On a cloudy Saturday earlier this month, a group of about 30 people spent the afternoon gathered in the basement of Christ Lutheran Church in Albany Park. This group, a mix of undocumented immigrants and U.S. citizens who live in the area, were there for a workshop aimed at educating the neighborhood on what to do if federal immigration agents show up and start knocking on people’s doors.
An estimated 511,000 undocumented immigrants lived in Illinois as of 2014, according to a report commissioned by the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. Of these an estimated 183,000 live in Chicago. The southwest-side Little Village neighborhood, which has had a substantial Mexican population since the 1970s, is home to about 20,000 undocumented immigrants. But recent waves of immigration “have created large undocumented populations in Belmont Cragin, Gage Park, Albany Park, and Brighton Park,” according to the report. Belmont Cragin has about 12,000 undocumented immigrants, while Albany Park has about 10,000.
“I came to this [workshop] because I want to prepare myself for whatever is going to happen,” said a 45-year-old undocumented woman in Spanish, who spoke on the condition that her name not be published. “We’ve always lived with uncertainty,” she explained, due to her immigration status, but since the election of Donald Trump, “everything is so much more uncertain.”
