Abolish ICE and Unbuilding Walls
What I've been doing when I'm not playing Soccer Dad
Once again, there are calls to “Abolish ICE” as incidents have quickly escalated in recent weeks with spontaneous uprisings in Los Angeles, Chicago, and other cities against Trump’s immigration raids. I participated in two small but spirited actions this week in downtown Urbana.
I’ve recently been preoccupied being a Soccer Dad and finally having a chance to spend part of my Friday doing one of my favorite things — writing for my Substack. Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there holding it down!
I’m currently working on an article for Truthout about the growing infrastructure for mass deportations. Trump’s $45 billion plan to expand immigrant detention includes two privately-run prisons in the Midwest. One is the GEO Group prison in Baldwin, Michigan I wrote about in 2020 for In These Times which has a capacity for 1,800 people. The other is a CoreCivic prison at Leavenworth, in my home state of Kansas, which can hold another 1,000 people. I am talking to activists organizing against both prisons. I am also tracking smaller county jails being used to detain immigrants for ICE in places like Chase County, Kansas and Clay County, Indiana. These are all a part of what I’m calling the Midwest detention network.
There is a small core of people helping me with ICE Watch during traffic court at the Champaign County Courthouse. Every few weeks there is traffic court with an interpreter where dozens of Latino immigrants show up for court dates. Back in April, ICE showed up to arrest two men at traffic court, as I previously wrote about. Since then, it’s been thankfully quiet.
Chicago Trip
I spent the weekend of May 17 & 18 in Chicago for events at the Haymarket House. Silky Shah, of Detention Watch Network, gave a talk for her new book Unbuild Walls — what I consider required reading for anybody doing immigration work. You can catch Silky on “Movement Memos” with Kelly Hayes.
Alan Mills also had a retirement party at Haymarket House, an old mansion in Uptown that has become a critical movement space. (I was last there to see “The Box,” a play by Sarah Shourd about solitary confinement.) Don’t worry, Alan is only retiring as executive director of Uptown People’s Law Center, he will continue as the attorney willing to take on the Illinois Department of Corrections.
Orange Crush Lawsuit
I got a chance to talk to Alan about the recent trial against the Orange Crush, the notorious so-called tactical team that conducts mass shakedowns in Illinois prisons. Back in 2017, I wrote about the Ross v. Gossett suit. I already got the news that they had lost the suit at trial. I asked Alan why and he said it was largely due to the setting in Benton, Illinois, deep in conservative southern Illinois. I asked to include a statement for the new issue of Stateville Speaks (on its way soon!) and UPLC sent the following:
This is a class action case for shakedowns in 2014 at Menard, Big Muddy, Illinois River, and Lawrence prisons. The class was only certified for claims against the “supervisory defendants” – the IDOC Director, the Chief of Operations, the Deputy Chief of Operations, the Statewide Tactical Commander, the Southern Regional Tactical Commander, the tactical and assistant tactical commanders at each facility, and the wardens and assistant wardens at each facility. We sued over their role in planning and overseeing the shakedowns.
On March 31, 2025, this case went to jury trial in Benton, IL. On April 11, 2025, the jury entered a verdict in favor of the defendants on these claims. In other words, plaintiffs lost the class claims against the supervisory class defendants.
You should know the limits of this case. We do not represent any person who was not part of the class certification. The class also did not include people’s claims against individual correctional officers and other prison staff who were not supervisors, only broad claims against the supervisors listed above.
If you think you have a claim for a specific use of force used on you during these shakedowns, you should consult an attorney about the statute of limitations. Class counsel is not able to provide any individual advice regarding the time frame for filing an individual case.
Lastly, I caught up with my dear friend Antonia Darder for breakfast at the Golden Nugget in Humboldt Park, it was a breath of fresh air. I didn’t get a picture of us because we were too busy catching up, but I did take this photo of the old school pancake house.
