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Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown continued on Halloween night as federal agents were seen in Chicago and Los Angeles on the holiday, according to multiple reports.
In Chicago, where the president has unleashed military troops to assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as agents carry out arrests and push back against protesters, several people were arrested on Friday. ICE agents descended on the city and its suburbs as part of their operations, and protesters were also detained during clashes with law enforcement.
A chaotic scene in Evanston, a suburb of Illinois, was captured on video by multiple spectators after a car rear-ended an ICE vehicle on Friday. In footage, released by the New York Times, officers can be seen wrangling and pinning two people to the ground and demanding that others “get the fuck out of here”.
The scuffle took place a block away from a nearby middle school and elementary school.
At a news conference outside the middle school, Evanston’s mayor, Daniel Biss criticized ICE for what he called an assault.
“Just today, ICE agents have assaulted Evanston residents, beaten people up, grabbed them, abducted them, taken people off the street,” Biss said. “It is an outrage.”
Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, ICE agents in recent days had been wearing Halloween-style costume face masks as they travel around areas where they’ve been carrying out enforcement activities. The local news site LA TACO published images of agents wearing disturbing masks, including one modeled after the horror movie character Chucky. When the news outlet reached out to the homeland security department for comment, a spokesperson replied with: “Happy Halloween!”
The clashes come after Illinois’ Democratic governor, JB Pritzker, wrote a letter to Trump’s homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, asking for a pause in immigration enforcement activities over the holiday weekend.
“Illinois children should not be robbed of their innocence,” Pritzker wrote. “Please let children be children for one holiday, free from intimidation and fear.”
In response, Noem said at a news conference: “No, we’re absolutely not willing to put on pause any work that we will do to keep communities safe.”
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Pritzker later wrote on social media that Noem “must love Halloween because she always dresses in law enforcement costumes, but what is truly shameful is that she refuses to agree that we shouldn’t tear gas children trick or treating”.
The chaos seen on Halloween also comes after months of tension after Trump sent out the national guard to multiple Democratic cities, including Chicago, New York, Portland and Los Angeles.
In Washington DC, where nearly 2,400 national guard troops have been deployed, federal officers have been involving themselves in situations that are typically under the purview of local law enforcement.
On Halloween night, the local Metropolitan police department, along with national guard troops, reported having dispersed a group of people whom they accused of being “disorderly” in the city’s Navy Yard neighborhood.
