When masked agents descended on a Chicago suburb, residents disrupted the operation with hollering and blaring car horns

By Danya Gainor, Sara Smart, CNN

(CNN) — In the quiet village of Mount Prospect, nestled just northwest of Chicago’s city limits, residents were sheltering from the cold and rain on a sleepy Sunday afternoon watching TV, scrolling through social media and enjoying midday coffee at home.

As rain pattered against windows, and trees lining the streets swayed, flurries of urgent texts began ricocheting from one end of the neighborhood to the other, and panic set in as some residents put on their shoes and hurried out the door.

“ICE IS HERE,” one text between Mount Prospect neighbors said.

“F**king helicopters. Ice at Owen Park,” read another. “On our way,” one neighbor replied.

The historic suburb quickly devolved into a scene that has become familiar to places like nearby Chicago and elsewhere across the country as President Donald Trump works to execute his Day 1 promise to crack down on immigration and crime: A Homeland Security helicopter whirred overhead, several SUVs and trucks with tinted windows drove slowly past houses, and around two dozen masked federal agents meandered through yards and walked down sidewalks, according to images and interviews with residents.

Neighbors stepped out of their homes to document the agents who had descended on their community, joining a coalition of opposition to the president’s unwavering determination to detain and deport undocumented migrants en masse – a resistance effort spreading throughout US cities that have seen their workers, schoolchildren and community members swept up in ICE raids.

“The Rapid Response network confirmed high levels of immigration enforcement activity in Rolling Meadows, Wheeling, Prospect Heights & Mt. Prospect,” read a text from an ICE activity alert system run by a local immigrant rights group, the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. “At least 4 people have been detained.”

Without knowing exactly where she was headed, Mount Prospect resident and small business owner Dawn Ardito grabbed her phone and driver’s license and rushed out the door after receiving some of the texts. She had reached only the end of her block before spotting the first set of SUVs with dark windows driven by men in masks and fatigues.

She followed the cars to a nearby street with even more SUVs and agents. Ardito joined the handful of neighbors who had gathered, recording the federal officers with her phone, asking them what they were doing and demanding they leave.

“You don’t belong here,” Ardito said she told immigration enforcement agents. “Our neighbors, they do belong here. Our community members, they do belong here.”

Agents told residents they were looking for an “escaped criminal,” describing the person to Ardito and others as a “gang member” at one point, then a “murder suspect” and “sex offender” as the operation went on.

CNN has reached out to the Department of Homeland Security about the operation.

Mount Prospect police said they encountered the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers while responding to a 911 call about a person running through a nearby backyard. Officers left after they “confirmed these were federal agents,” and didn’t participate in the operation, “as this would be in violation of Illinois State Law and the Trust Act,” Officer Greg Sill said in a statement.

Another person living in Mount Prospect who was mobilized by the texts, speaking on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal, said she hoped to chase out the agents with her screams like she’d seen in videos on social media of similar encounters around Chicago.

“People should be coming out of their houses and confronting (agents),” the resident said. “I have neighbors who are terrified to leave their houses. … Nobody should have to live like that, not in any neighborhood.”

For more than an hour, residents screamed, videotaped and tailed federal vehicles, raucously honking horns to send the message: Their operation is not welcome here.

Agents left the area after about two hours, neighbors said. It’s not clear whether agents arrested the person they told residents they were searching for.

“If it can happen here, it can happen anywhere,” Ardito said. “Just because you haven’t seen it outside your front door like I saw it this weekend -– only time will tell until we all see that.”

Packing whistle kits and buying out street vendors: How Chicagoans are opposing ICE in their neighborhoods

At “No Kings” protests, Latino independence celebrations or ordinary afternoons in the streets of Chicago, bright orange whistles swing from community members’ necks, ready to cut through the city’s bustle should federal immigration agents appear.

The whistles have become a peaceful display of opposition as federal agents have been deployed across the city in recent weeks for what the Trump administration calls “Operation Midway Blitz,” an ICE effort that has resulted in more than 1,000 arrests of migrants across Illinois between September 8 and October 3, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

In Belmont Cragin, a northwest Chicago community, local organizers have rallied hundreds of volunteers to create kits packed with the whistles, handouts showing when to use them and bilingual flyers detailing what bystanders’ and detainees’ rights are when agents are conducting arrests.

