Baltazar Enriquez began wearing his whistle in June, when the threat of the Trump administration’s immigration raids was more focused and the fear perhaps less widespread in Chicago. The whistle — green plastic, attached to an orange lanyard — was at first a small gesture of preparedness. It has since become a symbol of resistance.

In the beginning, the sight of it around Enriquez’s neck prompted questions and confusion in Little Village, one of Chicago’s proudest Latino neighborhoods. He remembers people asking him, perplexed: “What is a whistle gonna do?”

“And we said, ‘Well, the whistle is in case immigration is around, and you start blowing. The whistle is for people who are undocumented to go away, to lock their doors, lock their gates and not open the door.’

“And it grew like wildfire. Now everybody’s using it.”

For the past two months of President Donald Trump’s so-called Operation Midway Blitz, federal agents have engaged in a norm-defying assault on the Chicago area. In Little Village, where Enriquez is president of the community council, restaurant doors have remained locked and business along 26th Street has slowed.

The resistance born there, though, has spread. A movement that began in Chicago’s Latino enclaves has arrived in neighborhoods everywhere, breaking through segregation and boundaries long defined by race and socioeconomic status. A city known for its resilience and a take-no-nonsense attitude has found another reason to unite

And in its unity, the city has made a statement, an unmistakable message akin to the one a woman packing whistles at a recent “Whistlemania” event on the Northwest Side hoped to send.

“Show ’em that you don’t (expletive) with Chicago,” she said.

The whistles have become part of the city’s soundtrack, the sight of them around people’s necks as common as Bears jerseys. But the resistance to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and U.S. Border Patrol agents, often dressed in tactical gear, toting weapons built for war through city neighborhoods and suburban subdivisions, has taken many forms. A movement has grown through acts large and small.

Resistance is a woman documenting the deployment of tear gas in Broadview. It’s neighbors coming together to grab one of their own from the grasp of federal agents in Old Irving Park. It’s a white suburban mom rushing from her house in Mount Prospect, phone camera in hand, to scream at federal agents to get out of her village.

It’s a 24-year-old man, the son of Mexican migrants, who alerted dozens of day laborers of the presence of ICE during a recent raid in the northwest suburbs, and then sheltered and protected them. It’s a young Black man on the South Side recording the detainment of several U.S. citizens following an apparently warrantless raid and sharing that video with the world.

And it’s hundreds of high school students who walked out of their classes and into the streets of Little Village, carrying flags and signs and blowing whistles, literally and figuratively.

In Little Village alone, Enriquez said, he and his colleagues on the community council have distributed almost 10,000 whistles. In the earliest days of the Chicago resistance, he said ICE and Border Patrol officers responded with bewilderment when people began blowing them in their presence. Enriquez can remember one agent who smirked and laughed at the sound.

“But he didn’t, once he saw people locking their doors and getting away,” he said.

The movement, like the noise, has only grown more intense.

‘No longtime activist’

She resisted because others inspired her to resist. Because for weeks she’d watched videos of protests at an ICE detention facility in Broadview and of standoffs between Chicagoans and federal agents in Brighton Park and the East Side and everywhere else. Videos that, at times, showed the targets of the raids “literally fighting for their lives.”

She resisted, ultimately, because agents showed up on her street on a random Sunday afternoon in October. Outside her door. On her quiet block in Mount Prospect. That’s when Lisa Porter ran outside.

“It was sort of like I was finally able to find a place to put my rage,” she said later, “and try to be a little productive instead of feeling so helpless.”

Lisa Porter yells at federal agents and tells them to leave as they sit in their SUV along East Busse Avenue on Oct. 19, 2025, in Mount Prospect. (Stacey Wescott/Chicago Tribune)
Lisa Porter in her dining room filled with artwork made by her three children on Nov. 5, 2025, in Mount Prospect. Porter was one of several neighbors who confronted federal agents when they blanketed her neighborhood on Oct. 19. (Stacey Wescott/Chicago Tribune)

Porter, 53, had never been all that politically active. She’d never been much of a protester. She’s a suburban mother of three — a 13-year-old daughter and twins who are 11. “I’m no longtime activist,” she said.

