"I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter; So help me God".
Record or near-record numbers of Americans support increasing (28%) or maintaining current levels (49%) of legal immigration, while opposition to legal immigration is at an all-time low (21%).
Just 36 percent of Americans see large numbers of immigrants and refugees arriving in the country as a critical threat, down from 50 percent last year.
Two-thirds of Americans (65%) say immigrants currently working in the United States illegally should be able to apply for US citizenship, either immediately (43%) or after a penalty and waiting period (22%).
Only a minority overall favor forcing undocumented workers to leave their jobs and the country altogether (23%), relatively unchanged from last year’s figure (20%).
(Federal policy is out of step with public opinion.)
Support for Legal Immigration Hits All-Time High
Support for legal immigration has hit an all-time high since the Chicago Council Survey first asked this question in 2002. Today, half of Americans (49%) say that legal immigration into the United States should be kept at its present level, up from 44 percent in 2024. That percentage includes similar proportions across partisan groups, with half of Republicans (52%) and nearly as many Independents (48%) and Democrats (47%) in support of maintaining the present level of legal immigration.
Correspondingly, support for decreasing legal immigration has dropped from one-third of Americans (33%) last year to just one-fifth today (21%). This reverses a four-year upward trend from a previous record low of 27 percent in 2020. The timing suggests that Biden-era policies, perceived by many to be ineffectual on a surge of illegal migration on the southwest border, also affected perceptions of migration through legal routes. Under the second Trump administration, attitudes have reversed.
As President Donald Trump seeks to keep his campaign promise of mass deportations, a majority of Americans say actions by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have “gone too far,” according to a new PBS News/NPR/Marist poll.
More than half of U.S. adults — 54% — described ICE’s actions in enforcing the country’s immigration laws as having “gone too far.” Another 18% percent said the agency has not gone far enough, while 26% said they’d describe ICE’s actions as “about right.”
It's no longer just undocumented immigrants, Muslims, Black people, & pro-Palestinian activists who are targets. As ICE violently marches across American cities, the majority must stand up & resist.
Violence, lawlessness, sadistic behavior, and even murder by this regime
White House leadership appears to ASSUME that the Public is as violent and lawless as they are-- in order to justify their attacks on the public. Miller and Noem are implicated.
New York mayoral candidate arrested
On June 17, 2025, federal agents arrested New York City mayoral candidate Brad Lander at a Manhattan immigration court.
Lander was released four hours later, and charges were eventually dropped.
The incident occurred as Lander, the city's comptroller, attempted to prevent ICE agents from detaining a migrant whose case had just been dismissed.
Federal agents accused Lander of "assaulting law enforcement and impeding a federal officer" after he linked arms with the migrant.
Chicago alderperson handcuffed
On October 3, 2025, Chicago Alderperson Jessie Fuentes was handcuffed and detained by federal agents at a hospital in Humboldt Park.
Fuentes, a 26th Ward alderperson, was at the hospital to protest the detention of a constituent by ICE.
The arrest happened after Fuentes questioned whether the agents had a judicial warrant. She was released from handcuffs outside the hospital.
ICE agents stated that Fuentes was being arrested for "impeding" their work.
Pepper ball shootings in Chicago of praying pastor, and deliberate assaults on journalists
In late September and early October 2025, federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security were involved in two separate pepper ball incidents during protests outside an ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois.
Pastor shot with pepper ball: On September 19, Pastor David Black of the First Presbyterian Church of Chicago was shot in the head with a pepper ball by an ICE agent positioned on the rooftop of the facility. Black is now suing the Trump administration over the incident.
Journalist shot with pepper ball: On October 1, CBS Chicago reporter Asal Rezaei was shot with a pepper ball while covering the same facility. Rezaei reported that the unprovoked attack left her with chemical burns.
In response, a federal judge in Illinois temporarily restricted federal agents from using certain crowd-control tactics against protester
Father of two children is murdered by federal agent in Chicago, DHS lies, like usual, about the innocent victim.
Bystander video reveals a completely different truth.
Based on reports, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in suburban Chicago shot and killed a man in September 2025. Following the incident, federal officials stated the agent acted in self-defense, claiming the man had dragged the agent with his car. However, body camera footage and other evidence later challenged that account, leading to public outcry and pushback from some elected officials.
The incident
What happened: On September 12, 2025, ICE agents conducted a targeted enforcement action in Franklin Park, a Chicago suburb.
