When ICE hits home
Commentary by Chitown Kev
I was up until about 3am Sunday morning putting the finishing touches on Sunday morning’s Abbreviated Pundit Roundup. I had to report to work later on that morning so, secure that APR was tight, I went to sleep.
I woke up about 9 or so and went to check my phone for updates and that’s when I saw the texts and had a voice mail from Miss Denise that the APR denizens were concerned about me given the recent federal actions in Chicago and much of Cook County.
I assured everyone that I was good and that I had simply forgot to post the APR in the queue.
However, considering the ICE surveillance and detainments south and north of Howard Street in Chicago, people were right to be concerned.
NBC 5 Chicago:
Chicago's Rogers Park community remained vigilant after reports of federal agents near a Catholic church during Sunday mass.
A neighbor, who wished only to be called by her first name, shared cell phone video with NBC Chicago from 8:30 a.m. She explained what she saw from her home just outside St. Jerome Catholic Church on West Lunt Avenue.
"There was like four guys," the neighbor named Julie said. "They were in camouflage and saying something to the car, and I started yelling out the window to go away. They did leave then went this way in like a little caravan."
Julie said she ran down to make sure they weren’t "hassling everybody at the church."
Telemundo Chicago obtained cell phone video from a parishioner inside the church at the 8 a.m. mass. The priest gave an unexpected warning to parishioners, urging them to leave cautiously because immigration officers were reportedly in the area.
I was a resident of the East Rogers Park neighborhood for over a decade from the 1990’s to the mid 2000’s. I have walked in front of St. Jerome’s countless number of times on the the way to a recovery meeting or to get something to eat or simply to hang out. I’ve never been inside the main church but I have been inside the parish house a few times.
I may not have lived in Rogers Park for over a decade but I do go to the “People’s Republic of Rogers Park” often. I still eat there. A lot of friends and acquaintances live there. I got sober there. I went to university there.
Back in the 1990’s Rogers Park was easily one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the entire country and even though gentrification hit the area in the early 2000’s, it’s still extraordinarily diverse.
Given the recent ICE activity in Rogers Park and St. Jerome’s Church, it is my duty to inform everyone that there are quite a few predominantly immigrant church congregations in the area and not all of them are of Mexican or Latino origin. There is also a sizable LGBTQ+ population. Everyone...and I mean everyone is welcomed there.
And everyone should feel threatened by ICE activity in the area.
I did say “north of Howard Street in Chicago”...which means the city where I live now, Evanston.
Evanston Roundtable:
Federal immigration enforcement agents detained two people on Sunday morning outside the Home Depot on Oakton Street in southwest Evanston, according to Mayor Daniel Biss and the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.
Biss confirmed the presence of ICE agents in the city in a social media post around 3 p.m. Sunday, sharing resources for residents to report sightings.
“ICE was once again a presence in Evanston and Rogers Park this AM, with masked men taking multiple members of our community off the street,” he said. [...]
Following that alert, Evanston’s youth soccer program, AYSO, sent an email to participants allowing coaches to cancel or postpone games scheduled for Sunday.
“James Park is directly across from Home Depot,” the email from AYSO Evanston said. “If you do not feel safe playing your soccer game today, do not go!”
I thought immediately of my best friend’s son, who is now in high school and is biracial (he is not of Latino descent).
As soon as I ran across this notice yesterday, I called up my friend and gave him the news. My friend does not follow the news regularly so I didn’t think that he knew about these incidents at James Park and Home Depot. And he didn’t.
After delivering the news, he had to call up a couple of people and form a plan of action for those that he’s close to, including his son. Then he called me back and had to decompress a bit.
Mind you, Rogers Park is not a “high crime” area of Chicago at all. Ditto for Evanston.
While Evanston is not as diverse as Rogers Park, there are sizable Latino and Asian communities in Evanston, including ones affiliated with the near-Ivy League Big 10 school Northwestern University.
Because of the ICE goons in my area and near my home, I don’t think that too many people feel safe any longer.
Yesterday, the Evanston City Council unanimously passed a resolution banning federal agents from using city-owned property in order to stage its operations in the area.
And just like that, the nearly perfect and relatively peaceful autumn days that we’ve been having lately have become days where anyone, American citizen or non-citizen, really, has to fear simply walking down the street just a little bit more.
And it has nothing to do with crime or with the area being “war-ravaged.”
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation announced a $50 million donation to Atlanta’s historically Black colleges and universities on Monday, aiming to close financial aid gaps that might otherwise prevent students from completing their degrees.
The money will support nearly 10,000 students with “gap scholarships” if they are approaching graduation in good academic standing and have exhausted all other sources of financial support. The aim is to raise graduation rates at Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse College, Morris Brown College and Spelman College, according to the foundation’s announcement.
“These grants are a material investment in hope,” said Fay Twersky, the foundation’s president.
The 10-year commitment comes days after the Trump administration said it would redirect nearly $500 million in federal funding toward HBCUs and tribal colleges as a one-time investment. A similar amount would be cut from colleges with large enrollments of Hispanics and other minorities, amid other moves to eliminate programs that promote diversity in higher education.
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In a corner of the new Museum of West African Art, visitors can marvel at a sample display of the cultural treasures that adorned the royal palace that once stood in its place: a proud cockerel, a plaque with three mighty warriors, a bust of a king with a glorious beaded collar.
The artefacts, collectively known as the Benin bronzes, were looted by British colonial forces who went on to burn down the palace in a punitive expedition in 1897. In the decades that followed they were scattered across collections in Europe and America.
Their return and public display inside the $25m (£19m) state-of-the-art museum in the city of Benin in Nigeria’s Edo state, co-funded by European governments and western enterprises, was to be the crowning moment of an almost century-long effort to reclaim Africa’s stolen art.
Yet when MOWAA opens its doors on 11 November, the only Benin bronzes on display will be clay replicas – a far cry from the “most comprehensive display [of Benin bronzes] in the world” touted by authorities when plans for the museum to become their home were announced in 2020.
About 150 original bronzes have been returned to Nigeria over the last five years, some on the initiative of private collections and some as acts of state by Germany and the Netherlands. For now, none are on public display.
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LAKE VICTORIA looks an inviting place for a quick dip. Don’t. Its waters are replete with tiny parasitic worms, called schistosomes, that drill through human skin and damage organs ranging from the liver to the brain. The result is bilharzia, an illness that affects about 200m people, particularly in Africa. It kills more than 10,000 of them a year, but that is not its only serious consequence. Many victims are children, and the parasites stunt both their physical growth and their cognitive abilities, damaging their personal prospects and dragging down the economies of what are already poor countries.
Bilharzia is treatable, but treatment does not stop recurrence and is not always easily available. Reducing exposure to the parasites would be ideal. In the case of Lake Victoria, a study in plos Neglected Tropical Diseases by Roland Proud of St Andrews University and his colleagues suggests boosting the lake’s badly degraded catfish population might help.
Schistosomes’ life-cycle involves two, alternating hosts—mammals (humans included) and aquatic snails. Take out the snails and you break the cycle. But attempts to do this with molluscicides have had limited success. Hence the interest of Dr Proud’s colleague, Andrew Brierley, in boosting catfish populations.
The late Dr Brierley (he died in 2024) had noticed that bilharzia goes up when certain pesticides are deployed adjacent to African lakes, and that these pesticides are killing predators, such as catfish, which eat snails. Boosting the predators might thus ameliorate the problem.
Unfortunately, catfish numbers in Lake Victoria have crashed in recent decades. Overfishing and the introduction of Nile perch, a predatory creature that wreaks havoc on native species, are to blame. A lot of boosting would thus be needed.
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