Her resistance began that day “by running out and screaming at people.”

“Now, granted,” she said, “I recognize that that’s not necessarily a tactic that everyone thinks is terribly effective. (But) I had been seeing a lot of it on those videos, and really it seemed to be the thing that got them to back down.”

There were agents in two SUVs down her street that day, and others circling nearby blocks in four or five more vehicles. She remembers their masks. About 20 of her neighbors had gathered outside to bear witness, with some of them, like Porter, rushing to protect anyone who might be targeted. Rumors swirled up and down the street and in the aftermath: that it was a cartel member they were after.

Or a sex offender. Or a murderer. Or someone who was all three?

The “worst of the worst,” as the Trump administration has often put it.

“There were several different stories that they told,” Porter said, but she knows that at “no point did they say, ‘Stay in your houses. There’s a dangerous criminal on the loose.’”

She cannot be sure whether the agents ultimately apprehended anyone. If they did, she didn’t see it, which leads her to believe it didn’t happen. She was, after all, trailing the vehicles — confronting the agents inside, screaming at them. A Tribune photographer captured Porter in mid-scream, her face twisted in rage, the masked agents on the other end of her ire avoiding eye contact.

The one in the driver’s seat is looking away from her. The other straight ahead.

She was yelling “a lot of not-safe-for-work things,” she said.

She remembers one interaction, when an agent that day asked her if she was “OK with criminals in the neighborhood.”

“You’re the criminals,” she told them. “You’re the ones kidnapping people off the street.”

About two weeks later, Porter received a text from a neighbor. ICE was back. Porter made her way to her neighbor’s house but by the time she arrived the agents were gone. It left locals feeling uneasy and angry again. On the way home, Porter noticed a young man mowing a nearby lawn. She flagged him down and offered a warning:

“I just want you to be safe,” she told him. “ICE is in the area.”

But he already knew. What he said in response has lingered in Porter’s mind.

She can still hear him saying it:

“They came and took my dad 10 minutes ago.”

‘These are my people’

He resisted because he identifies with those who’ve been targeted and deported. Because he has never forgotten the sacrifices his parents made or their journey from Michoacán, Mexico, to West Englewood, where he “didn’t grow up in one of the best neighborhoods,” but where he found opportunity, nonetheless.

He resisted, ultimately, because “these are my people.” That was one of Efrain Cuevas’ first thoughts when he noticed the caravan of Ford Explorers with Texas plates last month. And there was a moment, however brief, when his mind offered an alternative to what he was seeing.

“I guess people from Texas are visiting,” he said to himself. But at the same time he knew. He knew those vehicles carried federal agents and he saw them as they came closer. That was when Cuevas began shouting. Began screaming, with as much force as he could muster:

“La Migra! La Migra!”

“Which is ICE, in Spanish,” he said. “Everybody just started running.”

“It was everybody for themselves.”

Efrain Cuevas talks to window installers hiding in an apartment after federal agents raided the Hoffman Hills Apartments in Hoffman Estates and detained three installers on Oct. 31, 2025. (Stacey Wescott/Chicago Tribune)

Cuevas, 24, is an American citizen and Chicago native. He attended Chicago Bulls College Prep on the Near West Side. He said he served in the Marines. Now he works in maintenance at an apartment complex in northwest suburban Hoffman Estates. The apartments needed new windows and so the management company hired a crew.

Dozens of laborers arrived. Cuevas estimates that about 40 of them were in the U.S without legal permission.

In a way, they reminded him of his parents. They’d come to this area seeking opportunity. The only difference, as Cuevas saw it, was that he happened to be born here and they didn’t. But he wondered: “Why can’t we all just be human?”

“We all bleed red,” he said. “But, you know, I guess people just don’t like specific skin colors.”

