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by mbgerring 8 days ago
I started feeling that way around the time ICE illegally broke, entered and ransacked a low-income housing building in Chicago, terrorizing residents regardless of citizenship or immigration status. Once I realized that fear of reprisal was preventing me from expressing how I felt about it online, I resolved instead to get louder and more strident in my public speech than I had been in years.
2 comments
Freedom2 7 days ago
The thing is, this forum often tells us that the government is not allowed to do that, it's against the law. So I'm curious why they did, and how they were able to?
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gumby 8 days ago
Looks like that episode was a building clearance for a developer.
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JuniperMesos 7 days ago
There are news reports about how the owner and property manager gave formal permission to ICE to search the building: https://chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/2026/02/04/chicago-... ; as well as additional reports in the months after the raid claiming that the building had been poorly-maintained and plagued by squatters for a long time previous to the raid: https://therealdeal.com/chicago/2025/11/07/judge-orders-tena... and https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/10/17/city-wants-residents... . Finally, in December, all remaining residents were legally required to leave: https://chicago.suntimes.com/real-estate/2025/12/12/last-rem...

It does sound like the property management company that owned the building might have been trying to get existing tenants to leave so they could renovate the building. And that's probably ultimately a good thing. Obviously it's disruptive for the existing legal tenants; but it sounds like it was a building in disrepair - that's why it was cheap enough for large numbers of illegal immigrants to be living there - and in general I think that tenant protection laws in major American cities are an impediment to building more and better-quality housing units.

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mbgerring 6 days ago
> It does sound like the property management company that owned the building might have been trying to get existing tenants to leave so they could renovate the building. And that's probably ultimately a good thing.

Innocent children were marched out of their homes in the middle of the night by masked & unidentified Federal paramilitary troops with automatic weapons, who broke into the building by helicopter.

I will do everything in my power, for the rest of my life, to comprehensively politically disempower anyone who believes this is “ultimately a good thing.”

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