On August 26th, 6 out of 10 immigrant children deemed abandoned by the State of Illinois were ordered to be removed from the country by heartless immigration Judge Shawn Abraham at the 55 East Monroe St courthouse. During a hearing that lasted mere minutes, Judge Abraham – who conveniently attended court on Zoom while the children were mandated to attend in person – rejected arguments by the children’s attorneys to allow them to stay in the country. Attorneys argued that all the children had pending applications for special immigrant juvenile status, which is designed to help foreign-born children who are neglected, abused, or abandoned apply for a visa to remain in the U.S. Pending applications are also supposed to protect the children from deportation. However, with clear disregard for the children, their rights to due process, and protected application status, Judge Abraham proceeded to order the deportation of the children, aged 12-17 years old, who were left sobbing after receiving the news. Abraham, a former prosecutor for the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office and an ICE legal consultant, stupidly argued that the children would be in the country for too long before they could acquire valid visas – as if the children were somehow responsible for the long wait times from our shit immigration process. While the 6 unaccompanied children will face deportation back to Guatemala, Honduras, or El Salvador – with no indication of who will take care of them if they are forced out of the country – the remaining four children will return to court on September 9th. Attorneys for these remaining children argue this is a near-impossible turnaround time to fight for them to stay in the country. For now, it is unclear what will happen to any of these children, but one thing is clear: the strategy to quickly and efficiently deport these children in open court makes it apparent that federal courthouses are adding fuel to the deportation machine here in Chicago.
From Midway Blitz to “Churn and Burn” in the courts: deportation methods are expanding but the goal to mass deport remains the same
The deportation hearing that the 10 children participated in is called a “mega/master hearing,” one of the Trump administration’s newest tactics to rev up deportation numbers through the courts. Mega/master hearings can call dozens to hundreds of people with pending immigration claims to attend court in the same room at the same time, to have their cases adjudicated in a matter of minutes. These hearings often come as a sudden change to an individual’s initial court date, and if missed, result in an automatic removal order. U.S. Senator Dick Durbin has called these hearings Trump’s latest method to “churn and burn” immigrants out of the country. He isn’t wrong.
Since the feds invaded Chicago last September, kidnapping, shooting, and assaulting numerous immigrants and protesters and deporting upwards of 2,500 people in the process, the Trump administration has had to learn from its Democrat predecessors and tone down its racist push to increase deportation numbers in the midst of widespread public scrutiny against armed federal agents. In Chicago, militant street protests broke out in Brighton Park after the attempted murder of Marimar Martinez by Border Patrol agent Charles Exum, while in Minneapolis during Operation Metro Surge, the back-to-back murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti sparked nationwide unrest and broader calls to “jail killer ICE agents” and dismantle ICE. While two others had been executed by ICE agents before Good and Pretti’s killings, Silverio Villegas Gonzalez in Franklin Park, IL, and Keith Porter in Northridge, CA, public media and internet algorithms combined nonetheless to unleash mass condemnation of Trump’s siege-style immigration enforcement.
In a concerted effort to quell mass rebellion (not to be confused with slowing down on deportations), the Trump administration kicked its most flamboyant sadists, Gregory Bovino and Kristi Noem, to the curb and replaced them with merited deportation specialists like former Obama-era deportation branch head, Tom Homan, and new blood recruits like acting DHS Secretary, Markwayne Mullin.
The Trump administration relied on Homan and Mullin to be the guys to “get ICE out of the headlines” while staying the course on hunting down and removing immigrants from the country. Homan is the architect of the family separation policy, which criminalized immigrant parents crossing the border and separated them from their children, and in 2013 he helped Obama deport 432,000 people (more people than any other year in all of US history). This year, Homan was deployed on the ground in Minneapolis to defuse mass rebellion by calling for negotiations with elected state officials. Homan’s tactical diplomacy allowed liberal Governor Tim Walz to regain control of the situation on the ground in part by propping himself up as a principled negotiator, while mobilizing his reinvigorated voter base to channel people’s righteous frustration back into the electoral system that fuels deportations.
Mullin has equally worked to boost ICE’s efficiency while keeping the agency out of the spotlight. In a July 2026 interview, Mullin credited himself with “turning down the temperature,” or public spectacle of the deportation machine, focusing instead on perfecting work with local law enforcement to more smoothly and efficiently get immigrants off the streets—often before people become aware that an immigration enforcement operation is happening. The result so far, according to Mullin, was the deportation of 403,294 people as of July of this year 1.
While nothing can negate the violence of immigrants being kidnapped off the streets, swelling daily arrests rates since the spring show the value of precision over spectacle in ramping up deportation numbers, with nearly 50,000 people arrested and 34,000 people removed from the country in July 2026, the largest number of arrests since October 2022 and the largest number of removals since the start of Trump’s second term2.
