The Chicago Churches on the Frontline of Trump’s Deportation Wars

A yellow and white sign warning to call if you see ICE imposed over New Life Community Church in Chicago and murals seen around its Little Village location. (Composite of photos courtesy of Adrian Carrasquillo)

Chicago, Illinois
NEW LIFE COMMUNITY CHURCH, a nondenominational house of worship started forty years ago, has more than twenty-five locations dotted across the Chicago area. But two decades ago, church leadership realized it needed to better connect with the city’s youth. And so its founders created a nonprofit arm to provide everything from after-school programs, mentoring, camps, field trips, homework help, Bible study, and serious sports programming, including a partnership with the Chicago Cubs for little league baseball.

In short order, New Life became a village unto itself. It was there for its people—not just to nourish and spiritually fulfill them, but to protect them from dangers.

Those dangers have grown more insidious in recent months, as the Trump administration has fired up its mass-deportation machine.

Some of those leaders anticipated what was coming and tried to prepare for the worst. But even more have been struck by the ways in which mass deportation has, in just six months, remade both their community and America writ large. They speak in horror of anonymous gangs jumping out of SUVs in masks to take away working people. They describe the effects it has had on communities that had been built on principles of inclusion. And they brace for it to get still worse.

“We still have three and a half years left,” Andre Gordillo, the director of New Life’s southwest border arrivals program, told me as we sat at one of the conference tables at the facility. He said the problems for New Life extend beyond the abductions by ICE and the terror they cause. Because some of their programs rely on federal funding, the organization was gaming out what to do if that money dries up.

Walking into New Life’s Little Village location, which is shared by the church and nonprofit, you can still get a glimpse of what the community was like in a pre-Trump era. On Monday, I saw a Latina mom dropping off her two sons, who were excited to see what activities were available that day. Young teens ran up and down a basketball court. In an office down the hall, kids sat around a conference table chatting and eating lunch.

Inside the New Life Church and a portrait of Andre Gordillo (Photos by Adrian Carrasquillo)

This neighborhood of Chicago, also called La Villita, is 82 percent Latino and has the largest Mexican-American population in Chicago. Nearby, Mexican restaurants sell chilaquiles and agua frescas while Latino barbers laugh and talk outside their shops as norteño music plays. But if you stick around for just a little while, it doesn’t take much to see how profound the impacts of Trump have already been. In fact, they’re pretty much everywhere.