“Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.”
- John Lewis
Let me be clear: I was outside the ICE detention center in Broadview, IL (1930 Beach Street, approximately 10 miles west of Chicago), from approximately 8:00 p.m. until midnight on September 19, 2025. One thing I want you to get from this photo essay is that the police completely abandoned the people. For the several hours I was there, not one police officer showed up to make sure we were safe and not retaliated against. We live in a police state. Police are everywhere. We watch time and time again as police seize opportunities to exert force and establish power over us, particularly as People of Color. The fact that the police were absent last night should send chills down your spine.
We will not go silently into the night.
On September 19, 2025, ICE’s Special Response Team (SRT) used chemical agents on protestors. They sprayed pepper spray, tear gas, and pepper bullets. This wasn’t to control the crowd, but rather to intimidate them. They were trying to intimidate protesters and stop them from exercising their rights, which are protected by the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution.
The Broadview Police Department, responsible for the jurisdiction in Broadview surrounding the ICE detention center, failed to protect our right to peacefully protest and failed to intervene when ICE agents threw tear gas, shot pepper bullets, and pepper-sprayed us. It is not because they didn’t know what was happening. The Broadview Police drove by multiple times, slowly, at the end of the street, clearly witnessing what was happening, before ultimately driving away and taking no action. They chose to treat us like sheep to the slaughter.
The photographs below illustrate the absence of police in real-time. These photos were taken within 30 seconds of each other. You can see the protestors saying, “This is not okay, Fuck the Law.” While ICE SRT agents were right outside the facility, there were several feet of space between them and the protestors, and notice, not a single police officer in sight. Once they backed up into the facility, agents fired pepper bullets onto the ground. They shattered and released a toxic chemical agent that irritates the eyes, causes persistent coughing, and can even trigger vomiting in some cases. There was no reason for them to do this, and they showed their cards: pure intimidation.
Chemical agents in the air.
I can’t fully articulate the way your body burns from chemical agents irritating your skin, your tear ducts, and your lungs. Even after the particles disperse in the air, you’ll still cough for hours, want to rub your eyes, and not be able to think straight. The heat radiating off my skin fogged up my glasses, and I couldn’t see through the lens, so I had to pray I was capturing the scene. It felt important to continue documenting what was happening around me, even as I squinted and blinked repeatedly.
As a disabled photographer who has a traumatic brain injury (TBI), my body already struggles to process and regulate heat. As I documented, my goggles would constantly get fogged up, and the stress would trickle through my body, and the pepper spray only made this worse, but the one thing that kept me going was that it was bigger than me; it was about all of us.
I kept telling myself the pain was temporary, but this needed to be recorded. With a government that is trying to destroy voices and redact historical records, it is even more urgent to document civil rights being obstructed by ICE government-funded agents who mean to do you harm.
However, I think one of the most uncomfortable dystopian realities for me is that the detention center is only a 5-minute walk from I-290. You have thousands of cars and people driving by on their way to work or heading home to see their family and friends, oblivious to the fact that right off the highway, people are being harmed. I think that if more people knew what was happening in these detention centers, they would be outraged, but the mainstream media is largely silent on this issue.
I have been at this same detention center during the early mornings. If you look at my previous photo essay, you’ll notice that about 30-40 police officers were on duty to “protect” the protestors against unreasonable force. Not this time. Not only were the police absent, but in not showing up, they signaled to the ICE SRT agents that it was okay to harass and harm the community that they are sworn to protect.
It’s time to defend our civil liberties.
The Constitution was designed to prevent tyranny through checks and balances, elections, and the Bill of Rights. History shows that when those safeguards are ignored, power can consolidate and crush the very freedoms we were promised and by our government’s own founding narrative are supposed to be what it means to be an “American.” Our right to speak, to gather, and to petition the government is not just a phrase on paper. These rights are the living tools given to us so we can resist oppression when those in power overstep their bounds. Which right now, they absolutely are.
The Declaration of Independence goes even further, declaring that when a government becomes destructive to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it is not only the right but the duty of the people to resist and create something better. That spirit lives on in protest. Standing silent while oppression spreads is the same as granting it permission to grow. The Founders did not wait politely for tyranny to fade. They confronted it head-on and demanded a new future.
Today, when authorities and elected officials abandon their responsibility to protect and instead use their power to intimidate, suppress, or harm, protest becomes more than symbolic. It becomes survival. To stand up against authoritarianism is to honor the very foundation of this nation. Protest is not rebellion against democracy. It is the defense of democracy when the system itself is under siege.
Make no mistake, this may seem far away if it’s happening in Chicago, LA, Seattle, D.C., etc., but eventually tyranny always makes it to your front door. If we act like sheep, we will become sheep, and then suddenly no one will be standing up for our collective civil rights.
We will be sheep to the slaughter unless we unite and find a way to stand up to a tyrannical government. These photographs may be uncomfortable to witness, but now is not the moment to look away. Independent photojournalism and documentary photography are more important than ever. When our First Amendment rights are violated and the mainstream media buckle under pressure to remain silent, the voices of people on the ground become that much more vital.
Without the First Amendment, liberty falls.
