It Could Happen Here - ICE’s Ethnic Cleansing in Chicago

Episode Date: October 6, 2025

Mia talks with Unraveled’s Raven about ICE’s horrific raids in Chicago from a traffic stop murder to helicopter apartment raids. Sources: https://thetriibe.com/2025/09/feds-detain-dozens-of-immigrants-in-massive-south-shore-apartment-building-raid-in-chicago/ https://chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/2025/10/01/massive-immigration-raid-on-chicago-apartment-building-leaves-residents-reeling-i-feel-defeatedSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Hi there, this is Josh Clark from the Stuff You Should Know podcast. If you've been thinking, man alive, I could go for some good true crime podcast episodes, then have we got good news for you. Stuff You Should Know just released a playlist of 12 of our best true crime episodes of all time. There's a shootout in broad daylight, people using axes in really terrible ways, disappearances, legendary heists, the whole nine yards. So check out the Stuff You Should Know true crime playlist.

I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and on the new season of heavyweight... And so I pointed the gun at him and said this isn't a joke. A man who robbed a bank when he was 14 years old. And a centenarian rediscovers a love lost 80 years ago. How can a 101-year-old woman fall in love again? Listen to Heavyweight on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The murder of an 18-year-old girl in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved for years,

until a local housewife, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story. America, y'all better work the hell up. Bad things happens to good people. Small towns. Listen to Graves County on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And to binge the entire season ad-free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.

Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, and I'm the host of the on-purpose podcast. Recently, I had a conversation with the one and only Madonna. When I was broke and I had no friends, know where to live. I was held up at gunpoint. I was robbed. Always horrendous things happen to me. I had such an unhappy childhood that whatever happened to me in New York is better than what my life was, so I'm not going back. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Call Zone Media

Welcome to It Could Happen here, a podcast where the It is the authoritarian takeover of the city of Chicago. I have your host, Mia Wong, and today is an episode that was significantly delayed by the fact that our guests got shot in the face by riot munitions while attempting to cover an anti-ice protest at an ice facility, and then her coworker was fucking grabbed by the feds the next day, which she was also still out at, for reasons that are semi incomprehensible to me, because, again, she was just shot in the face. This is, this is Raven, a journalist with the independent outlet Unravelled, which really, truly is doing a lot of incredible work on the incredible proliferation of ice raids around Chicago. Raven, welcome to the show. Oh, boy. Oh, boy is right. Thanks for that intro.

Uh, yeah. We're, we're in the shit right now. We're in it. Yeah. I guess I want to immediately start this with you are mostly, you're basically okay from my understanding from getting shot in the face of the right ammunition like a week ago. I am, I am basically okay. I have, uh, like some swelling still in my jaw. I'm going to the doctor. We'll see like if there's any soft tissue like lingering effects later on down the line, but nothing's broken. Yeah, which thank God. Holy shit. Thank God. That stuff can really fuck you up permanently. Yeah, I mean, it's spent several weeks now of the feds just humbling people with these stupid little pepper ball rounds. Yep. And like the core of it is like metal. You know, it's like this little bullet thing with like the pepper powder on the outside.

So if you shoot someone in the face with those, I mean, like we've seen horrific injuries these last few weeks protesters. And also like people getting concussions from. like, you know, tear gas canisters exploding right by their heads and other things, broken bones from these really violent arrests. And yeah, it's just been awful, not going to lie. Yeah. I was shot at, like, literally, I was, like, taking a photo of a Fed, like, in a press gaggle. We were all hiding behind this van while we're just, like, being shot at.

And this guy, I mean, he stared right at me. and, like, right down the barrel of my lemons. Like, he knew what he was doing. Jesus Christ. Yeah, another reporter was, like, a similar situation where these guys, like, fucking ambushed them. Like, it was just two reporters, like, hiding behind a van, and these guys came up along the side of the fence

and just started, like, shooting them in the face with these rounds. Yeah. So... And this has been at the protests at the ice facility in Broadview? Yeah, Broadview is, like, just a tiny little... little suburb, like just outside of Chicago, it's still in Cook County, majority black suburb, actually black working class, the mayor's a black woman. And now this ice facility has been there for a while, obviously. People were protesting there weekly for like over a decade,

but nothing like what we've seen these last few weeks. Yeah. Okay, let's go back in time a little bit because in between the last time we spoke to you and now there has been so much unbelievably horrible stuff in Chicago. I guess let's go back a couple of weeks and talk about the guy they murdered. Yeah. So shortly after this latest ice surge began, they sealed a man at a traffic stop to ice agents who were seemingly operating completely alone. didn't seem to have any backup with them. It was just these two guys in this car who jumped down on the sky.

And yeah, it feels like forever ago, but of course it was only a few weeks ago. Yeah. And, you know, that's an example of just like a police killing that we may never learn more about because, you know, it involves the feds, right? Yeah. You know, there's no timeline under which they have to release

any information or, like, tell us anything. about their own investigation into it. Yeah. So that is, of course, really horrifying and horrifying to know there's kind of these these missing few seconds of video, right, where we don't see the actual shot fired. Yep. Or shots, excuse me. We can sort of piece together what happened.

