Little Village buildings spray-painted with swastikas, pro-ICE statement
According to a statement from the Chicago Police Department, three buildings in the 2700 block of West Cermak Road and one in the 2500 block were vandalized around midnight Saturday.
Community members said a grocery store and two community organizations were spray-painted with swastikas in the 2700 block of West Cermak.
Half of the front wall of La Frutería grocery store is 50 feet of uninterrupted cinderblock wall — a perfect canvas for the street artists whose murals occupy the space. Bibiana Mesa, one of the owners of La Frutería grocery store, said they decided to give the space to the community when they bought the business five years ago.
'It's either we have them do something to relate a message, or we have it getting tagged by gangs in the area or whatnot,' she said. 'It brings up a lot of colors, and it makes people feel good, our community is being represented.'
In the past, the wall has been home to a Chicago Bulls cartoon and a mural honoring the Hispanic community, Mesa said. Until Sunday, the wall featured a mural reading 'FREE PALESTINE' with a child standing on a pile of burning rubble in front of a Palestinian flag.
The Mesas check their building for issues every morning when they arrive. On Saturday, as they pulled up in their car, they saw there were swastikas on the front of the building.
'And as we looked around, we noticed that other buildings around the area were vandalized as well,' Mesa said.
The Mesas painted over the swastikas on their building Saturday, but the swastikas were still visible. They decided the mural had to be painted over completely to remove all traces and planned to do so on Sunday. But when they came in Sunday morning, 'ICE RULES' had been added to the front of the building, an apparent reference to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The full facade is now the same shade of pink as the rest of the building. Still, the Mesas are hoping that local artists will reach out to propose new mural ideas.
'These people are trying to scare us, but you know, we're here with strong community, and we will get through this,' Mesa said.
This follows a similar incident in Pilsen in June, in which a woman defaced a mural at 16th Street and Ashland Avenue and was accused of attacking another woman who tried to stop her. That mural depicted solidarity between a Mexican and a Palestinian man.
Latinos Progresando, a nonprofit that provides community services for the Mexican community, including immigration legal services and education, posted pictures on social media of a swastika painted on its front door. In an accompanying statement, it wrote that 'at least four other entities' had been similarly targeted.
'It is clear that the perpetrator, motivated by a federal government who has unleashed masked, heavily armed ICE agents into our neighborhood, believed that this cowardly act would further intimidate, frighten, and divide our community,' the statement read.
'Let's be clear about one thing — Latinos Progresando will not back away from our values or be deterred from our work because of this heinous criminal act. We are not going anywhere.'
The third building tagged was the Chicago Liberation Center, a community center where social media posts show people have recently gathered to focus on actions against ICE and deportation. A window flying a Palestinian flag was painted with a swastika that has since been removed.
Police said no one is in custody and detectives are investigating.
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Officials, he said, followed a strategy of focusing on the minority of violent convicted criminals so they could justify enforcement policies that are proving to be less popular. 'I think they know that if they were honest with the American public that they're arresting people who cook our food, wash dishes in the kitchen, take care of people in nursing homes, people who are just living in part of the community … there's a large segment of the public, including a large segment of Trump's own supporters, who would be uncomfortable and might even oppose those kinds of immigration practices.' 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As White House chief advisor on border policy Tom Homan put it: 'If you're in the country illegally, you got a problem.' Still, things did not really pick up until May, when White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller ordered ICE's top field officials to shift to more aggressive tactics: arresting undocumented immigrants, whether or not they had a criminal record. Miller set a new goal: arresting 3,000 undocumented people a day, a quota that immigration experts say is impossible to reach by focusing only on criminals. 'There aren't enough criminal immigrants in the United States to fill their arrest quotas and to get millions and millions of deportations, which is what the president has explicitly promised,' Bier said. 