Jenny Golden, a 48-year-old nurse and single mother, has the same thought all the time: “I could’ve been the first Renee Good. I could’ve been Alex Pretti.” Months before immigration agents killed Good and Pretti in Minneapolis in January 2026, Golden was working with a group of local organizers to document ICE agents’ activities in and around Chicago. One day last fall, around a dozen ICE agents surrounded her while she followed and recorded arrests. One demanded that she get out of her vehicle.
Golden didn’t get out, primarily out of fear that the agents would injure or kill her, but also because she felt she’d done nothing wrong. (It’s legal, she points out, to record any law enforcement officer as they do their work in public.)
One of the masked agents took a photo of her license plate and, according to Golden, he said, “I know everything about you.” He threatened to arrest her if she kept following them, then he and his fellow agents drove away.
The tense run-in came amid what the Trump administration dubbed “Operation Midway Blitz.” Hundreds of ICE agents surged into Chicago and, according to one locally led investigation, “used unwarranted and unlawful force, denied due process, and caused profound harm to families across greater Chicago.” Since then, the Trump administration’s methods have evolved — and so have the methods of the organizers trying to defend their neighbors.
For one, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees ICE, has a new leader: Kristi Noem was ousted earlier this year and replaced by Markwayne Mullin, a former senator from Oklahoma. What’s more, multiple organizers and attorneys interviewed for this story say the theatrics that were a core part of the Noem era have now quieted down to some extent in favor of different tactics, including more usage of “mega-master” hearings designed to deport as many people as quickly as possible.
But some things haven’t changed.
Many of Golden’s days are still consumed by a fear she calls “neverending.” She remembers the tremble of her hands as the agent yelled at her; she remembers thinking that stepping outside her car could lead to a broken arm or much worse. At the same time, she’s still monitoring ICE activity, as are many others in Chicago. In fact, the tactics deployed in Chicago have spread to many other major cities, including Minneapolis.
“It’s been a cat-and-mouse game for the last 18 months,” says Jorge, a Chicago-based organizer who, out of fear of being targeted by the administration, asked to only use his first name. “ICE comes up with a tactic, we respond to it, then they respond to our response.”
He adds, “It’s always evolving, but because of that, there’s always something that someone can do.”
In March, Mullin appeared before a Senate committee ahead of the vote that would ultimately confirm his appointment as the new head of Homeland Security. Addressing his fellow senators, he made it clear that he wanted to change at least one thing about the way DHS was led.
“I’ll work beside them every single day, to not just secure our homeland, but bring peace of mind and competence to the agency,” he said, referring to DHS employees. “My goal in six months is that we’re not in the lead story every single day.”
In that same hearing, he implored the Senators to fund DHS and end the partial agency shutdown that, by mid-March, had already lasted a month. A few months later, with Mullin leading the agency, the shutdown was over and ICE and Border Patrol (also overseen by DHS) had received nearly $70 billion in funding.
Now, the agency has made a record number of arrests for three straight months, arresting more than 50,000 people in both July and August each. At first, Mullin seemed to avoid the photo ops that had become a regular occurrence for Noem, who frequently joined ICE agents during their raids. But in May, Mullin joined agents for an arrest in Virginia, where he criticized the state’s recently elected governor for making Virginia “a magnet for criminal illegal aliens.”
Virginia has also become one of many states where so-called “mega-master” hearings take place: hearings in which sometimes more than 100 people — far more than a typical docket — are brought to court earlier than expected. This is another area where the Trump administration is breaking records: These hearings have led to a record high number of in-absentia deportation orders.
In a typical immigration hearing, a person and their attorney appear before an immigration judge to hear the government’s charges, state their intended legal defenses — such as applying for asylum — and request time to file applications. A “mega-master” hearing dramatically compresses that process.
Cases originally scheduled for 2027 or 2028 are now being moved forward with little notice. Unless the person in question is diligently checking whether their hearing date is changed — and often, they have no reason to — they risk missing their newly assigned hearing. People who fail to appear can receive removal orders in absentia, while those who do appear may be given extraordinarily short deadlines — sometimes as little as 30 days — to prepare complex cases.
Multiple attorneys interviewed for this story argue that these hearings, much like the increased number of arrests, are a way in which the Trump administration is trying to reach its goal of carrying out the largest number of deportations in American history.
Amanda Garcia, an immigration attorney who works for the Acacia Center for Justice, argues these hearings further the cruelty that defines DHS while trying to shy away from the headlines Mullin wants to avoid. “I think they achieved what they intended [by] showing a lot of force and being very visible and making it sensational,” she says of the Noem era. “And I think they pushed it to a place where they saw that there’s some blowback.”