But, you know, this happened in a working class, Latino suburb, a heavily Latino suburb, not very far down the road from the actual ice facility like as you were saying part of what's really frustrating about this is we can't tell you why they stopped this person because they won't tell us

right we know very little about this other than they stopped a guy he tried to drive away and they shot him that's like that's all we know effectively right I mean they claim he had some traffic violations which is true but I mean like who doesn't Yeah, like, I don't know, if we're shooting people for traffic violation, this country's going to have like 10 people in it by the end of it.

Yeah, he wasn't, he wasn't suspected of any, like, crime. No. I believe that it was just opportunistic. Yeah. That they were just looking for an easy target. And these guys were acting, like, cowboys. I mean, like, just doing this jump out by themselves. And, and also, to be clear, I mean, like, when they say he drove away from them, I mean, some of the video that we do have, it shows.

him slowly reversing backwards away from them. It's not like he just drove over the agents. No, no, no, no. Yeah. Which was, of course, their initial narrative that he, like, hit one of them with his car and all this stuff that, of course, turned out to be false. Yeah. And it's also frustrating, too, because, you know, in the app, well, I would say in the absence of better information, but it's the media, they will just straight up print. You know, no matter just how unbelievably absurd the lies are they will just straight up print Department of Homeland Security press releases as if they have anything to do with reality whatsoever even as it becomes increasingly clear even more than it's ever been that you simply cannot rely on on police press reports to

understand what happens in a situation people will just keep printing that and so that's the first that's the version of the story that goes out first which is what everyone sees yeah and they don't see the video where it's very clearly not what happened. Yep. It is a maddening situation. So, yeah, I mean, like, that happened. And then almost immediately and, like, concurrently, of course, all of this other ice activities started ramping up. Yeah.

And then around a week and a half ago, Bovino showed up and Border Patrol showed up. And now it's amped up even further because they're even worse than our regular ice guys. Bovino and the Border Patrol people, those are the people who seem to have been pulled out of Los Angeles and deploy to Chicago? Yeah, Bovino moved this sort of larger Border Patrol operation here to Chicago. So there are Border Patrol units here from, you know, Arizona, from California, different places. And they've been doing sort of a combination of like just strictly corny-ass propaganda ops. you know, like driving around on their boats for photos combined with like actual terrors like a few nights ago, hundreds of feds rating an entire apartment building of people

in the middle of the night. Yeah. And I think we'll get to that rate in a second because it was unbelievably sort of gruesome and horrible. But yeah, I want to talk to you just about sort of what the general sort of ICE operations and then the Border Patrol operations have looked like in the city and what it's been like being in a place where there's just guys in mass dragging people off the street?

It kind of feels like screaming underwater and no one can hear you. Yeah. Just sort of witnessing this every day and it is still highly dispersed, right? Like Chicago and the metro area and the suburban counties where this is happening, it's a huge, huge area.

So like we talked about last time, it's a real challenge to focus people's attention on because it can appear like the waters are calm like where you live you know like they're doing it in these very fast strike teams in this very dispersed way so by the time you even hear about it they're already gone so many cars abandoned on the side of the road was like windows smashed out Jesus Christ like landscapers work vans and stuff you know like people are just yeah rapid responders are just getting to sites where someone's reported something happening and all they

find is like a bused out car. God. And then they have to piece together like potentially what happened. Yeah. And additionally, the broad view, so like this ice facility where people are protesting regularly, you know,

it's not set up to be a permanent detention center. It's just supposed to be like a temporary stopping point because Illinois doesn't have overnight immigration. detention. So additionally, there are, like, so many extra people crammed into this facility that wasn't designed to hold them.

Yeah. And, of course, the conditions are horrible, you know, like, they don't have privacy. They don't have enough bathrooms. They're not getting fed. They're not getting medication. You know, like, after the kidnappings, after the disappearances, then there's this pipeline of detention horrors that people are enduring. So this is why people are protesting.

Yeah. You know, I mean, this is why people are out there yelling at the fence because the people who are brave enough to go out there and yell at the fence or to take the pepper balls or or what have you. They, they are in agony. They're aware of what's happening. They're witnessing all of this and feeling like this needs to stop. And there are a lot of people hiding in their homes.

Yeah. You know, like, like, it's true, like, I don't always want to make like Holocaust comparisons because I feel like that that's what we always go to. But I mean, like, that's the most apt comparison that comes to most people's mind. You know, they think of like Anne Frank hiding in her attic, like those kinds of things. And it's like, that is literally where we are at right now. People are literally in hiding because they are worried that if they go to Sam's Club, they will be kidnapped by secret police.

Yeah. I think the behavior that they've been exhibiting against the protesters too has been very, very similar to what they've been doing to the people that they're grabbing off the street. I want to talk to you a bit about what it's been like dealing with the way that the feds have been

attacking the protesters constantly. Yeah, well these guys are fucking monsters. Yeah. I'm trying to thread this needle for people of like all policing is bad, right? Like all policing is violence. All cops

are violent. But there is there is something different happening here as a result of the fact that there is literally zero accountability. And I'm not suggesting that like police accountability isn't a sham because in general it kind of is. But but I think like, you know, when you take away every single guard these guys don't have to identify themselves and they don't have to answer to anyone. Yeah. Their bosses aren't going to write them up. You know, it's kind of like with any other job, right? You know, take a city cop here in Chicago, of course it's rare that any of them ever actually get fired for the horrible shit they do. But, you know, there's this sort of biggest level of knowing like,

well, I got to show up to work every day with my name on my vest. And I also have like all these other bosses and all these other people who are going to like, you know, maybe make my day harder if I like really fuck something up, right? Yeah. And so when we're talking about the feds, There's just nothing. There's just nothing there. They can literally do whatever they want. On top of, like, just not having the same level of, like, quote, law enforcement training. I mean, we've been watching these guys for weeks, like, fucking hurt themselves with their pepperball guns.

