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

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