They’re kidnapping people off the street cartel-style

I've become accustomed to being lied to every day by now. About Israel and immigrants and trans people to name but a few. But there has been a superlative concentration of lies this past week. A novel density of lying. Something that feels massive. And not just from the people who I expect to lie constantly and not just from the people that I expect to lie often if not necessarily routinely but from nearly every direction imaginable.

And what's worse than that is that we are all expected not just to believe the lies but also join together in chorus in spreading them. Under pain of the full force of the cultural power of the right and the physical might of the state itself.

It has been talked about lately as some kind of victory that the president decided against sending in the National Guard to Chicago. A rare loss for a man who is capable of getting away with whatever he pleases. But as Raven Geary of Unraveled Press reports today for Hell World it hasn't made a difference for the many people being brutalized or kidnapped or detained in the Chicago area the past week, including, worst of all, a man named Silverio Villegas-Gonzales who was shot to death by ICE on Friday.

"For all we know he wasn’t even sure they were real police," Geary writes.

"Why would he be?"

More on Villegas-Gonzales from Unraveled:

What happened to Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez

Immigration agents shot and killed an unarmed 38-year-old father outside Chicago on Friday—and their initial narrative of events was quickly disproven by videos captured by witnesses.

Unraveled Press

More on recent ICE activity and protests from Hell World:

A life was snuffed out in the pursuit of a quota

He was forced to make an impossible choice by the federal government

Welcome to Hell WorldLuke O’Neil

It is happening here

Three days of escalation by the feds in Los Angeles

Welcome to Hell WorldLuke O’Neil

They don’t need a warrant

A federal kidnapping in Worcester

Welcome to Hell WorldLuke O’Neil

Something that feels productive good and true

We lost the great Val Kilmer this week and so naturally I have been thinking back to my favorite role of his as Doc Holliday in Tombstone. “A man like Ringo has got a great big hole, right in the middle of him. He can never kill enough, or steal

Welcome to Hell WorldLuke O’Neil

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Without a ripple

ICE executed a man in Chicagoland on Friday during their planned arrest surge

by Raven Geary

They move like sharks beneath the surface. 

A few people here, a few people there. Out of millions spread across hundreds of square and very flat miles, their hunting doesn’t make a sound.

All week they’ve been taking day laborers and unhoused people from outside the Home Depot at Cicero and 31st. We keep driving by because we know they’re staging there every morning somewhere between Cicero and Midway, an area they named their operation after. But we keep missing them. 

We don’t know if there’s any logic anymore to our behavior, driving around hoping to catch them in the wild before they find their prey. If we can get clear face or tattoo photos, maybe someone can use them. Maybe we can get someone’s name and share it with attorneys. The alternative is doing nothing, and a hell of a lot of people are doing nothing right now, so at least it’s something. This is what we tell ourselves to try to make any sense at all of the terror.

We raced over there on Friday, hoping to find any witnesses to a report of an arrest that had just rolled in but we were too late. 

There was a man at Home Depot keeping watch along with some others. Thankfully he spoke English. The other guys just smiled at our broken-ass Spanish. My four years of German have proven entirely useless in situations like these.

He was just happy to see anyone at all who gave a shit. He told us about an arrest the other day that happened right on his block.

“You just missed them,” he said. “There were four of them.”

We don’t know who they took or if a hotline was called or if anyone even knew this human being’s name. Rapid response teams are as underwater as anyone else right now and there are simply not enough volunteers, not enough patrols, and not enough people willing to leave their safer, more insulated neighborhoods and come out to places they’ve never heard of to try to help the much more vulnerable folks keep up.

You know how the saying about fascism goes. I’m too sleep-deprived to put it together correctly this morning, but it’s something about not noticing until it’s at your very doorstep. For most people they won’t even have to go that far. Why bother when all the ones they want are ripe for picking off elsewhere? Less desirable people in less desirable areas. 

Early morning every goddamn day they’ve been out there stalking their targets, but the stupid parking lots on either side of the stroad are so big it’s nearly impossible to position yourself correctly to even look out for them. They’ve become so very efficient at their terrible business. They could be sitting in any of hundreds of cars. We try to stake it out anyway. We’ve been trying to stake it out. Someone has to watch. It all feels like searching for a hammerhead in murky waters.

I don’t quite know how to explain what it’s like to feel them but not be able to see them but I promise it’s a thing. Some kind of electromagnetic cop radar that I take no pleasure in having developed over the years. 

We criss-cross rail yards and highways and half-empty retail strips that feel like they go on for miles, the beautiful gray landscapes of dying industry and disinvested working class suburbia. All these unassuming apartment complexes and little squat bungalows. I thought it would be so easy to imagine Dan Conner stepping out of one of them to go to work for the day. Then I remembered that the actual Roseanne is a MAGA loon now.

When I was a kid we used to go watch the trains. They were my favorite thing. Still are. I guess some people have other nostalgic childhood smells they can remember, but for me it’s always been the diesel gasoline. These days the hum of the engines will put me to sleep in an instant.