Like, they literally are, like, dropping shit as they're, like, running around the process. Like, it's like watching. People have made, like, call of duty comparisons or, like, proud boy comparison. And, like, it is kind of like that. It's like, if you just gave a bunch of chuds, a bunch of, like, military and police scare, and we're like, all right, go out and, like, pretend to be a cop. And that's, like, literally what it feels like. And so I'm trying to thread this deal for people of, like, yeah, all cops suck.

But, like, what's going on with this is, like, so much worse. Like, they're just out there, like, shooting at people randomly. Like, and, you know, for no reason. Like, it is just one of the craziest things I've ever seen in my. my life. Yeah. And I also, I want to put this into perspective. Like, you have also covered a lot of protests in the city. Yeah, I've covered a lot of cop violence. I've been to a lot of protests. I mean, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds at this point, right? Yeah. And there's just certain, like, things that you're used to seeing and certain, there's a certain predictability

sometimes to, like, a lot of their movement. Yeah. And what's interesting, too, is, like, in some ways, they are actually more militarized just in terms of, like, their riot formations and, like, tightly coordinated their units are because they practice and they train for like crowd control stuff all the time. And then you have these just like ice chuds running around with like way more gear and they look way scarier, but they're like way less organized and way more chaotic. Yeah. And there's not enough of them. Right. So like they're not even like doing a good job of like backing each other up, you know, like in the field. Like I'm just watching them like leave their own backs unwatched and

you know, like doing things that are like dangerous. Yeah. For them like they want to act like a military unit but they're like definitely not. Yeah. It's I mean people have made the comparison of like proud boys which I think I don't know. It kind of works

in a sense like street fighters. Yeah. Because what they're acting like you know, yeah it's just it's just been super violent, super awful. Chicago does not have really any experience with like these just feds in general, like, to this level, I know that out in Portland for years now, like, there have been various protests outside of the ice or something. Like, there's just,

there's been, like, a lot more, a lot more fed presence out in Portland, Seattle. Yeah. Throughout the past few years of protests, I've seen, you know, people interact with them. And we just, we've had nothing like that here. So this is also, like, yeah, very unprecedented, like, for this region. Yeah, because usually CPD is like, brutal enough that they don't, you don't end up with, like, federal deployments. And now it's like, oh, boy. Yeah. Well, and also keep in mind, this is all happening in broad view. So, like, they don't even have, I mean, there's been, there's been tensions and arguments and

discussions around what's happening with their local police department and just sort of the interface here, too, because it's like this tiny little police department is now having to sort of manage what's going on with this ice facility. And they're not directly, like, assisting ICE with fraud control, but they are, like, basically setting up a perimeter around the area, right? And so then, like, their guys are getting to your gas and, like, complaining about it. Yeah, was, was it brought to you the police chief who, like, finally was like, oh, holy shit, I've never been treated this racistly by a police officer before. And I was like, oh, my fucking God. Like, you're just now realizing that you're the baddie, like, when it finally, like, happens to you.

Like, come on. Yeah, he went on on like ABC or whatever and was just did this whole interview about like, well, ICE is disrespecting me as the police ship. And it's just like, what did you expect? Yeah, man, you signed up for the racism organization and you were like, ah, I'm in charge of my local, my local chapter of the racist association. So it'll never happen to me. And it's like, oh, shit. You mean there's other people who are higher up in the racism police? like oh god yeah so that's been that's just been like a weird side story to this of kind of like

the mayor and the police chief and the fire chief are not thrilled about what's going on and they're like looking into the legality quote of the fence that isis put up just like across this street that goes past their facility which is in this kind of like tucked away sort of industrial park thing, but there are homes like right on the other side. And, you know, they've just blocked off this entire street and there's like a business on the other side. You know, it's like obviously a huge fire hazard to just like block a whole road like that. They didn't ask permission to like put this up. Yep. Not to mention a hazard for the people in the detention center, which is now boarded up and has this huge fence across the street. It's like, oh my God, if there was a fire or like an

emergency and they needed to evacuate the people inside. Yeah. I mean, like, obviously people would die. It's this incredible mix of both blatant disregard for the safety of anyone involved and also just wanting to hurt people. And it's this incredible fusion

of they are both incompetent and malicious, which is yeah. Right. Which is not a great combination. No. Hi there. This is Josh Clark from the Stuff You Should Know podcast. If you've been thinking, man alive, I could go for some good true crime podcast episodes. Then have we got good news for you. Stuff You Should Know just released a playlist of 12 of our best true crime episodes of all time. There's a shootout in broad daylight. People using axes in really terrible ways. Disappearances. Legendary heists. The whole nine yards. So check out the Stuff You Should Know true crime playlist on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All I know is what I've been told, and that's a half-truth is a whole lie. For almost a decade, the murder of an 18-year-old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved,

until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story. I'm telling you, we know Quincy Kilder, we know. A story that law enforcement used to convict six people and that got the citizen investigator on national TV. Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran. My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, producer,

and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find. I did not know her and I did not kill her. Or rape or burn or any of that other stuff, They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her. They made me say that I poured gas on her. From Lava for Good, this is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame. America, y'all better work the hell up. Bad things happens to good people in small towns.