One pamphlet in the kit reads, “Form a crowd, stay loud,” instructing users to blow the whistles as they spot ICE activity to guide nearby Chicagoans to where the agents are patrolling or conducting arrests so they can make noise, document or follow agents’ caravans.

Alonso Zaragoza, an organizer helping to run Belmont Cragin United, said the group has 30,000 whistle kits to distribute throughout the city. The group is hosting its next “Whistlemania” event October 29, when nearly 80 Chicago communities are expected to come together to fold pamphlets and pack plastic whistles to reach their goal of 100,000 kits.

“Immigrants keep us moving forward. They’re the oil in the machine that is our community,” Zaragoza said. “Hopefully Whistlemania takes off in other communities, like in Portland, to protect their immigrant populations.”

But many immigrants in Chicago now fear venturing out into the very community they help sustain.

West 26th Street, in the predominantly Latino community of Little Village, once boasted an array of friendly street vendors selling shaved ice and fresh corn, with their carts dotting the busy road. Since “Operation Midway Blitz” launched, locals say street corners are emptier, and vendors who set up shop do so at their own risk.

“Everybody who is getting arrested right now are people who are going to work,” said Erendira Rendon, vice president of immigrant justice at The Resurrection Project, a Chicago-based nonprofit. “Folks have to stay inside to stay safe.”

Chicago resident Rick Rosales, a community organizer and co-founder of Cycling x Solidarity, a local cycling group dedicated to mutual aid, started raising money when raids began to ramp up to buy up all the vendors’ food to get them off the street for the day.

Sunday morning, Rosales and a few other volunteers biked up to a woman selling empanadas in the pouring rain. On the street next to her tent, the woman’s young child was sitting in her parked car as she worked. The bikers bought every empanada she had.

“She was incredibly grateful, very taken by surprise,” Rosales said. “And no sooner did we pack up the bikes with all her goods, she’s already packed up her cooler and tent. It’s cold, it’s raining, it’s early in the morning – she has a child, and now they get to go home.”

After buying out a vendor, the bikers pass out the food to encampments and shelters.

Rosales’ group works with the Street Vendors Association of Chicago, which typically helps vendors design menus and obtain permits, to fundraise and identify sellers. Together, the groups organize bike tours where riders buy from a series of vendors as they explore the city.

“A few of our vendors have been detained (by ICE),” said Maria Orozco, outreach coordinator of the association. “So, we try to protect our vendors and make sure they’re good and make sure that the community supports them.”

Chicago is the epicenter of immigration crackdowns amid ongoing legal battles

As attorneys face off in courtrooms and federal agents on the ground clash with residents, Chicago is being cemented as the epicenter of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown after a flurry of legal developments.

The Windy City was thrust into the national spotlight after a federal appeals court temporarily allowed the federalization of Illinois National Guard troops but blocked their deployment within the state.

Trump on Friday urged the Supreme Court to allow him to deploy the National Guard in Chicago, putting the explosive legal fight over his ability to use those troops on American soil before the justices for the first time.

The appeal uses striking language to describe the situation in Chicago, asserting federal officials there “have been threatened and assaulted, attacked in a harrowing pre-planned ambush involving many assailants.”

That framing stands in stark contrast with how US District Court Judge April Perry described the situation on the ground in an order earlier this month.

Perry, a Biden nominee, pointed to what she described as “a troubling trend of defendants’ declarants equating protests with riots and a lack of appreciation for the wide spectrum that exists between citizens who are observing, questioning, and criticizing their government, and those who are obstructing, assaulting, or doing violence.”

Illinois and the city of Chicago have asked the justices to block the administration’s emergency request to keep National Guard troops in that state and have fiercely denied the administration’s descriptions of crime in the Prairie State’s biggest city.

For residents in Chicago communities like Little Village and Belmont Cragin, and outside city limits in Mount Prospect and across Illinois, the work goes on.

“I now have this whole new network of people that we have connected with, and having this firsthand experience, it has really bonded us,” Ardito said. “We are now making sure we’re connected and looking for what we can do to continue to protect our community and to continue to push back.”

CNN’s Omar Jimenez contributed to this report.

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