It’s midmorning in Wheaton, 25 miles west of downtown Chicago.
Cristóbal Cavazos gets a call from a People’s Patrol volunteer at an industrial park near O’Hare International Airport where thousands of undocumented immigrants work in warehouses and manufacturing and food-processing plants.
The volunteer tells Cavazos she’s watching agents who might be from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency known as ICE.
Cavazos, 46, rushes to his car. He opens the hatch and packs in five-gallon buckets, drumsticks to pound on them, and bullhorns. He invites me to ride along.
Bensenville, the village that includes the industrial park, has been “a hotbed of ICE activity since Trump came in,” he says.
Cavazos leads the People’s Patrol, one of many volunteer rapid-response networks countering a Trump administration deportation blitz in the Chicago area. The idea is to locate immigration enforcement activity, record it, document abuses and, right on the spot, voice community opposition.
Cavazos’ network focuses on Chicago’s western suburbs. It’s housed at the Casa DuPage Workers Center, a small nonprofit devoted to immigrant rights.
“We saw ICE go into a factory about a month and a half ago, looking for someone,” Cavazos tells me on the way to Bensenville. “They freaked out the whole factory and they took some people from there. It’s just really sad, the way the United States crucifies [its immigrant] workers, particularly in this case. They’re essential workers that are in these factories giving us food.”
Racing toward the industrial park on an expressway, Cavazos says the People’s Patrol includes 180 people, all volunteers. The center holds trainings for the work every other Friday.
As the volunteers go about their daily lives, they all keep an eye out for immigration enforcement activity. Some make a point of driving past parking lots and businesses where the federal authorities typically gather before a day’s operations.
The ICE officers usually drive unmarked vehicles. But People’s Patrol volunteers sometimes manage to tail them. If the officers stop a motorist or try to take people from a house or workplace, the volunteers send an alert through a Facebook page and through text groups.
“We’ll send people to go check it out,” Cavazos says. “We want to go in and show the community ‘Hey, we got your back.’ We’re in the midst of a historic fight-back right now against ICE. We’re not going to leave any space to ICE. The People’s Patrol is there to fill these spaces of terror and fear with solidarity and strength.”
As Cavazos speaks, he clenches his fist. I make sure his other hand remains on the wheel.
When we arrive in Bensenville, we hear there is no immigration sweep, just a press conference about some illegal imports.
Now, however, Cavazos is getting word about immigration arrests in Elgin.
“So we’re going to head over,” he says.
Soon we are back on an expressway for another long drive across the western suburbs. I start to understand the mileage Cavazos racks up each day to help show his community’s opposition to Trump’s deportation campaign.
I ask Cavazos how he got into this work. He says he’s been fighting for immigrants since his college years two decades ago. And he talks about his parents: His mother, a South Texas native, and father, who came from northern Mexico, were migrant farmworkers. They harvested apples in Michigan, dug out potatoes in Idaho and picked cotton across the South.
“These were Mexican workers traveling during Jim Crow and Juan Crow, being asked to sit in the back of restaurants,” he says.
Some of the indignities were hazardous. Cavazos recalls his father telling stories about returning to Texas after visits to Mexico. At the border, they would be sprayed down with “some kind of a chemical to supposedly get all the germs off of Mexican workers.”
The chemicals included the toxic insecticide lindane and DDT, a pesticide later banned for killing off too much wildlife.
Eventually, Cavazos’ parents heard about jobs in the Chicago area. They settled in DuPage County. Cavazos was born in Winfield.
Throughout his childhood, he heard what his parents had gone through but also about freedom fighters, such as farmworker organizer César Chávez and Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata.
“Zapata once said, ‘I would rather spend one day standing up than 1,000 years on my knees,’ ” Cavazos says.
Emulating those freedom fighters, Cavazos patrols the west suburbs to stand up to Trump’s immigration enforcement.
“We’ll be there in two minutes,” Cavazos says in Spanish to People’s Patrol volunteers calling from Elgin.
When we arrive, the volunteers tell him the day’s immigration arrests seem to be over.
But then he gets a call about a U.S. Department of Homeland Security vehicle at a hotel 20 minutes away. DHS oversees ICE, the immigration enforcement agency.