When he started shouting upon the arrival of the agents, the workers began to scramble. It was “chaos,” Cuevas said, “and I’ll always see people just running in different directions.” They’d been there to install windows but now there was panic. Some of the crew members found their way into the buildings they were working on. Cuevas opened doors to unoccupied units where workers hid.

He tried to interrupt detainments in progress and asked for search warrants. One of the agents, he said, asked him if he was a U.S. citizen.

“Yes, sir,” Cuevas responded, and again asked to see a search warrant.

“But these agents are like — the Constitution? They don’t even care about it,” he said.

It was only after everything quieted down that Cuevas realized that agents detained at least three workers. Dozens of others remained hidden until the agents left. Some of the workers had their car keys taken, Cuevas said. The agents swiped them out of the ignition through open windows so that the owners of those cars wouldn’t be able to drive away.

Cuevas tried to facilitate safe exits when the time came and, for days after, everything played over in his mind: the sight of the SUVs, the workers running, the agents giving chase.

“I’m still in shock,” he said.

A week later, the new windows and the equipment to install them were still scattered about the property, a job left unfinished. Cars remained parked on the grass, left behind by people taken away, or ones who escaped and were too afraid to come back. The scene offers constant reminders. Cuevas has thought a lot about his parents, who “wanted to give their kids an American dream.”

He suspects it wasn’t much different for the workers.

“I saw this and it really did hit home for me,” he said. “And I was like, I have to protect these people …

“Who’s gonna look after them?”

‘Chicago isn’t playing around’

Resistance is as much a part of Chicago’s history as resilience, and in a lot of ways one can’t exist without the other. This is a city that rose from the ashes of a fire and rebuilt itself 150 years ago. The Haymarket Riot of the 1880s, when the working class fought for an eight-hour work day, remains one of the most important labor movements in American history.

In 1968, the turmoil surrounding the Democratic National Convention — where Mayor Richard J. Daley’s police force met anti-Vietnam war activists with brute and bloody force — underscored a greater American unrest. One speaker, Connecticut Sen. Abraham Ribicoff, lambasted Daley for his “gestapo tactics” against protesters.

Almost 60 years later, little has changed about the city’s spirit. The difference, though, is that those resisting now aren’t doing so in opposition to war in a faraway place. They’re resisting, instead, what they consider to be an invasion of their city and their neighborhoods. They’re resisting the presence of federal agents who look more like soldiers, and immigration raids that feel like attacks.

The deeds of resistance, themselves, can be wide-ranging. They don’t fit neatly into boxes. They can be, as one viral social media post detailed, as simple as a middle schooler handing out whistle packets with a know-your-rights card on a city street. They can be the profane messages, written on the street in chalk, against ICE outside of its facility in Broadview, or the 14 suburban women who were arrested Friday after they hopped the concrete barricades that have proliferated around the processing center, sat down in the middle of the street and held hands in a organized display of civil disobedience.

A large crowd gathers for a rally organized by clergy leaders outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Broadview, Nov. 7 2025. (E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune)

They can be marches. Or walkouts. Or a local ironworker and union board member who spread the word in a video on Tik-Tok — seen more than 32,000 times as of Friday evening — that “Chicago isn’t playing around.”

“We’ve been standing up to government since the 1800s,” Paul Goodrich of Iron Workers Local #63, says into the camera. He wears his hard hat and a short beard. And, as a white man who works “a hard job,” as he put it, he has the look of the kind of person President Donald Trump most tries to appeal to. But Goodrich isn’t having it.

“If Donald Trump thinks that he could come in here and send his police force to hold us down, he’s wrong,” he said. “The whistles are everywhere … this is what we do. The best thing we do in Chicago is organize. So good luck.”

The  Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment for this story.  In previous statements, its spokespeople have labeled residents opposed to their enforcement as  “rioters, gangbangers and terrorists.”

In Chicago, some moments of recent resistance have received national attention. Not long after the formal announcement of Operation Midway Blitz, there was the viral video of a man on a bike eluding federal agents downtown. Scenes of the protests in Broadview have been broadcast to the rest of the country.

