The Siege of Chicago II

 

By Chicago Correspondent Walter Burns

On the list of things that didn't really need to be revived, right up there with Baywatch, is the Siege of Chicago, a wonderful metropolis which over the years has earned infamy as the site of some of the most brutal battles waged by armed forces against their imagined enemies.

The latest episode occurred this week, when an entire apartment block on the South Side of Chicago was invaded and its occupants taken prisoner by unidentified forces claiming to be acting on behalf of the United States.

According to battlefield dispatches,

A massive immigration raid at an apartment in the South Shore neighborhood of Chicago tormented residents in the early hours of Tuesday morning. 

Some 300 federal agents, per NewsNation, raided the building, arresting 37 people, with the Department of Homeland Security alleging that “some of the targeted subjects are believed to be involved in drug trafficking and distribution, weapons crimes, and immigration violators.”

Agents rappelled in from helicopters, broke down doors, used flash bangs, tore tenants from their units, and detained several people—including numerous U.S. citizens—for hours before leaving the building ravaged, according to multiple reports.

Pertissue Fisher, who lives in the building, told ABC7 Chicago that ICE agents forced everyone out and only asked questions later. Fisher said she was handcuffed and questioned before being released at around 3 a.m. The officers, she noted, “just treated us like we were nothing,” and, “It was scary, because I had never had a gun in my face.”

Another ABC7 interviewee ducked upon hearing flash bangs detonate, and was then distressed by the sight of children detained. “They was bringing the kids down too, had them zip-tied to each other,” she said. “That’s all I kept asking. What is the morality? Where’s the human? One of them literally laughed. He was standing right here. He said, ‘f*** them kids.’” 

Prior to the January 20, 2025 coup against America, armed police and federal agents were prohibited by the Fourth Amendment from rousing peaceful inhabitants out of their apartments solely on the suspicion that in at least one of those apartments there might be an immigrant subject to removal.

Not anymore. 

Now it is something that the regime boasts about and executes with apparent impunity:

Although the federal goons claimed the operation was aimed at supposed members of a Venezuelan gang, exactly two were arrested on suspicion of being gang members.

 Is it really true that Gov. J.B. Pritzker can do nothing to stop these assaults because of the Constitution's Supremacy Clause, which has generally been construed to immunize federal officers acting within their authority from state law? 

From CBS News Chicago

Consider the case of a federal official shooting someone on Fifth Avenue.  If that official is the President, John Roberts and his fellow Lords have immunized him.  But if a federal official out for coffee decides to gun down say his ex, there's no immunity because there was no action under color of federal law.

Was there immunity here?  The conduct was clearly unconstitutional and therefore outside the scope of the federal agents' lawful authority.  If only there were courts in Chicago that Gov. Pritzker could turn to for a definitive resolution of this question. 

And that's not the only violent lawless actions that VD Amin's goons have undertaken in poor suffering Chicago over the past week.   A few days earlier, a CBS Chicago correspondent lawfully carrying out her duties was assaulted by apparent federal officers:

Illinois State Police and the Broadview Police Department are investigating after a pepper ball was shot at a CBS News Chicago reporter over the weekend.

It was around late morning Sunday when reporter Asal Rezaei visited the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Broadview, Illinois, to see if there was any activity near the 25th Street entrance. There were no protests or protesters at the scene, except for a person with the Broadview Fire Department.

"It's not really clear why that officer took a shot at me. My car has been here several times, although I did not identify myself verbally as a member of the press," she said in a report.

Rezaei said she was not close to the ICE facility nor the fencing surrounding the building, adding she was alone in her truck with the driver's side window down.

As reported to police, she was leaving the area when she said a masked ICE agent shot a pepper ball about 50 feet from the inside of the fence, hitting her truck's driver's side panel. The chemicals then engulfed the inside of her truck.

"An ICE agent who was masked shot directly at my car," Rezaei recounted on camera after the incident. "He saw my window was open."

The chemicals from the shot caused burning to her face, leading to her vomiting outside her truck.... 

It wasn't the first battle of Chicago.

Rezaei captured a picture the moment right before the pepper ball was fired, showing a nearly empty parking lot and two federal agents standing dozens of feet away. One of them appeared to have been readying his weapon. She said she believes that it was the agent who fired at her car. 

Note that state officials are at least investigating whether they have jurisdiction over the lawless attack on a known journalist driving on an open public street.