Listen to Graves County in the Bone Valley feed on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season ad-free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and on the new season of heavyweight, I help a centenarian mend a broken heart. And a hundred and one year old woman fall in love again. And I help a man atone for an armed robbery he committed at 14 years old. And so I pointed the gun at him and said, this isn't a joke. And he got down. And I remember feeling kind of a surge of like, okay, this is power.

Plus, my old friend Gregor and his brother tried to solve my problems through hypnotism. We could give you a whole brand new thing where you're like super true. charming all the time. Being more able to look people in the eye. Not always hide behind a microphone. Listen to Heavyweight on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. People called them murderers.

Ten years later, they were gods. Today, no one knows their names. A group of maverick surgeons who took on the medical establishment who risked everything to invent open heart surgery. Welcome to the Wild West of American Medicine. I'm Chris Pine and this is Cardiac Cowboys. If you like medical dramas, if you like heart pounding thrillers, you will love cardiac cowboys. Listen on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you listen to podcasts. Sponsored by Jasper, AI Build for Marketers. Let's talk about this raid in South Shore. Yeah, well, you know, we don't have a

We don't have a ton of details on the true extent of this because it happened at one in the morning. So two nights ago, hundreds and hundreds of federal agents showed up to an apartment building in the South Shore neighborhood, which is a predominantly black neighborhood where a number of newly arrived migrants settled because there's cheap housing there. So when Governor Abbott started,

busing people here a few years ago. That is one place where, you know, a number of people found housing. And unfortunately, also, too, there's, like, a lot of slum lords down that way. Yeah. Cheap housing means shit in Chicago. Yeah, of course. Of course. I used to tenants organizing that shitty. I have seen shit that, like, I have seen people sewage, like, running out of their bathtubs. I have seen, I have seen places with no electric, like, literally no electricity, no lights, no running water, like actually literally like frozen solid in the winter and no one can contact a landlord, and those were in parts of the city that were, like, not even that badly off.

The apartment that I had, they're almost fucking killed me from dust inhalation, and, like, that's like, that's like a normal cheap apartment. It gets so much fucking worse. The pictures from, like, inside of the apartment, not even just the parts were like, yeah, all the doors are blown off. It's like, these apartments fucking suck because they're run by, they're run by fucking landlords. And yeah, like the housing situation in Chicago, so much of it is so shit, is never going to get repaired because these gang landlords don't give a shit because they can just keep extracting money from it because no one can go anywhere else.

And yeah. Yeah, I mean, these people were living in really bad conditions. I've heard that like a lot of people were like shrippled, quadrupled up in units. You know, I don't know what it looked like before it was rated. yeah but it's like virtually empty now i mean like there there were some and to be to be clear like what happens to back up a little bit you know they hundreds and hundreds of feds showed up with this building in the middle of the night and reportedly detained everyone in the building so there were like yeah you know people in the building who aren't immigrants like black people who

live in the neighborhood you know there was one woman being interviewed on broadcast who was like an older black woman, you know, who was just like, yeah, I was like detained by the FBI, you know, like in the middle of the night, like asking me if I'm a citizen, you know, like, it's just absolutely fucking wild that this happened. Also, as of today, granted, this might change by the time your podcast is out. Importantly, so we're recording this the night of Wednesday, October 1st. Who fucking knows what we'll have learned about this or what will happen in between this and when it comes out probably Monday?

probably there will be new horrors if you've heard about like the horrors in Chicago and it's not in this episode it's probably because it happened after we've recorded things are happening at a terrible rate

yeah so as of today Wednesday October 1st I could not find a story on the Sun Times or the Tribune website about this raid and I think of course a lot of people

want to indict mainstream media for not covering things which like is fair sometimes don't get me wrong they've been trying things are happening so fast now

and there are so many horrible things happening every day that like no newsroom can keep up. Wait, red alert, red alert. They did finally get a story up five minutes ago. So mid-recording.

I checked the four minutes. They got one up. Is it the Tribune or the Sun-Times? Sometimes, sometimes. Okay, okay. Well, it only took them two days. Okay, sure. I haven't read it yet.

Maybe it's a good story. I don't know. Maybe they went really in depth. It's not terrible. it does actually seem I mean it's pretty long I mean I'm gonna read one quote from it

to get people and this is like I actually think is pretty representative of like the independent media coverage that I've read of it aren't federal agents and military fatigues

busted down their doors overnight pulling men, women and children from their apartment some naked residents witnesses said that is the thing I've seen in every thing report about this

is that a bunch of people just literally didn't have clothes on because they were dragged out of their bed they were like fucking naked children like people holding naked babies being pulled out of their fucking apartments

like Jesus fucking Christ God and this was like such a huge number of beds that like the buses were rerouted around the scene I mean like

there's questions there's questions right now over like the level of CPD involvement in like protecting the scene and this was not just ice there were a ton of FBI and a ton of ATF

yeah yeah which, you know, it's like, okay, what, what is the FBI doing right now? They are fucking dragging naked children out of their fucking homes, like out of their fucking apartment at one in the fucking morning. Yeah. And they were, they were in fucking moving vans like Patriot Front. Like, yeah, fucking horrible. I mean, like, I got, I were seeing a statement where it was like they were denying

that they had loaded any immigrants into moving vans. Yeah. Which, like, maybe that's true. I don't know. Maybe only the FBI. Yeah. We don't fucking know. I don't know.