But resistance often comes in quieter forms, in the shadows.

In the days after the late September nighttime raid of an apartment building in South Shore, in a predominantly Black neighborhood, residents spoke out against the militarized invasion of their community — one in which some federal agents rappelled from helicopters.

Someone placed a small memorial on a fence near the place where 37 people had been taken into custody. There was a hula-hoop. A pink stuffed animal. A hopeful message:

“This too will pass … Protect South Shore. Protect Chicago.”

Resistance can be a lot of things but they always come in the form of “an oppositional action,” said Rachel Einwohner, a Purdue University political sociologist who has studied resistance movements for nearly 30 years.

“It could be posting on social media,” she said. “It could be participating in a march. It could be giving shelter to somebody who, you know — you hear the whistle and you’re like, ‘Oh, my God, ICE is coming,’ and you see somebody running, and you let them into your house.”

Chicago’s history of taking stands “is absolutely important” in shaping this current moment of resistance, Einwohner said, but resistance movements are not limited by ideology or political leaning. She noted that one “could say MAGA was a whole resistance movement” of its own, one that spawned Midway Blitz, but now Chicagoans find themselves pushing back.

“In this particular moment, the city of Chicago is absolutely being targeted because of its history, because of its politics, because of the Trump administration and how they’re kind of seeing things,” Einwohner said.

To stand in opposition requires very little. The challenge for scholars in her line of work, Einwohner said, is quantifying the difference any of it makes.

How does one measure the effectiveness of a social media post? Or the blowing of a whistle?

Or a march or a walkout? It can be difficult to answer.

“But small acts have huge consequences,” Einwohner said, and she thought of the person who thought to take video of George Floyd’s murder. “If she hadn’t done that, then things would be a lot different. So (resistance can be) just kind of saying, ‘I’m going to be a witness to this,’ and I’m going to say, ‘No, this is not right.’”

Whistlemania

They resisted because they believe this is not right. Because they felt like they had to do something, even if it was small.

Wednesday evenings are usually quiet at Illuminated Brew Works in Norwood Park, but the place was almost full a little after 6 p.m. on a recent Wednesday. By 6:30, it was at capacity — not a spot at the bar or any of the tables organizers brought in just for the night.

The brewery is tucked into a small industrial space off of Northwest Highway, not far from O’Hare International Airport, in Chicago’s far northwest corner. It’s a part of the city’s 41st Ward — one of the few in Chicago where Trump found success in the 2024 election. Norwood Park is not necessarily a bastion of progressivism. It is instead something of a reddish or purple island in a deep blue city.

And yet even here, where Trump won several nearby precincts, organizers of a Whistlemania event, one of several throughout Chicago in recent weeks, did not bring enough whistles. Or know-your-rights cards. Or any of the other supplies that would’ve met demand.

Agnes Guerra, one of those organizers, was not sure what to expect. She feared low turnout, and worried that a whistle-packing event in one of Chicago’s most conservative-leaning neighborhoods might come and go unnoticed.

“This ward is very red,” she said, but over the past two months she found herself “doing something every day to keep myself sane.” Sometimes that meant protesting in Broadview. Sometimes it meant spending money to support businesses that had been affected by the raids. She said she was among the early wave of protesters in Broadview when agents reacted with force.

“My joke is how do you radicalize middle-aged white women?” she asked.

“You throw tear gas at them.”

She met another neighborhood organizer, Virginia Jimenez, online, and the planning began for Whistlemania at the brewery. They thought they needed enough whistles and information packets for 1,000 people. That seemed like a lofty goal. But they could’ve used twice as many. The sight of so many people coming into the brewery to fold informational flyers into small booklets, and pack them into little bags with plastic whistles, made Guerra and Jimenez emotional.

It was especially personal for Jimenez, who recounted her personal history of arriving in the United States from Guatemala when she was 5-years-old.

