Chicago and the Horrors of Carte Blanche

The Trump regime believes it has all the justification it needs to violate our laws and the Constitution. It is mistaken.

Image courtesy of ABC News 7

Yesterday, federal authorities, including agents from ICE, the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives), and the FBI sought to make good on Donald Trump’s recent threats against U.S. cities.

In the dead of night, they swarmed a residential building in Chicago, even dropping in from Black Hawk helicopters like some sort of special commandos going after dangerous terrorists. They indiscriminately broke into people’s apartments and yanked them from their beds. Some residents were naked. They ransacked apartments and even zip tied small children. Some U.S. citizens were detained for hours.

The justification for this blatantly illegal and unconstitutional assault is a familiar one. The regime claims it was going after drug traffickers and gang members.

But once again, it offered no proof. We just have to take their word for it. Authorities seized people first, without probable cause, treating merely living in the same complex as suspected undocumented migrants as a crime.

As Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the Immigration Council observed,

A dangerous moment for America. If the normal police ever pulled something like this — pulling every single person out of an apartment building and handcuffing them to run checks — they would be sued into oblivion. It’s beyond unconstitutional.

The regime is deploying overwhelming force against innocent people and breaching all manner of constitutional boundaries, all in the name of interdicting drugs and gangs. We have seen this before, and this is now a pattern we need to highlight and organize to stop before even more lives are endangered or destroyed.

The Chicago attack

The reports out of Chicago are horrifying. And they are intended to be so. The regime wants us scared and cowering. But after reading the reports and hearing from the victims of this attack, I and many others are not scared but furious. We are more determined than ever to demand an end to ICE abuses and accountability for those who violate the rights of citizens and residents.

The Fourth Amendment’s guarantees against unreasonable searches and seizures lay in tatters following this assault. One resident, Pertissue Fisher, told the ABC News that ICE agents “took everyone in the building, including her, and asked questions later.”

“They just treated us like we were nothing,” Fisher said.

She had come out to the hallway in her nightgown around 10 p.m. Monday, where armed ICE agents were shouting “police.”

“It was scary, because I had never had a gun in my face,” Fisher said. “They asked my name and my date of birth and asked me, did I have any warrants?”—apparently meaning outstanding warrants for her arrest. “And I told them, ‘No,’ I didn’t,” she responded.

Fisher relayed that she was handcuffed and only released some five hours later around 3 a.m. She was told that if anyone had any kind of arrest warrant out for them, even one unrelated to immigration, they would not be released.

Other residents’ experiences were equally harrowing, and they described children being zip tied to one another like criminals. ABC News reported,

“As I got to my unit to stick my key in the door, I was grabbed by an officer. And I said, ‘What’s going on? What’s going on?’ He never actually told me. He said I was being detained,” said Alicia Brooks.

Neighbors like Eboni Watson say they ducked for cover as they heard several flash bangs.

“They was terrified. The kids was crying. People was screaming. They looked very distraught. I was out there crying when I seen the little girl come around the corner, because they was bringing the kids down, too, had them zip tied to each other,” Watson said. “That’s all I kept asking. What is the morality? Where’s the human? One of them literally laughed. He was standing right here. He said, ‘f*** them kids.’”

U.S. citizens were among those detained for long hours. The Chicago Sun-Times interviewed Rodrick Johnson, a 67-year old American citizen, who was one of the detainees. Johnson said agents broke through his front door and then dragged him out in zip ties. He was left tied up outside the apartment complex for nearly three hours before they finally let him go.

“I asked [agents] why they were holding me if I was an American citizen, and they said I had to wait until they looked me up,” Johnson said. “I asked if they had a warrant, and I asked for a lawyer. They never brought one.”

This treatment of citizens by federal authorities makes a mockery of Justice Kavanaugh’s concurring opinion in the California ICE enforcement cases, now being dubbed the “Kavanaugh Stop.” As Slate reported,

Kavanaugh insisted that ICE agents may use a person’s “apparent ethnicity” as a “relevant factor” when deciding whether to arrest them. But he assured readers that agents may use ethnicity only in combination with other, nonracial factors when deciding whom to target. He also insisted that these “immigration stops” are a minor inconvenience for “those individuals who are legally in the country,” writing: “The questioning in those circumstances is typically brief, and those individuals may promptly go free after making clear to the immigration officers that they are U.S. citizens or otherwise legally in the United States.”

“Promptly” apparently now means five or more hours while zip tied in your sleepwear in the dead of night outside your own apartment.

There were also reports that Black residents were put into one van while Latino residents were put into another, a clear indication of racial profiling. Citizen reporting flooded social media. Here’s just one example:

No, we are not being invaded

We have seen this kind of tail wag the dog before. More than six months ago, the White House decreed that it was invoking the Alien Enemies Act to move against the Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang of Venezuela, which Trump baselessly claimed was “invading” the United States. Here were his words in his presidential proclamation on March 15, 2025:

Nicolas Maduro, who claims to act as Venezuela’s President and asserts control over the security forces and other authorities in Venezuela, also maintains close ties to regime-sponsored narco-terrorists. Maduro leads the regime-sponsored enterprise Cártel de los Soles, which coordinates with and relies on TdA and other organizations to carry out its objective of using illegal narcotics as a weapon to “flood” the United States. In 2020, Maduro and other regime members were charged with narcoterrorism and other crimes in connection with this plot against America.

