When National Guard troops from Texas started to arrive in Illinois last week, I drove out to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing center on the outskirts of Chicago to get a better look at what the soldiers were sent to protect. The ICE building is just off the interstate, next to a pest-control company and several union halls. Protesters have been gathering here for weeks, so ICE covered the windows with plywood and closed off the street with jersey barriers and steel fencing. The facility looks not much bigger than a neighborhood hardware store, a vestige of a different era of immigration enforcement, when ICE wasn’t working for a president who wanted a million deportations a year.

Television crews were set up outside, but I found only two protesters. One was Nick Sednew, a 40-year-old musician and father of a preschooler who told me he has been coming here every few days to try to overcome a feeling of dread and hopelessness. He stayed in the designated protest area about two blocks from where officers were coming and going, and it seemed unlikely they would notice him or the sign he held above his head, which said: ICE Out!

Sednew said he lives in a mostly Latino neighborhood in northwest Chicago that has been hit hard in recent weeks by raids. “This is not really abstract or political for me. I’ve witnessed them kidnapping my neighbors,” he told me. It was as if he were describing a foreign occupation, but from the beginning, President Donald Trump has framed his Chicago operation as a military conquest.

In early August, Trump announced his plans on Truth Social with cartoonish imagery from Apocalypse Now, with the president appearing as Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, the film’s fictional U.S. commander who massacred Vietnamese villagers with napalm. Chicago’s skyline is behind him, shown as a flaming hellscape, with “Chipocalypse Now” scrawled across the bottom. “‘I love the smell of deportations in the morning’ … Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR,” Trump wrote , adding emoji of helicopters.

Life seems to imitate social media in the current Trump era, and sure enough, Border Patrol agents in commando gear rappelled from a Black Hawk helicopter this month to raid an apartment building on the city’s South Side. They kicked down doors and forced residents from their beds at gunpoint, using plastic zip ties to subdue U.S. citizens and noncitizens alike. A few days later, agents shot and wounded a woman who works as a teacher’s aide at a Montessori school, whom they accused of ramming them with her vehicle. As the federal government’s crackdown intensifies, I’ve spoken with activists and ICE officials who are all worried about where this is headed.

Sednew, bearded and wearing a hiking cap, told me he wanted to choose his words carefully because he fears the government will target resisters like him. “They are like a bully who has someone in a headlock and saying ‘Stop making me hit you.’ They control every lever of power, and they’re using the power of the state to punch down, with vengeance and ill will, on innocent people.”

Department of Homeland Security officials say they’ve deployed to Chicago to save the city from immigrants who commit crimes. Chicago has long had a reputation for shootings and gang violence, but there is no evidence that the recent influx of immigrants has made the city more dangerous. If anything, it’s been the opposite: Chicago’s murder rate is down by more than half since a spike during t