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Notes From an ICE Chaser

I followed Border Patrol agents from Illinois to North Carolina to Minnesota. To my surprise, they loved my coverage.

We were in hot pursuit of the caravan that was chauffeuring Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, who had just arrived in Minnesota the day before. In his wake were a dozen or so cars, some carrying journalists and others full of “commuters”—the term used by citizens who follow immigration agents around in an effort to alert community members to their presence. For months, I and a number of other members of the press had been following Bovino from Illinois to North Carolina to Louisiana, and now to Minnesota, documenting the impact of the Trump administration’s surges of federal immigration agents. We spent a lot of time in rental cars, driving like maniacs.

When you do this kind of work, you walk a fine line: You don’t want to get in the middle of the commuters and agents, but you don’t want to lose the caravan either. In my rental car, I straddled lanes, riding the bumper of the car in front of me. When a BMW tried to cut me off , I held my ground. I locked eyes with the driver, expecting a random pissed-off person who wouldn’t understand why I was acting like a jerk. Instead, I saw a masked man behind the wheel, his eyes and the bridge of his nose immediately identifying him to me as one of Bovino’s guys. The BMW was full of Border Patrol agents, and we were keeping them from the rest of their pack.

I slammed on the brakes, raised my hands, and shrugged. Oops, I mouthed. The driver shook his head and wagged his finger at us. When we ended up next to each other again at a light a few blocks up, the agents rolled their windows down and cracked a few jokes at my expense. Probably not the reaction a random civilian would have gotten.

I never really intended to cover immigration in any capacity, especially not with video. I’m a writer whose work focuses on the far right. But when President Trump brought the National Guard and ICE to Washington, DC, I started recording as much of their activities as I could. This meant recording federal agents lurking around Metro stations, apprehending people for smoking weed, and overseeing roadblocks conducted by the local police. After a few weeks, a friend who had followed ICE in DC with me suggested I go to Broadview, a village outside Chicago with an ICE facility that was central to Operation Midway Blitz, the administration’s name for the surge of federal agents into Chicago, ostensibly for immigration enforcement. By 8 am on my first day there, agents had gassed the handful of protesters who had gathered outside numerous times and had drawn handguns. After one weekend in Broadview, I could not imagine caring about any other story. I spent the rest of Bovino’s tenure following the surges, creating videos for Mother Jones.

The compulsion to stick with this story was not unique to me. A handful of us followed Bovino to the other cities, becoming increasingly obsessed with recording raids and abductions. How could anyone think anything else in the world mattered? People needed to see what we were witnessing. Going home for weddings, birthdays, or just a few days off was jarring. A Chicago-based journalist friend pointed out that if what was happening in Chicago had happened in New York City, it would be on the front page of every paper in the world. Until Renée Good was killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis in January, most people did not have any concept of the scale of violence we were witnessing. Though Los Angeles was the first city to face a surge, many of the people, reporters included, who traveled around following immigration agents started in Chicago.

Chicago, a city with 560,000 immigrants, has been one of Trump’s favorite targets. Trump has attacked its governor, JB Pritzker, as a “loser” and “fat slob.” And throughout his first and second terms, he has depicted Chicago as a lawless city; crime statistics in Chicago are a favorite refrain of MAGA.

Federal agents guarded the Broadview facility during protests for the first few weeks of Midway Blitz. Their tactics, from tear-gassing the neighborhood to shooting pepper balls directly at protesters, resulted in an extreme amount of violence against a largely unprepared crowd of people. Agents often seemed to single out members of the press, routinely sniping at us from the rooftops of nearby buildings. On September 27, a day so violent and brutal that local police ended up taking over guarding the facility, photographer Dave Decker snapped a shot of an agent near the facility’s gate.

“I bet that picture looks cool as hell,”........

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