Yeah. I was just like haunted by like what other reports that I saw with they were talking, but like they separated all of the black people into like one van and all of the non-black people to another one. And it was just like, oh God, like these people, there's another one thing. I think this is in the story that you wrote about this or they literally like a Fed literally said fuck them kids. Oh my God. I don't, I definitely didn't write that. But I believe that someone said it.

Yeah, it was, oh my God. I believe it. I'm glad to hear that five minutes ago, the Sun-Times covered it, you know. Yeah, they finally got around to it. Yeah. Good for them. To be clear, like, they probably interviewed a lot more people than we had capacity to. You know, it's been obviously a huge challenge to even uncover all this stuff,

like, as this tiny, random weirdo-ass news outlet, like, and we're still figuring out as we go. but yeah I mean this this I am still it has been two days and I am like still trying to wrap my head around this raid this specific raid because it it's just so horrific that this happened and of course like the timing like they knew what they were doing by yeah timing it in the middle of the night of course yeah I'm gonna fucking read the Times article because I've just been reading it while you're doing it like Watson is somebody who lives across the street said she saw Asian dragging residents, including kids out of the building without any clothes and into U-Haul vans. Kids were separated from their mothers. It was heartbreaking to watch, said Watson, even if you're not

a mother, seeing kids come out buck naked and taking from their mothers, it was horrible. They're literally ripping kids from their fucking mothers at one in the morning and throwing, apparently, allegedly, throwing them in U-Haul vans. Yeah, I mean, this is like

psycho shit. The last three weeks, four weeks, has just been a gradual progression of like the most evil shit you've ever seen in your life. I don't even know what to say about it anymore, honestly, because it feels like... Yeah. Feels like our only way of grappling with things like this is by making comparisons to other things. Yeah. And I don't know that that is really helping anybody right now, but, you know, it's, it's ethnic

cleansing, it's genocide. It's like literally... Yeah. I was just saying earlier today when, like, when you drill down to it, like, they're disappearing, like vast majority Latino men. There are some women. It's not only men, but like they are definitely targeting, like, mostly Latino men. And like, these are people who are migrating here from Central America, who are like,

if you look at their lineage, mostly like indigenous to this fucking continent, unlike white people, you know, it's just an extension of like the American project, like, of the white nationalist, like, extermination of the people indigenous to the Americas. Like, that is literally what's happening, like, right now. So, yeah, it does not feel like, I don't know, like, like enough people get it to the level that they should. Yeah. Well, and that's, I think, like, one other thing I wanted to talk to you about was, like,

the way the press bubble has worked around this, where, again, the fact that, federal agents dragged naked children from their homes at one in the morning in the third largest city in the United States. That is a story that is hitting the mainstream Chicago press today two days later. And I think the only national coverage of it that I've seen are from people who are basically like repeating the scoop that was given to this like unhinged UFO out. Who were the people that got the exclusive... Oh, have you already answered this yet? Oh, I have no idea what I got it.

Hold on, hold on. Let me, let me... God, fuck. Okay, I'm very excited to tell you about this. This is so unhinged. I saw, like, the propaganda video that they made about it. Yeah, so the group that got, like, the exclusive, like, press release thing from the feds, which is basically being, like, reprinted by Newsweek, who are just a joke at this point.

Like, their description of it is, like, ah, federal agents repelled from black cop helicopters in the rooftops of Chicago residential buildings targeting Trendaagua gang members according to News Nation and I was like what the fuck is News Nation? Like I have a pretty good grasp on like all of the weird right wing news outlets. I'd never heard of this one

I looked them up and the first like big thing that I saw about them was that well A they were the people, they were the person that Chris Cuomo went to after he was like publicly disgraced as a journalist and the second thing I saw about them was that their big thing is that they like quote unquote take UFOs seriously

and these are the people who were given like the exclusive scoop on this is like the UFO outlet that is so funny that is when I watched the propaganda video that we were watching about it yeah it was news nation I just thought it was like I don't know some right wing outlet like any other that's what I thought too when I looked at it and like the Wikipedia article was like there was a section titled UFOs and I was like what the fuck Great. Great. I didn't know about the UFO connection. I mean, I saw them, I saw their reporters, like, actually at the protests, like, interviewing, like, the one guy in a MAGA hat who showed up to counter protest. Like, of course, that's who they interview. Yeah, of course, of course. So that's good to know that they are UFO weirdos. regime-approved media outlet, the UFO guys.

stuff. So I mean the official like DHS line on this entire thing is that trend de Aragua was this like this entire apartment building was a trend de Aragua hideout. It's just like no it wasn't like

like it's literally just the same fucking thing that Israel does about Hamas right when they're like oh yeah this hospital that we're bombing yeah it's a Hamas hospital there's Hamas tunnels underneath I mean it's like the exact same shit. Yeah the the connection you made earlier to

this functioning as an extension of the genocide that founded this country. I think it might have been Hannah Arendt. Okay, I want to attribute this to her at Hannah Arendt which is, I guess, kind of a mess because of her do not

ever look up Hannah Arendt's stuff on segregation, or actually maybe do if you want to see the worst argument you've ever seen in your life or like famed intellectual Hannah Arendt says that segregation is like a defining quality of like a free society. Oh, no.