There are many other battles being waged by federal agents against unarmed civilians on the otherwise-peaceful streets of Chicago, but we wanted to look back at the history of such assaults along Lake Michigan.

This is usually when we draw connections between past Republican attacks on democracy and human rights (like the murder of unarmed students at Kent State in 1970) and today's outrages.

The reality is violence in the service of white supremacy has been a bipartisan affair depending mostly on which party embodies it. In 1968, that honor was split between the declining white Democratic racist base in the South and big Northern cities (like Chicago!) and the nascent Southern strategy of Tricky Dick Nixon.

Norman Mailer termed the police assault on unarmed protesters at the 1968 Democratic Convention the “siege of Chicago,” and for once in his sordid empty life he was right:

The violence was spurred by a young man attempting to climb a flagpole in the park and lower the American flag. Police grabbed the man down and began to beat him, according to witness interviews. ...

In response, protesters began to throw sticks, paint and bricks at the officers. Organizers were eventually able to regain control of the crowd and calm them down. But the police advanced on the crowd anyway.

According to the Walker Report, one St. Louis journalist later observed: “In the wink of an eye, the police appeared to have lost all control.” ...  

Officers chased demonstrators and beat them, hitting them in the head. Women were knocked over and trampled by the fleeing crowd. Bystanders, including both the young and the elderly, were beaten too. Some officers even threw tear gas directly in the faces of demonstrators. Photojournalists stood bloodied. ...

Upon its completion three months later, the Walker Report noted that most officers faced no disciplinary action, and argued that this could weaken police ties with the community. “There has been no condemnation of these violators of sound police procedures and common decency by either their commanding officers or city officials,” the report said.  

The violent cops were in fact lionized as heroes by the forces of white reaction, thus insulating them and their violent successors from accountability:

The country certainly appeared to sympathize with the police more than the protestors. In a Gallup poll, 56% approved of the police response to anti-war protestors and 31% did not. In a Harris survey, 66% agreed that Daley was right in the way he used police against the demonstrators, against only 20% who disagreed. 

Read all about it.  While you can.

That level of public support gave the Chicago Police all the, um, ammunition they needed to execute Black Panther activist Fred Hampton the following year.

At the time, the reaction of all the wise pundits was not shock and outrage over police murder of a young activist. Instead, it was to make fun of white people who cared enough to support besieged Black Panthers like Hampton.  Tom Wolfe's insult comedy targeting a fundraiser held by Leonard Bernstein in his magnificent apartment with his rich famous friends led to the adoption of the term “Radical Chic”.

In Wolfe's telling, adopted by all right-thinking persons, nothing was more hilarious than rich upper-class people meeting to aid oppressed Black Panthers because – well, it was just funny.

Perhaps Wolfe would have been more respectful if the fundraiser were held in the rec room of dentist Lenny Bernstein's split level in Woodmere and the assembled guests were served pigs in blankets and Schaefer beer, but we doubt it. The point was to mock white people, especially the rich Jewish ones, for the crime of daring to care about anyone less fortunate than themselves.

Humiliating anyone who opposes the Republican agenda of white supremacy, bigotry, and plutocracy has been a staple of conservative hilarity ever since.  We point you to the Presidential meme of mocking Hakeen Jeffries' concern over the denial of health care by adorning him with a stereotyped Frito-bandito mustache and sombrero. 

The point, then as now, was to change the focus from murdered activists and poor people consigned to agony and death to those wacky liberals who dare to take up those causes. 

And it won't stop until we call it out and demand that our supine media (including Bari Weiss's new toy, CBS News) stop distracting us from the true horrors at hand.

No we don't have a glib solution. But we do know that the first step in fighting a battle is to know the enemy.  In this case, we need to understand how deep police violence against dissenters and other marginalized folks runs in American culture and the relentless crude mockery of those who dare to oppose it.

Our old buddy Dwight D. Eisenhower spent months before D-Day gathering intelligence on the German defenses in France.  It was his relentless focus on preparation that led to victory, even though history does not record that Ike spent even one minute worried about the beards and waistlines of his Army.  Nor, since Tom Wolfe wasn't there to focus on what was really important, do we know what delectable tidbits his elite staff enjoyed in May and June, 1944.

Right now there's a war in Chicago and other American cities, which is itself part of a larger assault on what's left of American democracy.  You can hear it all around you if you don't let the mariachi music drown it out.