Community members demand ICE leave Chicago

Community members demand ICE leave Chicago

Plus: the CPD’s second in command is stepping down, Northwestern students boycott “antibias” training, and more.

by Dave Byrnes, Shawn Mulcahy and Devyn-Marshall Brown (DMB)September 24, 2025

Fuera Chicago

Planque LSNA’s Bethzaira Charluisant speaks at a press conference on September 18, 2025.Credit: Dave Byrnes

The community group Palenque LSNA—formerly Logan Square Neighborhood Association, now Liberating Spaces through Neighborhood Action—is decrying violent arrests across Chicagoland by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.

“You are not welcome, not welcome in our neighborhoods in Chicago,” said Bethzaira Charluisant, an immigrant community navigator for Palenque LSNA, at a September 18 press conference in the Montclare neighborhood on the city’s northwest side. “Leave. Leave Chicago now,” she said in Spanish.

Palenque held the press conference in partnership with the Northwest Side Rapid Response Network, a volunteer coalition that works to alert the community to federal immigration enforcement sightings, confirm immigration arrests, and inform people of their rights during encounters with federal agents. 

Before Palenque held its press conference at 9:30 AM, federal agents were across town, outside a Home Depot on 47th and Western in the southwest-side neighborhood of Brighton Park. It was the second day in a row they’d taken people from outside the hardware store. Video shared by witnesses on social media showed federal agents lifting a man’s leg and pushing him to the ground, screaming as the agents stood over him.

As federal agents departed the scene, they nearly struck a 17-year-old on an electric scooter who told independent news outlet Unraveled Press he had been on his way to school. “I could have been right there on the floor dying, and they wouldn’t have cared,” the teenager said. —Dave Byrnes