Awful. Horrible. Rancid. I'm not like a super expert on Hannah Wren, but I definitely did not know that. Oh, yeah. No, that people don't, I'll say this, white people do not be bringing that shit off. Everyone else is like, oh, God. Holy shit.

You were like a major segregation, like intellectual who got brought out to be like segregation is actually good. No. This is free association. But I think it might have been her. It might have been fit someone else. I've been trying to look for who had this idea, and I haven't been able to find who it was,

and I vaguely remember being a rent, but fuck her. This is all been a very long wind up saying, like, there's an idea that I ran into back when I was in my sort of, like, days in the academy about the way that societies reflect their founding violence. And, you know, the sort of, like, the founding violence of the United States is the genocide of the United States. is the genocide with the issues people in slavery. And you look at what they're doing right now.

You're just watching sort of in miniature that violence just being replicated over and over again where you're tearing fucking mothers from their children in the dead of night. And it's the same people, right? Like this is an apartment building where almost everyone is black and the people who aren't black are immigrants.

Right? And obviously, like, some of them are both. But like, you know, but like you're just like watching the founding violence of this country just being played out over and over and over again every night. And it's this thing where, like, I don't think on a fundamental level that this thing that we've built, this sort of like this conception of what democracy is, like this conception of what the state is, this conception of like what this country is is going to survive this. moment. Either it's going to change completely or the part of it that was nominally a democracy is going to be consumed by the part of it that's just doing this genocide over and over again. I quote this song a lot. Song of choice by

Peggy Seeger. That's about the rise of fascism that I think about a lot. That has one of the lines is, today the soldiers took away one. Tomorrow they may take away two. One April they took away Greece, but surely they will never take you.

And, yeah, they're just fucking taking people away in the night right now. Like, that's the stage of this where we're at and either something fundamentally changes or, you know, like, that the end of that song is either like they take you or at the end, they don't take you because they know you didn't care. Right. And, yeah. I mean, look, I've been, I've been covering civil conflict and violence, you know, like, more or less for the last five years, right? I was at January 6th, like literally in the middle of the mob.

I've seen a lot of shit. Reporting on it. Make this very clear. Reporting on it. It was not trying to clarify. I was there as a reporter. I was not part of the gavel. Although my fash stalkers might insist that I was part of like an

intiva conspiracy to infiltrate the camel right. But, but, but, um, You know, I've seen a lot of shit the last five years, obviously. And I think this particular moment feels like, yeah. Yeah, like we're kind of, you know, like we're a marble at the top of like a spiral. And it's like either we're going to keep rolling down or or somebody like jams it or takes the marble up.

You know, like there's just this is a spiral. Like there are so many factors that are going to contribute to this getting worse if we do not. significantly alter course. And I think, you know, this feeling that we have locally of like we're screaming underwater and nobody can hear us, I'm sure is share a sentiment that is shared in LA, that is shared in D.C., that is shared in all of these cities all over where ICE is doing similar shit, it can make us really angry. I mean, I've been really angry at times in the last month about the lack of like attention whatever but then I think about how everyone is overwhelmed because there's so much horrible shit happening every day on so many places like like we just can't

keep up anymore like none of us can keep up yeah like I mean like I'm in Portland right now and like it's my job to keep track of this and I can't tell you at this exact second whether a federal deployment to Portland is on or off I think it's currently off but also by the time you're listening to this Who the fuck knows? And like, yeah, like, right. I don't know.

There's an and or a line about how it's easier to hide a thousand atrocities than it is to hide one because you can just keep ramping the tempo up. Exactly. Hi there. This is Josh Clark

from the Stuff You Should Know podcast. If you've been thinking, man, alive, I could go for some good true crime podcast episodes. Then have we got good news you. Stuff you should know just released a playlist of 12 of our best true crime episodes of all time. There's a shootout in broad daylight, people using axes in really terrible ways, disappearances, legendary heists, the whole nine yards. So check out the stuff you should know

true crime playlist on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All I know is what I've been told, and that's a half-truth is a whole lie. For almost a decade, the murder of an 18-year-old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story. I'm telling you, we know Quincy killed her. We know. A story that law enforcement used to convict six people and that got the citizen investigator on national TV. Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran. My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, producer, and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find.

I did not know her and I did not kill her, or rape or burn or any of that other stuff that y'all said. They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her. They made me say that I poured gas on her. From Lava for Good, this is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame. America, y'all better work the hell up. Bad things happens to good people in small towns. Listen to Graves County in the Bone Valley feed on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season

at free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and on the new season of heavyweight, I help a centenarian mend a broken heart. How can a 101-year-old woman fall in love again? And I help a man atone for an armed, robbery he committed at 14 years old. And so I pointed the gun at him and said this isn't a joke.

And he got down. And I remember feeling kind of a surge of like, okay, this is power. Plus, my old friend Gregor and his brother tried to solve my problems through hypnotism. We could give you a whole brand new thing where you're like super charming all the time. Being more able to look to people in the eye. Not always hide behind a microphone. Listen to Heavyweight on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. People called them murderers. Ten years later, they were gods. Today, no one knows their names.