Using the pretext of this “invasion,” Trump cited the Alien Enemies Act as grounds to summarily deport, to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador, anyone even suspected of being a TdA gang member. These renditions were often based upon nothing more than mistaken assumptions about innocent persons’ tattoos.

It took many months and concerted public pressure to finally force the U.S. government to release the hundreds of immigrants held inside CECOT and at least return them to their home country of Venezuela, though many should have been allowed to return to the United States.

As for Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, no less than a panel of the conservative Fifth Circuit, along with every district court in Texas that heard the deportees’ cases, found that Trump had exceeded his authority and that the proclamation was void. (The full circuit, sitting en banc, recently agreed to hear the case.)

No, we are not in “armed conflict” with gangs

Those court losses and public pressure failed to deter this White House from attempting the same play on the high seas. Trump, acting through Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, ordered a small armada to assemble off the coast of Venezuela. The military has since used this force to destroy three civilian vessels, killing all on board.

Secretary Rubio justified the illegal destruction of the vessels and the murders of their crews by claiming, again without evidence, that the vessels were smuggling drugs to the U.S. and that the U.S. had a right to prevent that from happening. Because non-violent, non-lethal interdictions were not succeeding, Rubio argued, lethal force was now justified and would happen again.

But there is no legal justification for the use of lethal force anywhere to stop non-violent crime of any kind, let alone in international waters against unarmed foreign civilians. Were the U.S. a signatory to the International Criminal Court, these would constitute crimes for which all involved could be arrested—just as we have seen with former dictator Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, now awaiting justice at the Hague for ordering extrajudicial killings under the pretense of halting drug trafficking.

To get around this inconvenient fact, Trump issued a notification to Congress yesterday that the White House has determined the U.S. is in a “non-international armed conflict” with drug cartels that it has designated as terrorist organizations.

That notice labels three of the people killed in a strike on September 15 as “unlawful combatants.” Notably, that is the same term President George W. Bush used to describe al-Qaeda.

White House spokesperson Anna Kelly’s explanation for this move is strained to the point of absurdity, given that these were all unarmed civilian vessels:

“As we have said many times, the President acted in line with the law of armed conflict to protect our country from those trying to bring deadly poison to our shores, and he is delivering on his promise to take on the cartels and eliminate these national security threats from murdering more Americans.”

If the unspecific threat of deaths in the U.S. from smuggled drugs justifies lethal military action against civilians, then there are no meaningful limitations on what the military can be ordered to do.

The White House has already labeled certain drug cartels as “terrorists” even though they do not fit the traditional definition. Terrorists generally seek to destroy or overturn a country’s government or attack its political leadership or people with a specific agenda in mind, such as extreme religious or political ideology. The drug cartels have no ideology besides profit, which makes them sophisticated criminals, but not terrorists in any sense we usually understand the term.

Watch the creep

Even the designation of the TdA gang members and other narcotics traffickers as “terrorists” does not give the regime permission to use lethal force against them wherever and whenever it likes, though this is apparently what the White House wants. Congress has not authorized the use of force by the U.S. military against the cartels, but Trump seems determined to proceed anyway.

This brings us back to what happened in Chicago. A lawless regime doesn’t wait for permission, and it doesn’t feel bound by law or even the Constitution. Trump’s abuse of his presidential authority—through false proclamations that we are being “invaded,” and that drugs are killing people in the U.S. so we can kill those we think are bringing them in—won’t stop at our borders or be limited to international incidents.

With the Chicago raid, the Trump regime is now using overblown threats about gangs and drugs to trammel directly over the constitutional rights of residents and citizens. The “war on drugs” has now become a war on the American people.

But make no mistake. Deploying armed force against minority neighborhoods, migrants and small civilian vessels is a sign of weakness, not strength. These are the targets least able to fight back, assert their rights or move public opinion.

The regime is cosplaying, attempting to show it is big and tough, all while terrorizing innocents and racially profiling whole communities. It is testing the limits of its authority by deliberately overstepping and by publicly abusing its power.

Meanwhile, it is dog-whistling to white nationalists in speeches while openly signaling to U.S. federal forces that atrocities committed by them will be celebrated rather than condemned. That helps explain why Secretary Hegseth chose last week to proclaim that the murderers of Wounded Knee would retain their medals, and the history of that day will be remembered not as one of shame but one of glory.

It is imperative that civil rights lawyers, blue state governors and attorneys general, the media and the public respond with outrage and lawsuits over this attack in Chicago, just as we did over the rendition of immigrants to CECOT. If it goes unanswered, Trump will be emboldened and push the limits even further.

There are signs that the public, especially U.S. citizens who can assert their rights more directly, are unwilling to put up with these abuses. Civil rights lawsuits against ICE and federal authorities are now being filed from Van Nuys, California to Baldwin, Alabama to force the U.S. government to answer for its abuses.

As members of the public, we can contribute to the outcry by uplifting news stories of these abuses so that more Americans are aware of what is happening under the pretense of stopping drugs and gangs. In the end, we the voters are the ultimate backstop of democracy and the final protectors of our cherished and hard fought constitutional rights. What happened in Chicago will continue to occur unless and until we push back hard enough to force the regime to back down. We know that it has in the past, and that it can again in the face of concerted public pressure and outcry.

Let’s ensure the regime hears us loudly and clearly. Attend a No Kings nationwide rally on October 18 and add your body and your voice. We need everyone, now more than ever.