“It’s parked at the Marriott in Bloomingdale, so that is where we’re headed,” Cavazos tells me.
We pull up to the hotel and see a white SUV with markings of the Federal Protective Service, a DHS police force.
I follow Cavazos and two People’s Patrol volunteers to the hotel’s front desk.
The hotel manager informs them that Homeland Security personnel are frequent guests there. A moment later, two uniformed DHS officers stride past the desk on their way out to the SUV.
Cavazos cannot be sure the officers are working on immigration enforcement but asks the manager to boot them from the hotel nevertheless: “They’re staying here, using your premises to launch their war of terror on the immigrant communities. That goes against our values. I would invite you to just tell them to leave.”
The request seems like a long shot. Cavazos starts working his phone to get more people there and make a stronger case.
By sundown, two dozen protesters are in front of the hotel with a petition to kick the DHS officers out.
“The people united will never be defeated!” they chant in Spanish through the bullhorns, beating the buckets. After a couple hours, Bloomingdale police officers threaten to enforce a noise ordinance. Everyone leaves.
A few days later, I catch up with Cavazos at a different protest. About 75 immigrants and supporters are marching to denounce a Mexican father’s fatal shooting by an immigration officer during a traffic stop in Franklin Park.
After the march, I ask Cavazos to sit down for a few minutes. I want to hear how Trump’s deportation blitz is affecting him after fighting so long for immigrant workers.
He describes what the backlash looks like up close.
“We had a protest a couple weeks ago, and one guy came up spewing racial epithets and screaming at us, and then I had this right-wing guy come into my face,” he says.
The second man, Cavazos says, was a “tall white dude without a shirt” trying to provoke a fight.
He says incidents such as these and the Franklin Park killing have been deflating: “You feel this emptiness. And you look at your community. People that you love are afraid.”
Cavazos says his community is suffering a “dark night of the soul,” a phrase coined by St. John of the Cross, the 16th-century Spanish monk who said a feeling of abandonment by God was necessary for a more profound faith.
That monk knew about suffering. His ancestors were among the hundreds of thousands of Iberian Jews, known as conversos, who adopted Roman Catholicism to survive the Inquisition. Converso descendants, even generations later, were viewed with suspicion, labeled “swine” and singled out by blood-purity laws.
In the Chicago area, Cavazos tells me, the “dark night” has led too many immigrants to internalize Trump’s attacks and even slam rapid-response work.
“On social media, they don’t like what we’re doing and they think that we’re too out there, that we’re putting people in danger by being community organizers,” he says.
“When you feel the government attacking you,” Cavazos explains, “you just feel that you’re somehow not an essential, valuable part of the community, that you should be gone because of the color of your skin or the fact that you were not born in the United States. There are people that don’t have courage right now.”
Cavazos confides that sometimes he himself struggles to find courage.
He also gets pushback from some relatives. Cavazos says they are “evangelical Christians that think that Trump is somehow part of the Armageddon and the end of the world.” He says they tell him he is selfishly rebelling against the inevitable.
Amid the doubts and criticism, Cavazos turns to his faith.
“Every morning, I give thanks to God. I give thanks for my family. I give thanks for my organization, Casa DuPage. I give thanks to be in this moment of time, where I have some kind of influence and I’m able to organize.”
Where does all this gratitude come from?
Cavazos points to Gustavo Gutiérrez, the late Peruvian priest who pioneered liberation theology, a movement that encouraged some Catholic clergy in the 1960s and ’70s to stand up to Latin American dictators. The theology links gratitude for God’s love to solidarity with the poor and to the active struggle to build a just society.
“I give thanks for beautiful allies,” Cavazos says. “The past few months, more and more people have been coming out of the shadows to say ‘How can we help?’”
He ushers them into the People’s Patrol.
“Sometimes the only thing we have is resistance. Particularly at this moment, we don’t know where this is going to end,” Cavazos says. “But you have faith in justice. You have faith in principle. You have faith.”
He says his faith will guide him when he’s back out on patrol, tomorrow and the day after.
Chip Mitchell reports for WBEZ Chicago on policing, public safety and public health. Follow him at Bluesky and X. Contact him at cmitchell@wbez.org.