A group of maverick surgeons who took on the medical establishment who risked everything to invent open-heart surgery. Welcome to the Wild West of American Medicine. Chris Pine, and this is Cardiac Cowboys. If you like medical dramas, if you like heart-pounding thrillers, you will love Cardiac Cowboys. Listen on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you listen to podcasts. Sponsored by Jasper, AI Build for Marketers. I don't know. I'm not a historian. I'm just a journalist. So maybe you would know better than me, but I feel like we are literally already in a civil war. We just, don't know it yet or like we're waiting for like some specific thing to like prove it you know

like I don't I don't know yeah I think generally nobody knows until it's like already you're you're already in it to me it feels like we're in it yeah and but I but I also wonder if that's just the cognitive effect of like us being here literally in it because so much is going on and and then thinking like well if the ice surge subsides two months from now is it going to still feel this way I don't know. I mean, to me, it feels like we've got several more years of the Trump regime at least. If we look at this in the sense of like, well, they're escalating. And then also this is going to keep going for several more years.

Yeah, that's a terrifying concept. Yeah. Where do we go from here if it's just going to, like, get even worse? Yeah. And I don't know. I think I've been there a lot recently. I don't know. It's the thing I've been telling listeners of this show is that, like, the upside of all of this is that everyone hates them.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Like, their approval ratings are so bad. Everyone fucking hates them. And all of this stuff is hideously unpopular and the giant economic collapse that is very obviously going to happen when the giant AI bubble that is like a third of the U.S. GDP pops when it inevitably does because it doesn't make any money. They're doing all of this in a situation where the economy is still a piece. to be functioning. And when that shit implodes on them, shit is going to be even worse for them than it is now. But also, like on the other hand, unless people do things about it, then it doesn't really matter how popular or not they are, as long as no one is willing to, like, stop them. And I guess that's, like, the last thing I kind of want to close on is about, like, can you talk a little bit about like what you've seen organizing-wise that you can talk about that have been

effective? Well, I think people here are still figuring it out. These protests outside of the ICE facility, you know, there has been a lot of autonomous organizing. Chicago does not have the same entrenched autonomous organizing culture that you see in like Portland or Seattle for like a ton of reasons. Yeah. Which are like beyond the scope of this episode and the The minutes that we have left. We can do like a 15-part series of the history of organizing in Chicago and like how we're in this specific moment. You know, it's important to remember like this is a city where like the FBI murdered Fred Hampton, right? It is bad.

Yep, yep, yep. So there's a lot of tension between different organizing factions about how they want things done and a lot of it is fear driven. Yeah. For good reason, because people are terrified. Yeah. And yeah, they're still figuring stuff out. I mean, I think, for lack of a better term, last Saturday, people got their shit rocked by Border Patrol. You know, they were so violent.

They were so aggressive. They were just so out of hand, just like immediately, too. I mean, it was just like zero to 60 instantly. Like, there was just Saturday, we saw them just immediately tear gas and, and shoot at people over nothing. Like, nobody was doing anything. And they just assaulted the crowd with, like, the most. tear gas I've ever seen in my life. So I think folks were definitely underprepared for that, but that doesn't mean that it's like insurmountable to resist something like that. I think there are

questions surrounding the best way to protest this specific building because of a relocation and it's tough because it's not in Chicago. It's hard to get to for some people. Yep, yep. But I don't want to, I don't want to write anybody off. I mean, I think people are just still figuring things out. Like, It's ICE is adapting, border patrols adapting, and so then organizers also have to adapt. Like, it's like this tennis match, right? Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, we are also very much here. Our activists are not used to, like, and our press, also by extension, are not used to, like, a huge amount of chemical weapons.

Chicago doesn't use tear gas, like, historically, like, they just beat people. Right. Or, like, shoot them with riot munitions. Like, they don't tear gas. I think I was literally always told, like, growing up, the city as an activist was like, if they start using tear gas, they're one-step away from shooting you. Right.

And they finally did it in 2020, which is the first time I knew one had seen it in, like, decades. Right. And the fact that, like, they're just doing it all the time now, like, Jesus Christ. Well, the feds, I mean, we saw this in L.A. Yeah, yeah. At the beginning of this summer, where, like, Border Patrol specifically just has this enormous amount of chemical weapons that they, like, I don't know, maybe they're going to explain. fire soon and they have to use them all.

Like, I don't know, I don't know what the rationale there is other than just being evil. Yeah. But it's like literally their first choice of, like, they're just, I mean, they're fucking enjoying it. They're fucking enjoying it. They're enjoying shooting at people,

tear gassing them, playing G.I. Joe. Like, yeah, I mean, I will say, it does also raise the question like, how much of this stuff do they actually have? Because like, 2020, they went through decades of stockpiles, right? Right. And, like, this is a thing that, like, I don't know, someone who has a lot of time and is an investigative journalist should try to go track down how much of the, like, countries tear gas supplies they've been able to replenish because they used a lot of it on us in 2020. And, like, I mean, this is, I don't know if it is famous.

