, the idea that people would come into our town, beat our residents up, force a car accident, take them away, if that was anybody except for a federal agent, they would be under arrest. And so, our approach has been, understanding that there’s a lot of constraints relative to interactions between local government and federal law enforcement, to nonetheless do what we can to treat these situations like we would any other. And so we’ve launched investigations both into the traffic incident as well as into the violence that occurred on the scene, and we’re in the process of going through that and figuring out the appropriate place to refer those investigations. But I feel that our residents have been attacked by a lawless entity, and we can’t just stand by and pretend this is acceptable.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Mayor Biss, what do you know about where people are being taken? As you said, people are being abducted. And where are they going?
MAYOR DANIEL BISS: Well, it’s important to be clear. There are two different things happening here, each of which is awful, but they’re different. The first is this, what they’re kind of presenting as though it were immigration enforcement, what they would claim to people who don’t live here and don’t know better that it is about going after, quote, “the worst of the worst,” where what they’re actually doing is, as I said, driving around town, looking, whether it’s at a Home Depot, where day laborers gather, or on a lawn, where people are working in a garden, or, as you heard, in a day care center — they’re looking for people who they’ve decided, based on the color of their skin and the job that they have, might be here without documentation, and they’re just grabbing them. That’s one — that’s most of what they do.
And then, on Halloween, they took another step in the other front of their battle against our community, which is that they now understand that the resistance and the rapid response efforts are effective and are impeding their efforts to terrorize immigrants, and so they’re now going after dissenters, as well.
So, the first category, people who they are claiming are here without documentation, I think, are typically taken to the Broadview center. And then, ultimately, you know, many, of course, are deported. Some are eventually released. Some have some semblance of due process; some seem not to. Those who they’re going after not for immigration-related reasons, but rather for — essentially, for being dissenters, seem, at least on Friday, on Halloween, those three individuals were driven downtown Chicago to the FBI. They were brought in. One of them, at least, was handcuffed to a bar. And then, after a while, they were released without charges, without any formal arrest, and just sent off on their way.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, we’ll ask Mayor Biss about the Broadview ICE facility that you mentioned. But first we want to turn to one of the three U.S. citizens detained during the violent immigration raid in Evanston on Halloween. This is Jennifer Moriarty.
JENNIFER MORIARTY: We were all taken to the FBI facility down on Roosevelt and kept there for a while and then released. We were never arrested. We were never charged. There was no paperwork involved in any of this. It was surreal, and absolutely — and the young man who was in the car, who was — who was injured, repeatedly requested medical attention, and they refused to provide any type of medical attention to him.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Mayor Biss, she was — Jennifer Moriarty was in conversation with you. We don’t hear your voice there. So, if you could talk about what she told you and how representative her experience is?
MAYOR DANIEL BISS: Well, her experience, from my standpoint, is somewhat miraculous, because I haven’t had the opportunity to have eyewitness reports of these interactions, for the completely heart-wrenching reason that most people these monsters interact with then wind up deported, and so we don’t — we don’t hear from them. But her experience was kind of extraordinary. It was a combination of grotesque authoritarianism and almost comical incompetence, right?
She told this story of how they weren’t paying attention, and so they allowed her to, while cuffed, get her phone and call a friend, so that — and just leave the phone running, so that her friend was able to record what was going on inside the van. She talked about how they kind of kept driving around, looking for a refuge where they wouldn’t be jeered and yelled at and potentially impeded by angry residents who were protesting them, but they couldn’t find anywhere in the Chicago area where they weren’t being vocally criticized and followed, because, as I said, the resistance that has grown around this nightmare is actually meaningful and effective and is saving people.
But most of all, she said there was no professionalism, no clarity, no indication of why she was taken. They violently took her from the street where she lives, handcuffed her, drove around town, brought her to the FBI, and then released her hours later, claiming that she was never under arrest. She was just, you know, having her freedoms and liberties taken essentially on a whim by angry agents who didn’t like the fact that she was there on the scene criticizing them.
AMY GOODMAN: Mayor, we’re going to end with this clip of President Trump. He was speaking on 60 Minutes to CBS’s Norah O’Donnell, who questioned him about federal immigration agents using violent tactics.
NORAH O’DONNELL: More recently, Americans have been watching videos of ICE tackling a young mother, tear gas being used in a Chicago residential neighborhood —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Mm-hmm.
NORAH O’DONNELL: — and the smashing of car windows. Have some of these raids gone too far?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: No, I think they haven’t gone far enough, because we’ve been held back by the — by the judges, by the liberal judges that were put in by Biden and by Obama.
NORAH O’DONNELL: You’re OK with those tactics?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Yeah, because you have to get the people out.
AMY GOODMAN: So, he says they haven’t gone far enough, Mayor Biss. In this last 30 seconds, your response?
MAYOR DANIEL BISS: I’m completely unsurprised, because what we have seen here is a constant escalation. It is clear that, in their view, no amount of violence is enough. They are going to be as brutal and violent as possible. And that’s why we have to resist. I feel as though my community is under invasion from our own federal government. It has got to stop.
AMY GOODMAN: Mayor Daniel Biss, Democratic mayor of Evanston, Illinois, a suburb north of Chicago, who is running for Congress, we thank you so much for being with us.
Coming up, “Taken: The Agents Raiding Communities and the People Trying to Stop Them,” a new investigation by Latino USA. Stay with us.
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AMY GOODMAN: “El Hielo,” “Ice,” by La Santa Cecilia in our Democracy Now! studio.
