Friday lunchtime, a guy was walking his fluffy dog at the corner of Henderson and Lakewood streets in Chicago’s leafy Lakeview neighborhood. On any other sunny, autumnal Friday, such a stroll would have been as calming and uneventful as the city gets.

But on this most recent one, the man found himself at what looked like a scene from the TV show “Chicago Fire,” which has filmed on and around this very block: he came upon screaming, yelling, fighting, spilled blood, tear gas canisters and masked federal agents in military-style fatigues moving their vehicle backward down a one-way street as an infuriated neighborhood repelled them with all the force its collective voice could muster.

The man responded in kind: screaming and hollering at the agents as they took a man away from a $300,000 renovation of a classic Chicago three-flat, even as he tried to keep hold of his dog. He didn’t care what the worker allegedly had done nor did he care about his immigration status and even if he had, no one would have explained. The man just wanted the invaders gone.

Had someone happened on this scene without the context of an immigration enforcement operation happening over the strenuous objections of the residents of an American city, they would not have believed their eyes, any more than they would if they had happened on a similar scene in the Old Irving Park neighborhood where, as the Tribune reported, “residents were tackled and tear-gassed as children prepared for a Halloween parade.” Little Village and Southeast Side residents, among others, have experienced the same.

Let that sink in, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. A conservative from South Dakota should understand that man’s impulse is to defend his homeland from invaders.

If you are radicalizing the Chicago guy with the poop bag and making kids in wizard hats rub their eyes, then, Madam Secretary, you are not doing your job very well. And if you don’t think that is happening, well, you are wrong. We watched it happen in real time.

Sure, that is your underling, Border Control Cmdr. Greg Bovino, who is rightly being hauled into court Tuesday to explain this apparent federal fixation on tear gas, with or without violent provocation (we’ve seen both but only one is acceptable and even then only in extreme circumstances), but this situation in Chicago is on you, Madam Secretary.

Period. These agents report up to you. You probably see yourself as effectively subservient on this matter to Stephen Miller, Homeland Security adviser, and even Tom Horman, acting ICE director, but their job titles don’t read United States secretary of Homeland Security. Yours does. History keeps its eye on you.

And it will watch and judge harshly even if you see yourself as necessarily hunkered down in the face of a hostile liberal media, instructing people how to track ICE agents; even if you are yourself certain that agents are going after only those whom everybody should want gone; even if you know, as do we, that deportations did not begin with the second administration of Donald J. Trump.

That’s not our point here and it is our hope that makes what we have to say a little less easy for you to dismiss, as you have most of the other coverage of the aggressive Chicago forays of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents into our streets where kids play.

Your job is United States secretary of Homeland Security and you’re overseeing a situation in the homeland that is anything but secure and getting less so by the day.

As we’ve said when this escalation began and the rhetoric on all sides began flying out of control, someone is going to get hurt. Snatching people at hospitals or places of worship or taking their kids to school in military-style raids is unacceptable, not just to those whom you see as your political enemies but also to those of more moderate or even sympathetic leanings.

This is not welcomed. There has to be a moratorium on these kinds of un-American tactics and there has to be one now. This is not outrage over a ballroom project or a tasteless meme; this is outrage over kids seeing things that are impossible to forget. And over American kids suddenly having a parent swept away.

As impossible as it may seem, the different factions of government — federal, state and local — simply are going to have to have conversations. We’ve said many times that all of this is a consequence of the long-term failures of the elected representatives of the American people to find some middle ground on immigration matters and exact (and then enforce) comprehensive immigration reform.

But right now, that is not what is uppermost in our minds. What is uppermost is that this invasion of the bodysnatchers has to cease and be replaced by negotiations. We don’t care if some find that prospect unlikely, or its very suggestion naive. We are less than one year into this administration. We don’t care for three more years of this. Enough already is enough.

Madam Secretary, the Illinois governor is not going to call your boss or proffer some assurances that assuages his ego.

So call a halt.

___

©2025 Chicago Tribune. Visit at chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.