In many cases, children fleeing human trafficking and violence have been caught up in mega-master hearings. Organizations like the Acacia Center for Justice have historically been paid by the US government to provide legal services for children who are immigrants; the organization points out that children win the right to stay in the US — and avoid deportation to a potentially violent, untenable situation — less than 10% of the time if they do not have an attorney.
But last December, the Trump administration asked the Acacia Center for immigration ID numbers and other case information that the organization refused to share on the grounds of basic attorney-client privilege. As a result, the government stopped paying the Acacia Center (in defiance of a judge’s order) and, at the end of July, the federal contract with the Center officially lapsed.
At the same time, attorneys interviewed by Inkstick say that the mechanics of the mega-master hearings appear to originate above the individual immigration courts. According to one attorney interviewed for this story, lawyers in Sacramento’s immigration court were told this past summer that court officials had been receiving instructions to prioritize certain dockets or adopt particular docket-management procedures. For instance, court officials reportedly told attorneys it was receiving lists from the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), the Justice Department office that oversees immigration courts, “almost every week.” One list seemed to prioritize the cases of people from Somalia, a country that has become a frequent target of the administration and Vice President JD Vance.
The attorney who described the process said neither they nor the local court officials they spoke with knew exactly who within EOIR was making the decisions. What is clear, they said, is that the practice is being rolled out systematically around the country with a speed and high volume that attorneys interviewed for this story haven’t seen in the past.
When reached for comment, a Department of Justice spokesperson said, in part, that the department is following the law while “hearing cases fairly, expeditiously, and uniformly.”
“The Biden administration allowed millions of unvetted aliens into our communities and intentionally turned a blind eye to hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied alien children in need of care,” the spokesperson added. “Reducing the immigration court backlog remains one of the highest priorities for this administration.”
The Acacia Center is still working with its network of nonprofit legal aid providers to get children the representation they need. “It’s kind of wild to expect a toddler to stand in front of an immigration judge,” says Claudia Tristán, a spokesperson for the organization.
But since they’ve yet to receive the tens of millions of dollars the government owes, they’re trying to adapt to life without federal funding.
Tristán says the Acacia Center is expanding its court-observation efforts, and working with local mutual-aid groups and other legal organizations to train volunteers on how to monitor immigration courts. By monitoring court proceedings, legal nonprofits can document potential abuses and identify where they can step in to aid people who do not currently have attorneys.
Further, the organization also sends people to shelters where some children are awaiting their immigration hearings. That’s where children, some as young as seven years old or even younger, receive the “know your rights” training that helps them understand how to talk to law enforcement officers and what to expect from court. By the end of August, as many as 1,900 unaccompanied children were being held by the US government at sites across the country, with the average shelter stay running about six months.
“It’s hard to get through all of these hoops that the government is adding now,” Tristán says. “Previous governments, Republican and Democrat, have never felt these were necessary.”
Tristán adds that she and her colleagues are still shaken by an incident from around this time last year, when the US government put 76 children from Guatemala on a deportation plane over Labor Day weekend. The children were woken up in the middle of the night; one had a panic attack, another vomited from their nerves.
“If you wake up anyone in the middle of the night while they’re in a shelter in government custody, and you just throw them on a plane and don’t explain what’s happening, anyone, especially a kid, is going to be terrified,” she says.
A judge was able to stop the operation before the plane took off, but Tristán says it was a close call — and the date, she believes, was chosen because it was a holiday weekend, with attorneys more likely to be out of the office.
It turns out that this single plan was part of a larger planned operation to deport more than 300 children who’ve fled violence in Guatemala. Earlier this summer, US Senator Ron Wyden said he’d heard of plans to resume the operation after last year’s failed attempt.
“We’re all bracing for something terrible,” Tristán says.
Unlike previous stories, many people interviewed for this article declined to speak on the record. Others requested the use of a pseudonym, due in part to fears of being targeted by the government after the Prairieland verdicts in Texas. In that case, people were sentenced to decades in prison after a police officer was shot at a protest at an ICE detention facility. Even though some of the eventual defendants didn’t know each other — and one man who received 30 years wasn’t even at the protest — the government claimed they are all part of the same “Antifa cell” of domestic terrorists.
This strategy — casting protestors as terrorists — has become a popular move by JD Vance and Trump aide Stephen Miller, widely considered the architect of Trump’s immigration agenda. Noem echoed those same claims during her time leading DHS, though recently, Markwayne Mullin has focused on using the “terrorist” label to describe immigrants being arrested by DHS.