Swelling arrests have also increased the number of immigrants locked in ICE detention. As of July 11, 2026, over sixty-five thousand people were rotting in ICE custody awaiting deportation (3)3. The conditions of ICE facilities – inedible food, crammed, dirty cells, medical neglect, abuse by officers, and the denial of legal counsel along with blatant coercion – have prompted immigrants to choose to voluntarily return to their countries rather than stay in hellish conditions for years, and now, under the Trump administration, caging and forcing immigrants to self-deport has become explicit state policy. When Operation Midway Blitz ravaged Chicagoland, immigrants kidnapped off the streets were taken in increasing numbers to the ICE processing center in Broadview, Illinois, with 1,854 immigrants booked at the facility in the first several weeks of September. While only meant to hold 236 adults for no more than 12 hours each, at the height of Operation Midway Blitz last fall, hundreds of detainees were held for multiple days in overcrowded cells, with little food, water, or access to showers. The result was 154 self deportations at Broadview between September 8th and October 2025. This was more self-deportations than nearly every other ICE detention facility during that time (4)4.
Now, as the numbers arrested and detained at Broadview have significantly decreased with the end of Midway Blitz, the deportation machine in Chicago is yet again adapting through mega/master hearings in pursuit of more efficient but quieter deportations.
Immigration court was always about deporting people
If you read up until this point, you might be thinking: Why don’t we just get rid of mega/master hearings and make the courts fair again? You might be asking this in good faith, but this line of questioning is based on the assumption that the immigration court system (let alone the judicial system as a whole) has ever been fair. This simply isn’t true. What is true is that the immigration court system has always been about deporting people.
The U.S. immigration court system was established through the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. The Act empowered the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), a Department of Justice (DOJ) agency, with enforcing, implementing, and adjudicating claims under the immigration laws. Appointed attorneys were given administrative powers to adjudicate immigration cases as pseudo-judges with the support of INS staff and resources. The 1952 Act placed immigration adjudication and enforcement in the hands of the executive branch rather than with the judicial branch. Even as the INS was meant to adjudicate immigration cases fairly, this objective ran contrary to the executive branch’s duty to deport. With the INS’s stated goal to streamline deportations, employees routinely coerced immigration judges, threatening to withhold resources the department was providing unless judges complied with deportation quotas. In 1983, when the issue of adjudication versus enforcement was investigated, the resolution of this issue was to move the process out of the INS and into the hands of the Attorney General (AG). Today, the AG appoints immigration judges and assigns them duties, thereby allowing the AG to influence, threaten, or fire judges who fail to meet deportation quotas. Far from an “impartial” and rights-driven process, from its inception, the immigration court system has always been rooted in the aim to deport (5)5.
With this in mind, Judge Abraham’s actions should come as no surprise. His ability to deport 6 children with little rhyme or reason is supported by the law, one that is expanding to meet the needs of the ruling class rather than the oppressed in this country.
But doesn’t the US rely on immigrant labor?
Yes, segments of the US ruling class, the class that rules this country and exploits cheap labor across the planet to produce goods for profit, do rely on immigrant labor, particularly in agriculture and other labor-intensive sectors. But they’ve also equally cultivated and embraced a very real hatred of immigrants in this country.
When capitalism was forming in the US, white supremacy promised native-born white men the right to advance within capitalist society on the backs of other oppressed and genders. This right formed the ideological basis and the loyal mass base necessary to enact genocide on the indigenous people and force the enslavement and exploitation of African peoples. When plantation slavery rivaled the wage system of the emerging industrial ruling class, civil war and the abolition of legal slavery soon left a gaping hole in the economy that the victorious industry owners had to fill with cheap labor.
Immigrants from countries and colonies oppressed by European imperialism stepped in to fill that void, providing cheap labor that helped build up US infrastructure under the assumption that these immigrants would ‘inevitably go back home’ and would not sink roots in the US. The periodic or seasonal labor of immigrants was acceptable to the ruling class who desperately needed their labor. However, when it became clear that immigrants might not readily go back home (either because of the opportunities found in the US, or if going back was not an option), the ruling class had to contend with the contradiction between cheap immigrant labor and the ideology of white supremacy that helped keep them in power. As white supremacy and anti-immigrant sentiment among native-born Americans became more adverse to immigrants residing in the U.S., particularly from Latin America and Asia, this caused the need for stronger restrictions placed on migration into the U.S. to quell rebellion.
Still, even as immigration policy became more restricted over time, the economic pursuits of the ruling class continued to contradict this enforcement. For example, in 1993, the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) integrated the US and Mexican economies. Economic integration prompted a flow of goods and people into the U.S., particularly rural workers and farmers whose livelihoods were upended by the flow of cheap U.S. corn into Mexico. In addition to the flow of rural workers into the US, the unquenchable desire of the U.S. ruling class to exploit foreign economies for profit fueled additional interventions into Latin America in the form of coups, massacres, the backing of dictatorships, along with capitalism-induced climate change, which has increased migration of people into the U.S. in search of safety and stability.
