President Donald Trump’s administration continues to enforce aggressive immigration policies, flooding Democratic-led cities with federal agents, raiding workplaces that have immigrant staff members, and deporting noncitizens in steep numbers — even, more rarely, going so far as to deport citizens. Clashes between protesters and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have erupted at agency facilities across the country, with political figures numbering among the demonstrators. In New York City, for example, 11 elected officials were detained on September 18 for demanding entry to ICE detention cells.
In a suburb west of Chicago earlier this month, activist and US House candidate Kat Abughazaleh was involved in a confrontation between federal agents and protesting politicians. At 26, Abughazaleh is currently the youngest candidate actively campaigning in the Democratic primary race for Illinois’ 9th Congressional District. While participating in a protest outside an ICE facility in Broadview on the morning of September 19, Abughazaleh was thrown to the ground by a federal agent, according to video footage she posted online. She told Teen Vogue she’d been attempting to prevent a fellow protester from being run over by a vehicle departing the ICE facility grounds, which protesters were trying to block from leaving.
Two other candidates in the race for Illinois’ reliably Democratic 9th Congressional District seat, Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss and Bushra Amiwala, were also at the protest. Biss posted on X that “federal forces” tear-gassed him and other protesters during the demonstration, calling it a “terrifying escalation.”
Abughazaleh, a former journalist who’s garnered attention for her political social media content as well as her progressive campaign platform, also told Teen Vogue that the recorded incident was not the first time “ICE has thrown me on the ground” — let alone that day — but it was the “most violent,” compared with earlier federal law enforcement actions she’d experienced at protests at the Broadview facility.
Said Abughazaleh, “If they are willing to do this to a congressional candidate in front of a bunch of press, imagine what they're doing behind boarded-up windows.”
The video Abughazaleh posted of the incident went viral on social media soon after she shared it. The clip — and Abughazaleh — drew support from more progressive corners of the internet for her willingness to participate in the protest, as well as sharp ire from online conservative groups and media personalities like Trump ally Laura Loomer. “I love watching communists get body slammed by ICE. Communist and Palestinian. Pick a struggle,” Loomer wrote on X. (Abughazaleh responded with a fundraising repost that saw far more engagement: “Donate to my campaign to make Laura Loomer’s day worse.”)
Fox News host Laura Ingraham praised ICE agents for their actions while discussing the incident on her show, saying, “A Democrat congressional candidate… was thrown to the ground by an ICE agent. Good work.” The Department of Homeland Security posted about it on X, saying, “Individuals and groups impeding ICE operations are siding with vicious cartels, human traffickers, and violent criminals. You will not stop @ICEgov and DHS law enforcement from enforcing our immigration laws.” And in a press release, DHS called the protesters “violent rioters” and claimed they “assaulted law enforcement” at the Broadview ICE facility.
Abughazaleh wrote on Bluesky that she and other protesters continued to face violence as the day went on: “They just tear-gassed us. They tried to run us over in a van holding a peaceful protester. They shot us with pepper balls. They dragged another protester into the facility.”
The greater Chicago area has been the subject of intense scrutiny from right-wing political figures in recent months amid the Trump administration's purported efforts to address crime and violence in major Democrat-run cities. After the administration deployed the National Guard to Washington, DC, in August based on that same premise, one of the cities Trump set his sights on was Chicago, despite the city's falling violent-crime rate in recent years. But the president's claim that he was considering sending federal troops into the city prompted pushback from Illinois leaders and residents, and initially, he backed down.
Instead, earlier in September, DHS ramped up its immigration enforcement actions in the area, starting with a crackdown called Operation Midway Blitz. Hundreds of individuals were reportedly arrested in roughly just the first two weeks of the crackdown. Later in the month, a Border Patrol deportation campaign that started in California, Operation at Large, was expanded to Illinois; following this expansion, scores of federal agents, including Border Patrol officers, were reportedly spotted patrolling Chicago’s downtown area this past weekend.
Ultimately, despite ongoing pushback from Illinois leaders, on September 29, US military officials announced that 100 National Guard troops would be deployed to Chicago. Governor J.B. Pritzker, who continues to be a loud opponent of federal immigration actions in the state, said in a press conference that day that a DHS memo claimed the troops were needed to protect ICE facilities as the enforcement crackdown continues. The announcement came days after Trump said on Truth Social that he planned to send the National Guard into Portland to crack down on anti-ICE protests there; Portland, along with the state of Oregon, sued the administration to block the action.
Amid these actions, protests have continued at the Broadview facility, with tensions reportedly rising between demonstrators and federal agents in recent days. DHS said in a news release last week that it had arrested 17 protesters at the facility since September 19. Over the weekend, law enforcement reportedly arrested several more individuals at Broadview and went after multiple journalists in the area.
A journalist from the independent Chicago media outlet Unraveled Press was detained for several hours on September 27 before being released early the next morning, according to local reports. Another journalist from CBS News Chicago alleged that as she was driving by the facility on September 28 to “see if any activity was taking place,” an ICE agent fired a pepper ball into her van, releasing “chemical agents” inside, her news outlet reported.
