WASHINGTON – U.S. Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL), Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, today delivered a speech on the Senate floor praising the hundreds of high school students in Little Village who walked out of class yesterday to protest the Trump Administration’s cruel “Operation Midway Blitz” in the Chicagoland area. Durbin has continuously gone to the Senate floor and made clear that the increased presence and enforcement actions of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents in Illinois are not about public safety, but instead are part of the President’s political theater.
“ICE [and] the Department of Homeland Security [are] creating a reign of terror in the city of Chicago. I do not exaggerate. Why are they in force in Chicago? Because the President said over and over again that immigrants are the problem in America. You’ve heard the speeches—waving his arms at these rallies saying ‘we have to stop the rapists, the murderers, the terrorists, and the criminally insane predators coming across our border… and we will have to crack down on them in cities that voted against me in the last election.’ What President Trump has done is send in these ICE agents who created this reign of terror,” said Durbin.
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“It is hard to describe what is going on in this great city when it comes to ICE agents. They have people afraid [to] leave their homes to go shopping, to go to church, [and] to go to a restaurant… The stories come in over and over again [on] what these ICE agents are doing. You know what happened last Saturday in their effort to get the ‘worst of the worst?’ These ICE agents [conducted a raid that disrupted] a Halloween parade for kids in Old Irving Park,” Durbin continued.
“Sometimes, in the worst of times, things emerge which are nothing short of incredible. It happened in Chicago. There's a section in Chicago called Little Village in Lawndale. Yesterday, several hundred high school students from the local high school marched [toward] 26th [Street] in the Little Village section of Chicago. They were doing that to protest the treatment that they faced with these ICE agents,” said Durbin.
Durbin praised one student, Lia Sophia Lopez, one of the student organizers of the walk out. Lopez said of ICE: “They hurt us like they’ve never hurt us before. They attacked our community. They surrounded the parks. They surrounded our school. I’ve never felt more unsafe in my life than that day. We need to protect our people’s peace. We need to protect their freedom and dignity because if we don’t, no one else will.”
“That was an extraordinary amount of courage for a high school student in the city of Chicago. She [Lopez] knows [that] her parents and many other families are afraid of what might happen because of the ICE agents that are roaming through, showing their strength to bust up Halloween parades, showing their strength to drop tear gas cannisters in front of churches. This extraordinary show of courage and her commitment to our country is nothing new,” said Durbin.
During his remarks, Durbin compared the courage of these high school students to the courage of Dreamers—young children who came to the U.S. with their parents and are trying to become U.S. citizens.
“After DACA was created, most of these young people, despite the advice and warnings of their parents, came out publicly and said ‘I’m a Dreamer and I want to be a part of America's future.’ This generation is doing the same—marching down 26th Street to say they want an end to this harassment by the ICE officials,” said Durbin.
Durbin concluded, “I salute these students in Little Village for the courage they showed, and I hope that students across the Chicagoland area and beyond will stand in solidarity with them and the peaceful protests that [are] taking place in Little Village.”