Mullin claims the Trump administration has arrested more than 2,000 “known or suspected” terrorists during the president’s second term, though that figure likely includes people who deny involvement in any kind of terrorist organization, such as Maher Tarabishi. Born in Jordan, Tarabishi lived in the US for 17 years before he was detained last year during his regular check-in to an ICE field office in Dallas. The agency claims Tarabishi is a “criminal alien” and member of the Palestine Liberation Organization, an umbrella coalition for the Palestinian people that the US once deemed a terrorist organization. Tarabishi denies any affiliation with the group.
The 62-year-old man was the primary caretaker for his son, Wael, who had a rare muscular illness known as Pompe disease. When Wael died a couple of months after his father’s arrest, Maher’s petition to attend his son’s funeral was denied.
The “terrorist” arrest list touted by Mullin and DHS also undoubtedly includes Jesus Acosta Gutierrez, a man from Venezuela who, until late last year, was living peacefully near Chicago under Temporary Protected Status. In what would ultimately become a pattern, immigration enforcement agents claim Gutierrez rammed one of their vehicles; Gutierrez claims it was his vehicle that was rammed. The agency also claims Gutierrez is a member of the gang Tren de Aragua, which he denies.
Following a dramatic chase that ended with ICE agents using tear gas, flash-bang grenades, and pepper spray before taking him into custody, Gutierrez spent about two months at a detention facility in Indiana. He feared violence from guards and other detainees on a daily basis; he lost 25 pounds and endured persistent gallbladder pain because of a preexisting condition. Gutierrez ultimately chose to return to Venezuela rather than continue with the deportation process, and in a recent interview with Inkstick, he shared that he’s struggling with his mental health as a result of his traumatic run-in and detention by ICE.
“I haven’t been doing very well because things in my country are still tough,” he says through a translator. “Mentally, I’m feeling a little frustrated by everything I went through with those people from ICE and the psychological abuse.”
“I arrived in my country with nothing,” he adds, referring to Venezuela, “but thank God I’m alive and healthy. Still it’s been very hard for me to move past what I’m going through.”
These stories simultaneously frighten and motivate anti-ICE protestors.
Jorge, the Chicago-area organizer, continues monitoring ICE activity in his corner of Illinois. He’s noticed some significant shifts: ICE once operated in large, highly visible groups, he says, but the agency has increasingly broken those operations into smaller teams that can move more quickly and attract less attention. Organizers have responded by becoming more cautious themselves.
“We have had to become a lot more compartmentalized in terms of who we work with, and we’ve had to become more covert,” Jorge says. He is cryptic about what exactly becoming “more covert” entails, but he says he and his fellow organizers have become more selective about who they work with, what software they use to organize their efforts and what, if any, personal information they divulge to the fellow protestors with whom they communicate.
At the same time, organizers are building systems to identify and document enforcement. Jorge said organizers in Chicago, North Carolina, and Minneapolis have shared information and trained one another, while using video, photographs, and social media to publicize ICE activity. “What we did in Chicago during Midway Blitz, we can replicate it,” he says “We get information to organizers in North Carolina, and then we get information to organizers in Minneapolis, and it works.”
Jorge adds that safety planning, once treated as optional, has become an expectation, with organizers considering their individual risk levels and what would happen to their families if they were arrested or detained.
“I have an arrest plan in place, meaning I have bills that are going to need to be paid,” Golden says. “If I’m arrested, I have someone that will pick up my son and care for him.”
Golden, Garcia, and Jorge also note that, after the killings of Good and Pretti, participation has become more fluid. Some volunteers have left altogether or taken temporary breaks to recover, while others have scaled back their involvement. Rather than treating that as a withdrawal from the movement, organizers like Jorge encourage people to find roles that match their own “risk tolerance,” whether that means responding in the field, documenting ICE activity, or contributing in other ways. Sometimes that means finding creative ways to block or delay construction of ICE facilities, as shown by a recent coalition of local organizers in Arizona.
Even still, Jorge stresses that monitoring ICE as they conduct raids is more important than ever, especially in the wake of recent shooting deaths in Maine and Texas. “You’re back on the goddamn front page now,” Democratic Representative Seth Magaziner, from Rhode Island, told Mullin from the House floor.
For Jorge, who is an immigrant, this work is especially personal. “Immigrant communities are getting much better connected for our survival,” he says. But that doesn’t mean he’s not still terrified every day. It’s a unique brand of terror, far different from fear of traditional law enforcement.
“If I go to jail, to a certain extent, it’s a public process,” he says. “My family knows I go to court, they know which jail I’m at, it’s public record. But nobody knows what happens when you go into removal when you get detained. That is a secret. If I get disappeared, my wife’s not going to know where I am. If ICE comes to get me, I’m gone.”