Several other protesters who were arrested this past weekend have also reportedly been released, according to Unraveled; however, some individuals remained in federal custody as of the morning of September 28, the National Lawyers Guild of Chicago said in a statement.
Abughazaleh, who recounted the September 19 protest in an interview with Teen Vogue last week, said, “They started the morning off by telling us, essentially, to bug off. Then when we said we're exercising our First Amendment rights, an ICE agent shot pepper balls at the pavement and said, ‘Your First Amendment rights are on the sidewalk.’ It was pretty obvious immediately that they were not going to be respectful… and then around 6 a.m. was the first time that ICE threw me.”
Despite the physical impact of the viral incident, which Abughazaleh said happened at about 6:30 that morning, the candidate told Teen Vogue that she still sees it as her moral responsibility as a person, not a candidate, to continue advocating for the rights of immigrants and protesting what she called “sickening human rights violations.”
A growing number of reports claim that the processing center is actually being used as a detention facility. “[Detainees are] being held for days or weeks at a time, without beds, without hot meals, without hygienic products, and it's absolutely atrocious,” Abughazaleh said. “Anything that we [protesters] have been dealing with does not hold a candle to what the people in the facility are dealing with on a daily basis.”
Family members of detainees have also spoken out about the conditions they say their relatives are experiencing inside the facility. For example, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that sisters Milagros Pelayo and Yessenia Garcia, whose father is being held at Broadview, said their dad described having to stay in a room with at least 150 other men, that food and water was being given out based on good behavior, and agents refused to give him his anxiety medication.
An earlier report from the Sun-Times said a woman held at the facility called the conditions “inhumane.” She told the news outlet that she was one of about 30 women held in a single room, saying detainees had to sleep on the floor, received “very little food,” and couldn’t access hygiene products.
As protests continue at the Broadview facility, DHS has reportedly implemented new security measures, including erecting a riot fence overnight on September 23 around the building’s perimeter to prevent protesters from getting close and setting up metal barricades on the street outside the facility to block traffic, according to CBS News. Federal officials said in a statement that the move was made in response to alleged actions from protesters, such as the throwing of tear gas canisters, rocks, bottles, and fireworks; slashing car tires, blocking the entrance of the Broadview facility; and trespassing on private property.
However, in a letter to DHS the same day the fence went up, Broadview's acting Fire Chief Matthew Martin said the barrier was built without a permit and would prevent the department from accessing the road in case of an emergency and demanded its removal. Though reporting from HuffPost suggested that the Trump administration was considering evacuating the facility and moving operations elsewhere amid the protests, a DHS spokesperson denied that report last week.
Broadview’s mayor, Katrina Thompson, has also denounced federal law enforcement actions in the suburb. On September 26, she sent a letter to ICE’s Chicago field office director claiming that the agency’s response to the Broadview facility protests was, in effect, “making war on my community.”
The letter prompted threats from the federal government about continued ICE enforcement, according to a statement from Broadview officials issued the next day. The statement went on to urge residents to take safety precautions and said, “We will not be intimidated.”
At the national level the Trump administration has taken steps in recent days that some say could make protesting more difficult. On September 22, the president issued an executive order that designated Antifa — a decentralized, left-wing political movement short for anti-fascist — a domestic terrorist organization, a move that some posit compares the actions of those who protest ICE to domestic terrorism.
Melanie D’Arrigo, a former New York congressional candidate, argued on X that the executive order “is worded so that anyone protesting ICE agents, filming or asking them for ID, or informing people of their rights, can be charged as a domestic terrorist.”
In a September 26 news release, DHS claimed to have arrested dozens of “Antifa-aligned left-wing violent extremists” in recent months.
To Abughazaleh, actions like these from the federal government are an example of “fascism 101” and a clear attempt to scare people away from protesting, she told Teen Vogue. “It is more important than ever to protest right now, to stand up right now, to not allow these people to intimidate us into losing our basic human rights,” she said. “There's more power in numbers.”
Abughazaleh argued that those numbers should also include elected officials and other people in power, whose platforms and visibility can be a helpful boost to protesters and who she’d like to see push for facilities like the one in Broadview to be shut down. “It gives other people more safety, it gives events more coverage, and it protects protesters, as people that are seen [as having] widespread credibility are able to attest to what is happening, to these human rights violations,” she explained.
Abughazaleh said further that she plans to continue attending protests at Broadview, telling Teen Vogue that she urges those who can to join protests against ICE or engage in other actions that can help fight what she refers to as fascism. These efforts include community volunteering and neighborhood clean-ups; connecting with organizations like the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, which works to protect immigrants and refugees in the state; checking on neighbors; or, “for some people…, just staying afloat for that day.”
She continued, “Whatever it is, it matters because fascism wants you to feel helpless, and it wants you to feel like you are alone. It wants you to doom scroll. It wants you to think that there is no way out and that capitulation — not just capitulation but total and utter submission — is the inevitable fate, and it's just not.”