“I’m very passionate about our rights, just as humans,” she said. In recent weeks she has spent a lot of time driving children of migrants around the city, to and from school or to appointments or to the grocery store, because their parents are too afraid to leave home. Too afraid of walking through their door and never returning again.

Jimenez and Guerra hoped the whistle packs they collected that night might make a small difference.

They could offer a warning. Maybe help slow a pursuit. Perhaps tell someone to run.

About 20 minutes after Whistlemania began, Guerra grabbed a microphone and said they were running low on supplies. Not long after that, she announced that they’d run out. The 1,000 whistles they had packed were destined for churches and little free libraries on street corners.

And, eventually, around people’s necks, waiting to be heard.

‘We had to fight’

They sounded the alarm in the distance down 26th Street in Little Village on a recent Tuesday morning, the shrill growing louder along with that of the chants that accompanied it. By then, students at Social Justice High had walked out of class. They’d grabbed their signs and flags and marched toward the arch at the neighborhood’s eastern edge.

Students from the Little Village Lawndale High School campus walk out and march along West 26th Street to protest recent immigration enforcement actions in the area, Oct. 28, 2025. (Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune)

The arch is the community’s most prominent landmark, and the words that stretch across it, in large letters, offer a warm greeting: “Bienvenidos a Little Village.” Lately, though, the place hasn’t felt all that inviting. The doors to some of Chicago’s most authentic Mexican restaurants have remained locked for fear of federal agents.

Along the usually busy 26th, which is Little Village’s version of Main Street, foot traffic has slowed outside of the quinceañera boutiques and other local establishments. Parking is easy to come by. Small signs taped to windows are common, ones that read: “ICE/CBP agents DO NOT have consent to enter this business/restaurant unless they have a valid judicial warrant.”

Anxiety has run high here ever since Trump’s second inauguration 10 months ago. Yet it has been especially tense since the start of the blitz and even more so since federal agents, accompanied by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol Cmdr. Greg Bovino, showed up in Little Village on Oct. 23. A confrontation ensued and the agents dispersed tear gas.

The community felt attacked. Wounded. The students marched because they wanted to heal.

One of them, Lia Sophia Lopez, helped lead the march down 26th. She carried a bullhorn and led chants, her voice cracking at times with emotion. She addressed the crowd upon its arrival under the arch, and preached a message of unity and resilience and resistance.

“When they attacked our community, it hurt,” she said. “We had to fight. We had to protect our people. Because people are scared to leave their homes.

“People are scared to even walk across the street. … We’re doing this to protect the people’s peace so people are not scared of leaving and people are not scared to fight back.”

She began to head back toward school, with more than a hundred others who’d walked out, and the route took the students past the locked restaurants and quiet storefronts, through a wary neighborhood that refuses to give in. Days later, Baltazar Enriquez, president of the community council, stepped out of his office and into Don Pepe, the restaurant right next door.

He took a look around at the empty tables and said, “This restaurant used to be full at this time.” For months, Enriquez has tried to comfort and lead neighbors while his community — home to the city’s largest Mexican American population — became a focal point of the raids. Now it was the afternoon of Halloween and an eerie quiet hung over 26th Street. Enriquez grappled with a new question that had been facing his community:

Should it cancel its annual Halloween parade? Or should it encourage a community gathering in a time of constant unease, one in which “we’ve got ICE everywhere,” Enriquez said. He thought of children yearning to wear their costumes and march carefree down the street. He thought of parents who’d been too afraid to leave home but who needed a small taste of normalcy. Of belonging.

He came to think it wasn’t much of a decision at all.

And so the parade would go on. It had to go on.

Enriquez solicited dozens of volunteers. They planned to protect children in the case of a raid. To make a human circle, if the need arose, to block federal agents.

In the end, none of it was needed. But the resistance had been ready. To protect each other. To make noise.

They didn’t have tear gas or guns. But they had each other. And the little pieces of plastic Enriquez and thousands of other Chicagoans keep around their necks.