'Immigration and Customs Enforcement says there's half a million removable noncitizens who have criminal convictions in the United States. Most of those are nonviolent: traffic, immigration offenses. It's not millions and millions.' By the time Trump celebrated six months in office, DHS boasted that the Trump administration had already arrested more than 300,000 undocumented immigrants. '70% of ICE arrests,' the agency said in a news release, 'are individuals with criminal convictions or charges.' But that claim no longer appeared to be true. While 78% of undocumented immigrants arrested across the U.S. in April had a criminal conviction or faced a pending charge, that number had plummeted to 57% in June. In L.A., the difference between what Trump officials said and the reality on the ground was more stark: Only 43% of those arrested across the L.A. region had criminal convictions or faced a pending charge. Still, ICE kept insisting it was 'putting the worst first.' As stories circulate across communities about the arrests of law-abiding immigrants, there are signs that support for Trump's deportation agenda is falling. A CBS/YouGov poll published July 20 shows about 56% of those surveyed approved of Trump's handling of immigration in March, but that dropped to 50% in June and 46% in July. About 52% of poll respondents said the Trump administration is trying to deport more people than expected. When asked who the Trump administration is prioritizing for deporting, only 44% said 'dangerous criminals.' California Gov. Gavin Newsom and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass have repeatedly accused Trump of conducting a national experiment in Los Angeles. 'The federal government is using California as a playground to test their indiscriminate actions that fulfill unsafe arrest quotas and mass detention goals,' Diana Crofts-Pelayo, a spokesperson for Newsom told The Times. 'They are going after every single immigrant, regardless of whether they have a criminal background and without care that they are American citizens, legal status holders and foreign-born, and even targeting native-born U.S. citizens.' When pressed on why ICE is arresting immigrants who have not been convicted or are not facing pending criminal charges, Trump administration officials tend to argue that many of those people have violated immigration law. 'ICE agents are going to arrest people for being in the country illegally,' Homan told CBS News earlier this month. 'We still focus on public safety threats and national security threats, but if we find an illegal alien in the process of doing that, they're going to be arrested too.' Immigration experts say that undermines their message that they are ridding communities of people who threaten public safety. 'It's a big backtracking from 'These people are out killing people, raping people, harming them in demonstrable ways,' to 'This person broke immigration law in this way or that way,'' Bier said. The Trump administration is also trying to find new ways to target criminals in California. It has threatened to withhold federal funds to California due to its 'sanctuary state' law, which limits county jails from coordinating with ICE except in cases involving immigrants convicted of a serious crime or felonies such as murder, rape, robbery or arson. Last week, the U.S. Justice Department requested California counties, including L.A., provide data on all jail inmates who are not U.S. citizens in an effort to help federal immigration agents prioritize those who have committed crimes. 'Although every illegal alien by definition violates federal law,' the U.S. Justice Department said in a news release, 'those who go on to commit crimes after doing so show that they pose a heightened risk to our Nation's safety and security.' As Americans are bombarded with dueling narratives of good vs. bad immigrants, Kocher believes the question we have to grapple with is not 'What does the data say?' Instead, we should ask: 'How do we meaningfully distinguish between immigrants with serious criminal convictions and immigrants who are peacefully living their lives?' 'I don't think it's reasonable, or helpful, to represent everyone as criminals — or everyone as saints,' Kocher said. 'Probably the fundamental question, which is also a question that plagues our criminal justice system, is whether our legal system is capable of distinguishing between people who are genuine public safety threats and people who are simply caught up in the bureaucracy.' The data, Kocher said, show that ICE is currently unable or unwilling to make that distinction. 'If we don't like the way that the system is working, we might want to rethink whether we want a system where people who are simply living in the country following laws, working in their economy, should actually have a pathway to stay,' Kocher said. 'And the only way to do that is actually to change the laws.' In the rush to blast out mugshots of some of the most criminal L.A. immigrants, the Trump administration left out a key part of the story. According to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, its staff notified ICE on May 5 of Veneracion's pending release after he had served nearly 30 years in prison for the crimes of assault with intent to commit rape and sexual penetration with a foreign object with force. But ICE failed to pick up Veneracion and canceled its hold on him May 19, a day before he was released on parole. A few weeks later, as ICE amped up its raids, federal agents arrested Veneracion on June 7 at the ICE office in L.A. The very next day, DHS shared his mugshot in a news release titled 'President Trump is Stepping Up Where Democrats Won't.' The same document celebrated the capture of Phan, who served nearly 25 years in prison after he was convicted of second-degree murder. CDCR said the Board of Parole Hearings coordinated with ICE after Phan was granted parole in 2022. Phan was released that year to ICE custody. But those details did not stop Trump officials from taking credit for his arrest and blaming California leaders for letting Phan loose. 'It is sickening that Governor Newsom and Mayor Bass continue to protect violent criminal illegal aliens at the expense of the safety of American citizens and communities,' DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement.
