He goes by “Bandido” – Bandit – and he inspires me. I haven’t met Bandit, I have no idea what he looks like. But I know he’s hard-core.
Bandit is part of the Chicago Southwest Side Rapid Response Team (SWRRT), a community of volunteers who have organized to respond to ICE activity in our area of Chicago. Many Chicago neighborhoods have similar Rapid Response Teams. We sign up for on-call shifts throughout the week and when ICE is sighted in the neighborhood, a “dispatcher” coordinates a response by messaging those on-call to go to the location. Responders document through video, record ICE’s license plate numbers and, most importantly, alert the community that ICE is active in the area through text messaging and social media; the SWRRT Instagram account has over ten thousand followers. Perhaps most meaningfully, the SWRRT assists with the abduction aftermath by dealing with abandoned cars or following-up with family members by connecting them to legal and support resources.
On active ICE days when I’m not on-call, I mute my phone notifications, otherwise the phone would be pinging constantly. Look away from the message group and by the end of the day there will be hundreds of unread messages. A lot of those messages are from Bandit. (I’m not as creative and my handle is just “Mark F”.) I don’t know how he does it. He has a knack for spotting ICE activity and while he does not “interfere”, he gets right in there, legally records them, and afterwards helps family members.
The ICE militarism is unfortunately eerily familiar to me. My wife Sara and I met in CPT when we worked together in Palestine confronting Israeli Occupation Forces for nearly three years. Over twenty years later, who would have expected that our neighborhoods in Chicago would be under a type of militarized Occupation, at the hands of the Trump administration’s ICE agents and policies?
Every day, right now, ICE agents patrol our neighborhoods and abduct people. Last week they took a public school custodian on her way to work. The week before, they took a dad just after he’d dropped off his kids at school. One agent – he’s called Giraffe because he’s tall and has a long neck – is particularly notorious. The fact that he’s been given a nickname indicates how many times the network has interacted with him, and how systematic and persistent the ICE activity is.
Growing up white and middle class in small-town Kansas, I was socialized to think that “the authorities” are legitimate and should be respected. CPT training and field work in Palestine helped to question and undo that socialization. Israeli Occupation Forces, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, should not be legitimized.
Last fall 2025, during ICE’s Chicago “Operation Midway Blitz”, agents shot a Rapid Responder five times claiming she’d rammed their vehicle. She survived and was charged by the Trump administration as a “domestic terrorist” for assault on an officer. The agent’s own bodycam footage showed that to be a lie; he’d exited his vehicle, said something like “Bring it bitch!” and then shot her. When the neighborhood turned out onto the streets in response to the shooting, things escalated: more ICE agents came, more neighbors, and Chicago Police Department (CPD). ICE threw tear gas and brought in an armored personnel carrier with a top-mounted machine gun. Calling upon years of CPT field work in Palestine confronting Israeli soldiers, Sara yelled at the machine gunner, “No! Do not shoot! These are unarmed civilians! Do not shoot!” Eventually ICE left, facilitated by the CPD. It looked like occupied Palestine. In my neighborhood.
A month later during a day of high ICE activity, Sara and I were out with other Rapid Responders “on patrol” in our old beat-up high-mileage rusty red Prius. We knew that our car might be damaged, so we drove our oldest old car in case ICE rammed the vehicle or smashed the windows. Caravans of masked ICE agents in black SUVs, pickups and tinted-window minivans had descended on the SW side. When we found a group of three vehicles, we followed immediately behind them, constantly honking the horn and yelling “La Migra” out the windows. We drove “fast and furious” like this – at least as much as a 2008 Prius can – for nearly two hours while these agents drove back and forth through our neighborhood, at times threatening to side-swipe our car, until they gave up and left the area presumably to “return to base”. Like the agents, we wore masks, hats and sunglasses to conceal our identities. We went home knowing that our license plate had been recorded by ICE and maybe agents would show up at our house as a show of intimidation, as they have with other responders.
Chicago, like many other targeted cities, has organized and come together. The strengthening of community structures and networks is a silver lining in this dark cloud. Community-based groups are providing training on dealing with authoritarianism, and how to interact specifically with “the authorities” on the ground. We’re learning what many others in the world who live under repressive structures already know: that when the authoritarian machine comes to your community, while we can’t dismantle the machine, we sure can be “sand in the gears” of that authoritarianism. Rapid Response is one way to be the sand in the gears.
I’m no Bandit, but each of us does what we can. I learn from and am inspired by these dedicated members of the community who are looking out for each other. May we all work to build a stronger community, and ask how we can be sand in the gears in our own way.
Take action: for people in the US, urge your elected officials to defund ICE and support legislation to end local 287g agreements that allow DHS/ICE to deputize state and local law enforcement officers to carry out federal immigration enforcement.
And at some point I just need to get a cooler message-group name than “Mark F”. If you have any ideas, email peacemakers@cpt.org and let me know.
Photograph by Paul Goyette, 30 September 2025.