Of course it’s all very different now. Immigrants have moved in and the people who were “here first” are pissed. The mayors and cops who run these towns are old Poles and Irish and whatever. Someone on Bluesky called them “Police Americans” and I’ve never heard a more accurate term. 

There’s no Brandon Johnson or Daddy Pritzker sweeping in at any point to condemn all of this. It’s just ongoing ethnic cleansing. It’s just guys in masks moving swiftly, picking people off that they know no one will care about and no one will plan a protest for. No one will lower the flag for. 

The waters are calm. They don’t make a wave.

While all of this was happening on Friday we got word of the Special Response Team agents over at the Broadview ICE facility putting on their gas masks. (Overnight detention is banned in Illinois so they move people from there to Indiana or Wisconsin as fast as possible after being processed). I hopped on the apps to check for updates. I expected everyone across the country would be sharing the videos I saw of protesters back at the facility facing off with ICE—scenes of conflict that would’ve rattled us all five years ago, but we’re now frighteningly numb to. The skinny antifa kids in keffiyeh and the wine moms with glitter glue FUCK ICE signs have formed a united front. I’ve never seen such a defiant mix of people. 

But no, the journalist-influencers are all still talking about what they consider a more important kind of violence. The kind they are worried might one day come for them. Not this more routine violence. 

Some idiot with a big account who lives miles inland in a neighborhood where none of this will ever happen this way claimed Chicago had defeated Trump by preventing him from sending in the troops. I feel like I’ve descended into total insanity. They’re kidnapping people off the street cartel-style, more and more of them every single day, and you’re declaring victory? ORANGE MAN FOLDS, #TACOTRUMP. What the fuck is even going on anymore? 

Scenes keep coming in on Facebook and TikTok faster than anyone can keep up with: 

They’re pushing an empty car with broken windows off the street and running away before more people can film it.

There’s a woman crying on the side of the road. She just witnessed some kind of arrest in front of someone’s kids.

SRT agents in full militarized kit tackling a guy between semi trucks in a parking lot somewhere. A trucker filming it from high up inside his rig.

They’re pummeling protesters with pepper balls and tear gas.

More cars left on the side of the road in suburbs people have never heard of.

They’re staking out the courthouses in adjacent counties.

Women in shackles filmed through the gaps in the fence tarps at Broadview.

Detainees in one of the arriving vans banging and shaking it from the inside.

A dude in camo absolutely rocking a protester on roller skates.

A man in a parking lot in Rosemont getting a chain wrapped around his waist before being thrown in a black van. 

A SWAT team of some kind busting into someone’s house on the far southeast side.

A priest on his knees praying the rosary. 

Many more arrests out in Elgin, a far flung city and rail hub nearly 70 miles out from us. There’s one man on Facebook rolling around every day out there trying to film as much as he can and we’re following his feed but we are helpless to assist. 

A lone flower vendor snatched off the street with flowers still in hand. 

The big bearded fuck who arrests him shouts at people filming, “We’re keeping America safe, guys! We’re keeping America safe!”

Our brave savior here happens to have my name tattooed on his arm. Okay, cool, thank you to the universe for an absurd fucking detail for me to have to remember amidst all this devastation.

It doesn’t stop. 

The serious journalists are making maps tracking arrests, having discussion circles in Signal chats, and planning their investigative pieces that will in fact outline exactly what went down after-the-fact, but won’t help anyone in the moment know where the predators are or how to avoid them. 

We pulled over so I could throw up on the side of the road. It wasn’t even from the trauma, I’m just on a GLP-1 now. Ok maybe it’s a little bit of the trauma, but I’ve always hated being in the car all day. Bad enough when it’s my own choice not someone else’s.

Friday afternoon came and we got news of the worst thing yet, the thing people knew was going to happen but so badly wanted to avoid.

They killed a man. 

His name was Silverio Villegas-Gonzales. 

He was a single dad. He never hurt anybody. He had some speeding tickets. Two mustached fucks in an unmarked SUV jumped out on him. He tried to reverse away from them, surely terrified if he was taken that no one would be able to take care of his boys. For all we know he wasn’t even sure they were real police. Why would he be?

They shot him in the head and neck within seconds. 

A bystander filmed them panicking and pulling his nearly lifeless body out of the car. They didn’t have backup to call for. They shouted at people to call 911.

He died later at the hospital.

No, the National fucking Guard isn’t here in Chicago. It never mattered if they came or not. We tried to tell people this. Trump himself told us this. CBP and the Border Patrol chief are still planning more for us and it’s only been a week. But most people can’t put two and two together. Can’t pay attention for more than five minutes to anything. Can’t read critically beyond a headline. All of these abilities have been stripped from us intentionally. 

It’s not your fault. I know it’s not. I wish I knew what to do to fix it for all of us. But I can’t even find a few guys in an SUV in a Home Depot parking lot. 

Raven Geary is an independent journalist in Chicago.

My new book of stories and poems We Had It Coming will be published this fall. Pre-order it here.