So even while the rulers of this country could turn up the heat on immigrants and make them deportable when reactionaries called for it, deportations would never stop the flow of immigrants into the U.S. seeking relief from US imperialism. Nonetheless, by criminalizing the entry of some immigrants into the US, the ruling class was able to balance the entrance of cheap immigrant labor with the reactionary “hate all immigrants” sentiment cultivated through white supremacy. This meant that immigrants could be exploited and deported at will, if and when their presence produced hostile responses or when their labor was no longer needed. Moreover, the ability of the ruling class to use immigrants as scapegoats in periods of economic catastrophe also made their deportable status useful.
With 9/11 and the recasting of immigrant populations, specifically from the Middle East, as potential terrorists, immigrants experienced a higher degree of hardship and surveillance. While immigration policy democratized during the Obama years, allowing pathways for foreign-born immigrant children or those lucky enough to get visas or asylum to live, work, and go to college in the U.S., this has only fractured immigrant populations by putting these privileged few in support of the system (if not reforming it) in opposition to the majority of immigrants deemed undeserving of these privileges and in need of revolutionary (rather than reformative) answers to their suffering (6)6. Under Trump, the contradiction between cheap immigrant labor and white supremacy has tilted toward open white supremacy. The resulting chaos and fear spurred by ICE terror has pushed immigrants underground and has likely forced many into more exploitative jobs and positions across the country. Still, it is to be determined what the full effects of Trump’s style of deportation policy are, particularly in the agricultural sector. In the detention sector, the fact that privately owned ICE detention facilities are expanding shows, in part, that the openly racist tilt of the Trump administration is still raking in profits for segments of the ruling class.
So what are we to do?
If by the end of this you agree that the real purpose of the immigration system in this country is to oppress immigrants, you’ll agree that resolving this crisis won’t come by putting faith in efforts or claims to reform the courts. Recall that US imperialism is the main driving force of immigration into the US, so if we truly want to stop the oppression that forces immigrants to come to this country and oppresses them while they are here, we have to overthrow capitalism-imperialism and build a new society. Here in Chicago, we must start this process by exposing the corruption of the immigration system as a product of capitalism-imperialism and lead immigrants in political struggle against the courts, ICE agents, and other elements of the deportation machine that keeps them in fear and robs them of their dignity, if not their lives. If we know these mega/master hearings deny immigrants due process, the question we should be asking ourselves is: how can we create a crisis out of this bogus court process that exposes the injustice of this system? What demands can we make? Who can we go after? Chicago is a sanctuary city in a sanctuary state meant to provide a haven for immigrants in the US, yet somehow these mega master hearings are allowed to happen with little threatening opposition from the progressive and liberal political establishment represented by Mayor Brandon Johnson, Governor J.B. Pritzker, and Senator Dick Durbin. If immigrants are openly being denied due process in the courts, why can’t they get access to Public Defenders and other government resources that will go to bat for them against the federal government Before you chime in (or consult Google) to say immigration is a civil and not a criminal matter so PDs aren’t mandatory, re-read this article and ask yourself why and then go out into the real world and see what immigrants at 55 E Monroe ST think about this demand. If we’re going to become the revolutionary force that overthrows this system, we must stop settling for what the system tells us is possible and start demanding what truly serves the interest of the oppressed in this country. So if you’re fed up with the status quo and want to stand with immigrants, hit us up. Let’s get to work.
- Mullin brags about deportations (2026). C-SPAN. https://www.c-span.org/clip/news-conference/user-clip-mullin-brags-about-deportations/5203147 ↩︎
- Singh Maanvi, and Amy Qin. (2026). The Guardian US. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/26/record-arrests-deportations-immigrants ↩︎
- TRAC Immigration. (July, 2026). https://tracreports.org/immigration/quickfacts/ ↩︎
- Quin Amy and Sophie Sherry. (2025). WBEZ. https://www.wbez.org/immigration/2025/12/29/broadview-detainees-operation-midway-blitz-self-deporting-high-rates-analysis-finds ↩︎
- “The Attorney General’s Judges: How the U.S. Immigration Courts Became a Deportation Tool.” (2019). The Southern Poverty Law Center. https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/attorney-generals-judges-how-us-immigration-courts-became-deportation-tool-2/ ↩︎
- “A brief history of immigration enforcement.” in Whistles Won’t Stop This. (2026). Going against the Tide. https://goingagainstthetide.org/2026/01/23/whistles-wont-stop-this-the-immigrant-proletariat-and-state-repression-from-chinese-exclusion-to-the-bovino-boys-terror/#sdfootnote3anc ↩︎
burn chicago 