I guess in my circles, it's kind of a famous story that one of the, one of the South Korean military dictatorships was taken down by a student, like, protest movement that calculated exactly how much tear gas. the police had and did this thing where they would do these marches where a whole bunch of people would show up and the police start co-dressing them and they would just slowly keep retreating and keep her treating until they ran the state out of tear gas. I mean, I hope to see that level of strategy

in America at some point. Yeah, inshala. Yeah. Inshala. Like, you know, like, nothing, nothing is impossible with the power of really, really pissed off students. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I don't know what the, I'm not familiar with the manufacturing process for these chemicals, like, how long does it take to like replenish and where do they source

it from? Yeah. This is 100% a, hey, I know a bunch of journalists listen to this podcast. If one of you wants to go do this, you would be doing a great service to everyone in this country. Right. I'm like assuming that it's not. not made in the United States and they're like importing these things. A lot of it is. A huge huge amount of it's made in the U.S. Because like American American tear gas ends up like all over the world

because we're like one of the big suppliers of it. Okay. Well then I was mistaken. The popper ball gun dispenser company apparently is based in Lake Forest. So it's actually local. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Since Chicago. Ooh. Wow. Oof.

It's just like a glorified paintball gun basically. Yeah. The thing I've been getting from listening to you talk about this and from talking to other people is that like both part of what's making this so horrible and also maybe where they fail is that these people don't know what they're doing. They just like violence. Right. And liking violence and being willing to hurt people is a very effective short-term strategy for causing violence. Right. But it remains to be seen whether it's an effective long-term strategy for like holding power and accomplishing their goals. Yeah, I would agree with that for sure. It feels like it feels like their operation is brittle. Like it wouldn't take a lot to like impede it, but because they are so violent and so out of hand that just like the slightest resistance, it's still really challenging

to figure out. I mean, and to your point earlier about everybody hating them. I mean, that is palpable. I have heard the anger and the rage pouring out of people at these guys. You know, like, yeah. Of course, it's palpable how much people hate them, how much what's going on. Of course, they're struggling to hire. Of course, they're all wearing masks because they're fucking terrified. They're going to be docs, you know, like, they know that they're hated. Yeah. But that's also a double-edged floor because I think knowing that everybody hates you anyway, well, that's just also sometimes going to make you even more violent because you don't care anymore. Yeah. And I mean, I think the traditional social movement gambit has been like, the more people can see how violent they are, the more people will go out to resist them.

And I think right now we're in this scenario where because of the sort of media blackout and like the media bubble that's been put around this, it just hasn't been getting out the things that they've been doing. and I think that is also a thing that you, random listener, can do things about in terms of, like, hey, tell people you know that, like, yeah, there's like a fucking federal occupation of a city and they're like dragging naked children screaming from their homes, like, tearing them away from their parents. Like, that's a thing that you can, like, that's the thing you could directly do that is a very, very low lift. Yeah, and also countering this, like, National Guard misdirection thing that is just, like, constantly going on where it's like every fucking two days Trump and Pritzker are arguing about, you know, a hundred troops coming to town who are essentially just infrastructure for ICE. They might block some roads, but, like, they're not the main threat. Yeah, yeah.

Do you have anything else that you want to tell people and then also where can people find and support your work as you go? hopefully not get shot again. Well, I've resigned myself to the fact that I've got to get shot again. But they can find us at Unravelled on all the social platforms, you know, Unravelledpress.com. And I think the only other thing I want to say is, as bleak as this episode sounded, we do have to keep the fighting spirit alive and not just like resign.

ourselves to total doomerism. We have the moral high ground here. Like we are doing the right thing and they are not. Yeah. And we can win this. I want to close on the story that came to mind when you said that, which was the story of the liberation of Turin in World War II, where Turin was like, you know, like one of the great industrial cities of Italy and it's directly under the occupation of the Nazis by the end of the war. And ahead of the Allied advanced, the city plans an uprising and the SS commander who is running the city

explicitly tells them if you do this we will turn this into another Warsaw and they do it anyways and they beat them all of these factory workers who had guns smuggled in successfully do an uprising

and defeat like an SS Panzer division and just kick the shit out of them and liberate Turin and you know those were people facing odds that were so much worse than the ones they were facing today they were facing a straight-up military occupation by the SS, and they beat them, and they freed

themselves. And, you know, history is replete with dictators who thought that their occupations would last forever until one day the Americans were withdrawing from Iraq. And the only thing that's eternal is their fear of the uprising that will one day destroy them. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, Coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

Hi there, this is Josh Clark from the Stuff You Should Know podcast. If you've been thinking, man alive, I could go for some good true crime podcast episodes, then have we got good news for you. Stuff You Should Know just released a playlist of 12 of our best true crime episodes of all time. There's a shootout in broad daylight, people using axes in really terrible ways, disappearances, legendary heists, the whole nine yards. So check out the stuff you should know true crime playlist. On the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and on the new season of heavyweight. And so I pointed the gun at him and said this isn't a joke. A man who robbed a bank when he was 14 years old. And a centenarian rediscovers a love. lost 80 years ago. How can a 101-year-old woman fall in love again? Listen to heavyweight on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The murder of an 18-year-old girl in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved for years.

Until a local housewife, a journalist, and a handful of girls, came forward with a story. America, y'all better work the hell up. Bad things happens to good people in small towns. Listen to Graves County on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season, ad free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, and I'm the host. of the unpurposed podcast.

Recently, I had a conversation with the one and only, Madonna. When I was broke and I had no friends, nowhere to live, I was held up at gunpoint, I was robbed, all these horrendous things happened to me. I had such an unhappy childhood

that whatever happened to me in New York is better than what my life was, so I'm not going back. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast. Thank you.