This week, organizers of Chicago’s annual Cinco de Mayo parade canceled festivities over concerns about deportations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). “Our people are scared,” said Hector Escobar, president of the Casa Puebla and Cermak Road Chamber of Commerce.
Unfortunately, the fears of Chicago’s Mexican community may be warranted. In the first 50 days of President Donald Trump’s second administration, ICE boasted 32,809 arrests, just four hundred shy of all arrests made in 2024. Under the direction of Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, sanctuary cities like Chicago have been the target of enhanced ICE operations, which have already included the improper or warrantless arrests of at least 22 individuals in Illinois.
Homan has also threatened to prosecute Brandon Johnson, the city’s Democratic mayor, if he obstructs ICE’s mass deportation efforts by upholding the city’s sanctuary policies. Meanwhile, federal lawmakers have investigated Johnson and other sanctuary city mayors for impeding federal law enforcement, despite legal precedent under which state and local governments cannot be compelled to enforce federal laws.
Immigrants in sanctuary cities aren’t the only ones being targeted and fearful of ICE raids; 238 individuals from across the country have been swept up by ICE and shipped to El Salvador. While the Trump administration has described those in El Salvador as “the worst of the worst,” 90 percent have no criminal record in the U.S. And in the case of Marylander Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was sent to El Salvador due to an admitted administrative error, not even a Supreme Court order has safely ensured his return to the United States.
Trump has also suggested jailing U.S. citizens in El Salvador. While imprisoning U.S. citizens in a foreign country is “obviously unconstitutional, and obviously illegal,” according to David Bier of the Cato Institute, the president’s proven willingness to flout Constitutional due process protections should give everyone—immigrants and natural-born citizens alike—cause for concern.
While Trump’s anti-immigration policies have succeeded in lowering the illegal border crossing rate to the lowest seen in over 25 years, Americans’ approval of the president is already waning. But the administration is showing no signs of slowing down by using protected personal data collected by federal agencies, like the IRS, to support harsh immigration policies and destroy privacy for all Americans, not just Mexican-Americans in Chicago, in the process.
Trump’s evolving immigration policies have created high levels of uncertainty and left little for Chicago’s Mexican-American community to celebrate this Cinco de Mayo. Escobar said that the parade cancellation was primarily about safety. “At this point, we don’t know what is going to happen next year,” he added.
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