The victim: The man shot and killed by an agent was Silverio Villegas González, a father of two.
Official claim: According to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Villegas González resisted arrest, drove his car toward agents, and dragged an agent, causing them to fear for their lives. The agent fired, fatally striking Villegas González.
Evidence contradicts official account
Minor injuries: Body camera footage later obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times revealed that an agent involved in the shooting downplayed his injuries to a Franklin Park police officer, describing them as "nothing major". This contradicts the initial official statement claiming the agent sustained "severe injuries".
Not dragged: Reporting suggests that contrary to the initial claims, Villegas González did not actually drag the agent with his car.
Disputed criminal history: Federal officials also claimed Villegas González was a "criminal illegal alien with a history of reckless driving". However, reporting found that Villegas González had only a single minor traffic violation in 2023, with no criminal cases on his record.
Consequences and response
Official silence: Officials have largely been silent on the discrepancies, referring media to their initial statements.
Condemnation: The misrepresentation of facts has drawn condemnation from activists and elected officials. Representative Delia Ramirez has accused ICE of lying and creating chaos. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker has also noted that federal agents' stories "are not lining up".
Guerilla-style, military tactical raid on entire apartment building in south Chicago was done in order to apprehend 1-2 drug pushers in Chicago. Children were separated from their parents after being ripped our of their shattered home at night, zip tied, tossed into back of budget moving vans for hours and worse. Read details here.
US immigration enforcement using military hardware and tactics on civilians
Agencies like Ice are way ahead of Donald Trump, who wants the military to treat cities like ‘training grounds’
Even without the national guard, law enforcement agencies of the federal government have been using military hardware and tactics on civilian targets.
At a low-rent apartment complex on Chicago’s south shore, people started hearing the boots hit the roof around one in the morning. The oh-dark-thirty immigration enforcement raid in the early hours of 1 Octoberfeatured an air assault from helicopters. Officers went door to door in the building, using charges to blow the hinges off doors and flash-bang grenades to clear apartments. They hauled men, women and children from the building in zip ties and often little else, ostensibly to capture undocumented gang members.
The troubled apartment building at 7500 S South Shore Drive hadn’t passed an annual inspection since 2022. With the remains of doors and furniture and the bloodied, scattered belongings of former tenants in tatters, it may struggle to pass another.
“So many of these people remain without shelter or a place to live because it essentially rendered their homes and that entire apartment complex uninhabitable,” said Colleen Connell, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois. She described the apartment raid as a military-style attack. Days afterward, the building looked like a war zone, which may be the point.
Addressing an assembly of high-ranking military officers last week, Donald Trump in impromptu comments called for the military to use American cities as “training grounds for our military”. The comment was a continuation of his belligerence toward cities full of Democratic voters and populations of color, delivered a couple of weeks after he meme-posted an image cribbed from the war movie Apocalypse Now about going to “war” in Chicago.
American cities should be 'training grounds for our military', says Donald Trump
For those on the receiving end of federal force from masked agents in military fatigues, a flash-bang grenade thrown by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agent or a soldier may be a distinction without a difference.
Mónica Solórzano was standing next to the mayor of Carpinteria, a farm town in southern California, watching Ice raid a marijuana farm when a flash-bang grenade went off at her feet.
“The canister flashed and made a loud explosive sound, like a firecracker. The noise hurt my ears,” she wrote in a deposition for a suit filed by the Los Angeles Press Club in July, seeking an injunction against attacks on the press, protesters and observers there during the administration’s immigration enforcement surge. “When the flash-bang detonated, the people around me started screaming and running. I fell to the ground and thought I was going to be trampled.”
Solórzano, a Carpinteria city council member, was one of dozens of witnesses who described homeland security officers wearing military-style fatigues, using armored personnel carriers and military equipment as they rolled through communities as part of Ice’s surge.
Flash-bang grenades are standard tools for clearing a room when soldiers conduct military operations on urban terrain. But the use of them by civilian police officers has been sharply curtailed, with many jurisdictions banning them entirely.
“The use of flash-bang or stun grenades for crowd control is an example of the inappropriate, inadequately regulated use of military weapons for crowd management,” wrote the California physician Rohini J Haar, offering expert testimony for the LA Press Club suit. “While the stated objective of stun grenades is to cause disorientation and a temporary sense of panic, the potential for severe blast injuries and even death caused by the pressure of the blast or by shrapnel from the fragmentation of plastic and metal constituents of the grenade is disproportionately high. The blinding light and deafening sound they produce can also cause injuries indiscriminately.”
