‘We do not need you here’: Lake County officials reject Trump’s immigration push
Pushback to the potential use of Naval Station Great Lakes to stage federal immigration and Homeland Security personnel for a pending push in Chicago stiffened Friday with more than a dozen Lake County community and elected leaders speaking out against the idea.
Speakers including Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton, U.S. Rep. Brad Schneider, state legislators, mayors, advocates and others gathered at Veterans Memorial Park in North Chicago thumped President Donald Trump to varying degrees with a clear message.
“We do not need you here. We do not want you here. There is no emergency in Illinois,” Stratton said.
The president’s forthcoming operation in Illinois with Great Lakes as its starting point “is meant to separate families and scare our communities into complying with his hateful agenda,” charged Dulce Ortiz, executive director of Mano a Mano Family Resource Center and president of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.
The organizations sponsored the hourlong late morning event to show unity in rejecting the idea of staging military and immigration enforcement personnel in Lake County or anywhere in Illinois.
There has been no word if or when National Guard troops would mobilize at Great Lakes. But the Trump administration plans to surge officers in Chicago in an immigration crackdown that may start as early as Sept. 5, The Associated Press reported Friday.
Great Lakes referred questions to the Department of Homeland Security/U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“President Donald Trump has been clear: we are going to make our streets and cities safe again,” according to an ICE spokeswoman. DHS are “arresting and removing the worst of the worst,” she added.
Speakers denounced that notion.
“Let me be clear — ICE raids do not make us safer,” said North Chicago Mayor Leon Rockingham Jr. “These raids are not law enforcement but instead they are fear enforcement, and I cannot go quietly into the night and allow our city to be a staging ground for cruelty.”
Other speakers emphasized immigration raids here are ill-conceived and not a path to safety. Stratton described them as “an engineered crisis designed not for safety but as a spectacle.”
Dozens of supporters, including Mark Rollenhagen, pastor of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Waukegan, filled the memorial plaza.
Rollenhagen, before the speakers began, said he was there “to support my colleagues of color and all people of color, who are apt to be most victimized by the efforts of the administration.”
He said it was encouraging to hear the messages.
“People need to speak,” he said.
Lake County Board Chair Sandy Hart said using Great Lakes as a base for ICE was “alarming, unprecedented and is a threat to our democracy.”
“The idea of a convoy of armored vehicles rumbling around Lake County for political posturing is straight out of a dystopian novel,” she said. “And yet, here we are.”