Bleak Beauty Blog

A dark cloud has descended upon America. Armed masked men are in our communities, seizing Brown and Black Americans. They act with impunity. The local police, hired and paid to protect us, do not interfere. In Chicago this reporter spent one day, chasing ICE. A single day. A new Cadillac Eldorado was parked in an alleyway, surrounded by neighbors. The doors were open, the windows smashed, as if some thugs had set upon it with baseball bats. The thugs are working for the United States Government; our tax dollars pay their salaries. Reports are that a screaming woman was dragged from the car. Inside was a child’s backpack and a child’s photograph and a booklet with Jesus Christ on the cover, which was covered in broken glass.

Throughout Chicago local defense groups have emerged, using whistles to announce when a caravan of ICE passes through a neighborhood hunting their prey, workers of Brown and Black color. Look at the myriad of videos that are all over the internet. Men screaming out of open car windows, a woman dragged out of school, men and women knocked to the ground in courthouses, where they have gone for legal refuge. Hundreds have disappeared. The Memorial pictured is to Silverio Villegas Gonzalez, 38, a man from Michoacán shot to death in his car by ICE in Franklin Park near Chicago. He had just dropped his two children off at school. This outrage, this Hitleresque event, is happening all over America.

The violence and destruction of our rights has produced a grassroots movement of opposition. Women and Men and Children with iPhones walk into clouds of tear gas holding their camera phones out as weapons. Police do not like to be photographed and filmed, and ICE reacts with violence. The woman dragged out of her Cadillac was trailing ICE, part of the community groups that have formed all across the country in order to protect their neighbors. An American citizen. She had joined a movement, a movement which is growing daily. Citizens against Ice is spreading across our land and it is a very, very good thing. The only answer to Fascism is courage and resistance. Photographers – this is the story of the  decade and it is growing. Don’t wait for a war to make you name. There is a war going on right now in the streets of the cities of America. It is an uprising. It is a remarkable show of courage by ordinary men and women and children. They have no armor. Their weapon is a camera phone. Like the civil rights movement, which used photography to win, videos of this outrage can bring it to an end. It’s not hard to find the resistance groups. They are in every city and neighborhood being attacked. Today it is Chicago and Los Angeles, tomorrow it is New Orleans. Journalists; go there.

Do they dare attack New York City, media capital of the Universe? Will Mayor Mamdani’s NYPD resist ICE and protect New Yorkers? They should. Get out and photograph it.