Masked officer throws smoke grenade from a car in Chicago – video
Federal agents used flash-bang grenades both to disperse crowds of protesters in California in July, and as room-clearing munitions on the raid on an apartment building in Chicago last week.
“Treating a US city like a war zone is intolerable,” wrote a group of eight Democratic lawmakers on the US House homeland security committee, asking the Department of Homeland Security to produce arrest or search warrants for the operation, arrest figures, confirmation of anyone they claim was a member of Tren de Aragua, and a justification for the “heavy-handed” tactics employed. “Please detail why helicopters were needed for this operation,” they asked. “Which agency provided the helicopters and agents manning them?”
The DHS has not responded to their questions, nor to those of the Guardian.
Gil Kerlikowske, former commissioner of Customs and Border Protection and former Seattle police chief, reviewed the testimony offered in support of the LA Press Club suit, concluding that the DHS had regularly engaged in excessive use of force.
“Some of the agencies involved have no responsibility for urban crowd control, such as Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), which is an investigative agency within DHS, that typically does fraud investigations and human trafficking investigations,” Kerlikowske wrote in an affidavit. “Similarly, the Special Response Team (SRT) is a tactical unit with DHS that is part of CBP Office of Field Operations that executes dangerous warrants. It also provided security for me, when I was head of CBP. These officers are not accustomed to policing urban civil unrest; nor are they trained to do so.”
Ice officers rush protester outside immigration facility in Chicago – video
A preliminary injunction was granted last month barring LA police from arresting journalists and limiting their use of force.
Even without reference to the use of national guard troops and equipment in support of enforcing the law – a proposition by Trump that federal courts have rejected multiple times this year – the use of military equipment and military tactics like armored vehicles, Black Hawk helicopters, Predator drones and military weapons by civilian law enforcement in the administration has drawn notice and condemnation.
The police agencies of large cities have experience with street protests, and the crowd-control tactics permitted to those agencies are often the result of arduous, deeply argued policy debates by locally elected leaders.
That’s not what Chicago is seeing on the ground.
“What we have seen in particular is the shooting of projectiles, so-called nonlethal rounds, at protesters and at members of the press,” said Connell of the ACLU. “Rather than shooting at the ground, we’ve seen actual incidents of protesters and the press being hit by those projectiles … We’ve seen an exacerbation of the sort of display of military-style equipment and tactics, whether it’s an armored vehicle with an armed, masked, camouflaged Ice agent or other federal law enforcement agent atop the turret, armed with heavy military-style equipment.”
Journalists from Block Club Chicago, the Chicago Headline Club and other press organizations filed suit Monday in federal court, seeking an injunction against the federal government for actions against journalists outside the Broadview Ice facility. Four of Block Club’s journalists were “indiscriminately shot with pepper-spray bullets and tear-gassed by federal agents” while covering the raid. The lawsuit is an attempt to bar federal agents from, among other things, indiscriminately using chemical weapons against journalists asserting their first amendment right to report.
Teargas used against protesters in face-off with federal agents in Chicago – video
While federal agencies could fly a helicopter in for a raid on an apartment building in Chicago, many civilians in the Windy City have been locked out of their homes for two weeks.
Citing “special security reasons”, the Federal Aviation Administration imposed a 12-day-long ban on drone flights by anyone without a special commercial operating exemption across a 15-nautical-mile radius around the Ice facility near Chicago. As a practical matter, it denies anyone except news stations with a helicopter from observing federal operations from the air. Practiced drone operators – and journalists – have little experience with this kind of airspace control.
“I’ve had a drone license basically with the FAA for almost as long as that program has existed – at least eight years – and I’ve never seen anything like that before,” said Adam Rose, press rights chair of the LA Press Club and deputy director of advocacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation. “They’re trying to basically take their militarization techniques to the sky. They’re trying to keep the enemy out of the sky, the enemy being anyone who is observing them.”
Rose notes that the no-fly space above Los Angeles during the protests earlier this year was 900 times smaller than Chicago, but that DHS filled that airspace with Predator drones drawn from the border to surveil crowds.
“It doesn’t matter what uniform they wear, whether they are federal agents or troops, they are bound by the constitution,” said Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project. “People need to know that if any member of the federal force violates their rights, they need to be held accountable”.
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