At the McKinley Park News, we very carefully consider our choice of verbiage and language that frames the reporting of our news, acting always in the service of providing our readers with the most accurate and truthful relation of what’s going on in our neighborhood.

The editing process for our article “ ICE Terror Top Concern at Community Policing Meeting ” included interesting consideration of how current local actions by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) should be portrayed in news reporting.

After careful consideration, the McKinley Park News employs terms like “abduction” because it is the most accurate description of ICE’s recent actions in Chicago, which seemingly follow no law, convention, history or concern beyond that of political and racial oppression. 

We’ve made this determination for many reasons, including the following:

• ICE is secret police. ICE provides no information on those they grab, disappearing individuals without due process and cutting off communication to family and legal counsel. Many times these seizures are violent, conducted by surprise and by anonymous gunmen who refuse to identify themselves.
   
  Because of this, as a news outlet, we have no way of knowing whether any incident is conducted by ICE or not. Criminals in masks are aping ICE’s anonymity to abduct, steal and violate: The FBI is even pleading that ICE officers identify themselves because of all the impersonators committing street crime, kidnappings and sexual violence.
   
  We’d welcome ICE’s public disclosure of all its local activities and information on those it seizes in order to consider it toward reporting. However, as long as ICE is secret police who follow no legal standards, seizure incidents will most accurately be described as abductions.
   
• ICE commandant Gregory Bovino stated that ICE seizes people not based on crime, but on how they look , and just before Chicago’s ICE operations, the U.S. Supreme Court provided a shadow-docket OK to use race as the primary reason for ICE to seize someone .
   
  As dissenting Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayer wrote, “… all Latinos, U.S. citizens for not, … are fair game to be seized at any time, taken away from work and held.”
   
  The McKinley Park News disagrees that government seizure of a person should be based on racism, and it can’t be considered a legal “arrest” or “detention” if its impetus is the crime of being brown. 
   
  News language that legitimizes actions based on racism serves to support and normalize that racism. 
   
• Despite its assertions, ICE does not focus on crime. According to news reports on the ground in Chicago, ICE’s actions follow the easiest and laziest paths toward fulfilling U.S. President Donal Trump’s stated deportation quotas, yanking workers and parents, elderly and young, off the streets and out of homes and businesses. 
   
  ICE has not cleaned up O-Block or focused on gang members or other hardcore criminals: ICE predominantly seizes street vendors, gardeners, temporary workers and others who pose zero criminal threat and may have committed no offense other than civil immigration violations. 
   
  ICE’s purpose in Chicago has seemingly never been to fight crime. In fact, the biggest source of violence and fear on the streets of Chicago right now is ICE itself, as it terrorizes not only those it targets for deportation, but also any member of the community who steps up to protest, object and record ICE’s extra-legal actions.
   
  News language that posits a legitimate law enforcement role for ICE ignores the facts on the ground in Chicago and across the country.
   
• ICE is the personal instrument of Trump’s oppression. ICE operates as an unaccountable, opaque, heavily armed gestapo answerable to and directly controlled by Trump, who’s busy putting zealots in place to ensure ICE’s loyalty and brutality .
   
  Republicans and their Democratic allies who voted to open the government have now also enabled full funding of ICE: giving it more money than most countries’ military budgets and raising the specter of ICE agents on every street corner, in every city, all the time. You think it’s bad now? Just wait.
   
  Trump has repeatedly stated his desire and intent to use violence from U.S. armed forces against law-abiding Americans: both immigrants and citizens. Honest reporting about ICE activity will take this context into account.

The safe and profitable route for news organizations is to apply standard crime reporting language to coverage of Trump and ICE, no matter the facts and how this engenders legitimacy for harmful and illegal behavior. 

This is the unfortunate default for many news outlets, even some that pose as having a concern for ICE’s illegal actions in Chicago. All of them make a choice to normalize Trump and ICE by employing language that markets ICE’s actions as legitimate.  In contrast, the McKinley Park News uses language that pulls no punches and speaks directly and honestly to our audience. 

I am proud that every element of our local news reporting is factually accurate and supported by our independent editorial voice that allows us to tell the truth about what’s going on in Chicago’s McKinley Park neighborhood. 

I have the utmost respect and am so impressed for your careful and accurate choice of verbiage in your articles about the unlawful federal activities in this wonderful city.

Thank You for your coverage and your accuracy and your thoughtful descriptive word choices.

Justin, you are w wonderful writer.

You are most welcome! Thank you so much for your feedback.