Lucy says she starts early because ICE starts early. It’s around eight o’clock one Thursday morning in late October, at a coffee shop in Back of the Yards, a neighborhood on Chicago’s Southwest Side. Taped inside the shop’s glass door, a sign warns ICE not to enter without a judicial warrant. (The agents very rarely bother to get one.) More signs surround it: “Hands Off Chicago”; “Migra: Fuera de Chicago”; the phone number to report ICE activity. (These are all over town.) Free whistles sit at the register. Lucy buys a black coffee from the barista and joins me at a table, checking her phone for messages about potential sightings—not just of ICE, but also Customs and Border Protection and other federal agencies, such as the FBI and ATF, tasked with arresting immigrants in neighborhoods like this one. She has dark hair and a few tattoos reaching past her shirtsleeves, and, even at this early hour, her eyeliner is precise. As we wait, we stare out the café window at a nearly empty street, toward a candy-colored mural of clouds over a desert sunset. “There should be a street vendor right there,” Lucy says. There should be more than one. “It shouldn’t be this quiet.”

Volunteers like Lucy, doing ICE or migra watch shifts across the city, tend to work in their own neighborhoods. They are part of a network of rapid-response groups that have sprung up over the last few months to protect immigrant communities from the Trump administration’s brutal, far-reaching “mass deportation” program, led by Department of Homeland Security director Kristi Noem. It would easily take dozens of pages to provide a full accounting of the abductions, arrests, and protests that have taken place in Chicago as of mid-November. The Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, or ICIRR, posted verified sightings of federal immigration agents nearly every day in September and October. Shortly before I met Lucy, ICIRR identified federal agents in at least nine Chicago neighborhoods and suburbs on a single day: Melrose Park, Oak Park, Cicero, and more, as well as at the Kane County Courthouse and the O’Hare International Airport. At O’Hare, according to reports verified by ICIRR, at least 20 agents shut down exits at rideshare lots, demanded identification from drivers, and detained multiple people. All told, according to the Department for Homeland Security, more than 4,000 people in the city have been taken off the streets by federal agents and held in immigration detention facilities since September, in what the Trump administration calls “Operation Midway Blitz.”

The crackdown is vast, the stakes could hardly be higher, and the response from Chicagoans has been profound and far-reaching. The mayor signed an executive order designating city-owned property as “ICE Free Zones.” A federal judge required some of those overseeing the operation, such as Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, to testify under oath, and set schedules for them to update the court on the operation. But neither political nor legal interventions have managed to meaningfully interrupt what’s going on. ICE-free zones, residents report, do not stop ICE. And the slow-moving legal system can’t prevent agents from violating residents’ constitutional rights; indeed, the system largely functions to offer redress after the fact. Even when courts have ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement or CBP to cease some violent action, such as lobbing tear gas into residential neighborhoods, agents ignored them. The scores of terrifying arrests continued.

ICE, CBP, and others have violently retaliated against these groups in part because the agencies correctly understand what many do not: An organized movement is a formidable adversary.

The one response that has been genuinely effective has come from community members—ordinary residents who have come together, trained one another, and connected across neighborhoods to form groups like the Southwest Side Rapid Response Team. They have eyes on the street, the trust of their neighbors, and the ability to intervene practically instantaneously, sharing information with the ICE-activity hotline that operates across the state. They can record evidence and pass it along in seconds to rights groups, news media, and social media. Blending protest and direct action, they are offering something concrete to Chicagoans who want to express their opposition to Donald Trump’s war on immigrants. This is true movement-building, a project that may endure after this particular threat to immigrant communities, even after this regime. ICE, CBP, and others have violently retaliated against these groups in part because the agencies correctly understand what many do not: Organized neighbors are mounting an effective defense, and an organized movement is a formidable adversary.

On the far Southwest Side of Chicago, by Lucy’s estimate, hundreds of people have been working together since early September to defend their neighbors, joining thousands across the city. Just outside the parking lot of a nearby Home Depot on Western, a broad street dividing Brighton Park from Back of the Yards, one community group starts its shift at six in the morning: a couple of people with a table, folding chairs, and free coffee. Not far away, ICE uses the parking lot of a strip mall as a temporary base. Enforcement officers gather here, their faces covered in balaclavas, name badges stripped off their uniforms. They idle in their unmarked vehicles, some with the license plates removed. Then they caravan together to pick off people setting up food carts, taking their kids to school, or just out walking alone.

That’s when the notifications will hit Lucy’s phone, as well as hundreds, if not thousands, of other phones, passing messages within neighborhoods. “OK, let’s go to one spot,” Lucy says, grabbing her coffee and picking up a banana for later. She has a report of two suspected ICE vehicles nearby. Now she’ll try to verify the report before it gets shared more widely. If she can, she’ll trail them and report where they’re going, sending word through the network so that others close by can alert the neighborhood with their whistles, follow in their cars, and generally try to make ICE’s work as difficult as possible.

It’s no surprise, then, that these efforts have been cast by Noem and other officials as violent and criminal. Almost all of the people to whom I spoke for this story chose to use pseudonyms, to ensure that they can keep doing community defense work in this environment of new and escalating legal threats. Some are also immigrants or have immigrant family members to protect. People are risking a great deal to defend their neighbors, their students, their co-workers, and their customers, while trying to withstand the chaos caused by armed,........

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