On this edition of Hard Knock Radio, host Davey D speaks with Chicago alderperson and grassroots organizer Jessie Fuentes about the Trump backed ICE operation that has turned parts of the city into a live test site for authoritarian policing.
Fuentes begins by recounting how she was roughed up and handcuffed by ICE agents inside a hospital simply for asking whether they had a signed judicial warrant. She stresses that what is happening in Chicago is not normal immigration enforcement. In her view it is political punishment for a city that refused to bow to the Trump agenda, fueled by racism, anti Latino sentiment, and open contempt for immigrants.
Fuentes describes masked ICE teams in unmarked cars, swapping license plates, sweeping people off the streets, and ignoring local rules that require visible badges. Many of these agents, she explains, are lightly vetted recruits and even bounty hunters lured by big bonuses and debt relief, not seasoned law enforcement. The result is unchecked violence, including killings and assaults that have put residents in the hospital.
Davey presses hard on why Chicago police and city leaders have not arrested agents who violate local laws. Fuentes points to stonewalling from police leadership and the limits of consent decrees, even as she pushes ordinances to investigate any local officers who cooperate with ICE and to enforce Chicago’s status as a welcoming city.
The conversation also exposes the human impact. ICE is not rounding up the dangerous figures featured in right wing propaganda. Instead they are seizing long time residents, street vendors, small business owners, and parents with traffic tickets, then warehousing them in Broadview, a small processing center now functioning as an overcrowded and filthy detention site.
Fuentes and Davey close by calling out media productions that stage anti immigrant Black and brown voices to pit communities against one another. Fuentes highlights Chicago’s rapid response network and urges people everywhere to organize, document abuses, and refuse divide and conquer tactics that protect white nationalist power at the expense of Black and brown lives.
Hard Knock Radio is a drive-time Hip-Hop talk show on KPFA (94.1fm @ 4-5 pm Monday-Friday), a community radio station without corporate underwriting, hosted by Davey D and Anita Johnson.
