On Thursday morning, agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement were at the intersection of Clark Street and Lunt Avenue. They detained one man and ticketed another for not having his resident status paperwork. By early afternoon, when I arrived, ICE was gone, but a posse of anti-ICE activists had gathered at the corner. They handed out orange whistles, with instructions: three short blasts if you see ICE, three long blasts if ICE is detaining someone. As a federal helicopter buzzed overhead, the activists plotted patrols.

Chicago is the rehearsal ground for what’s becoming a militarized nationwide campaign against undocumented immigrants and those who seek to protect them. What’s happening here will soon be happening in Portland, in Memphis, in Los Angeles, in New York. But it’s also the rehearsal ground for what will, one hopes, become a nationwide campaign against Trump’s American-made brand of fascism. Whether he intended to or not, Trump couldn’t have chosen a better city for the beginnings of a resistance movement.

What’s significant about the protests in Chicago is that they have spread beyond the usual groups, the so-called “professional left” that can be counted on to attend every rally, and which started the demonstrations in Broadview, and into the neighborhoods where ICE is attempting to operate. When ICE agents were heckled in Logan Square and blocked from entering a grocery store parking lot, they responded by spraying the neighborhood, which is near Funston Elementary School, with tear gas. But neighbors banded together against ICE, as described by Chicago Teachers Union delegate Maria Heavener. As Bill Higgins told the blog The Party Cut, the principal at another nearby school — Moos Elementary School — also set up a system where families can help walk kids to their homes, or get groceries, if other families can’t go out as easily and need help. 

“The community is 100% united in support of one another, even as these guys are committing crimes and trying to turn our city into the war zone they always falsely accuse it of being,” Higgins said. “They’re making all of us unsafe and they aren’t helping with anything good.”

That kind of resistance is happening across the city. When 40th Ward Alderperson Andre Vasquez held a Community Defense Workshop on October 4 in the auditorium of Mather High School, he expected 300 people to show up. Instead, an estimated 700 did, filling the hall. One speaker advised attendees on what to do if they saw ICE agents snatching a neighbor. “Use your cars,” he said. “Block them. Don’t let them leave with your neighbors. Make their lives a living hell.” 

After the event, Vasquez told the Chicago Tribune’s Jake Sheridan that the turnout was so large because “people know what moment we’re in in history. They want to be on the right side of it.” The moment, as Vasquez identified it: “Fascism.”

Meanwhile, on the West Side, a group of business owners pledged their support to “ICIRR, not ICE,” referring to the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, a nonprofit that has trained 4,500 residents in its “Know Your Rights” campaign, and whose hotline is receiving a record 1,000 calls a day from frightened immigrants. ICIRR now has 30 rapid response groups of volunteers who document ICE in their neighborhoods.

“Don’t use our parking lots,” said a woman who identified herself as Ann from Play, the Chicago toystore, addressing ICE. “Don’t use our loading zones, and definitely don’t use our tax dollars.” Another speaker endorsed Sin Titulo’s Neighbor to Neighbor initiative. Sin Titulo, which describes itself as “a collective of Latina sisters,” is dropping off groceries to immigrants too frightened to venture outside.

In Belmont-Cragin, the group Belmont Cragin United is also handing out whistles that residents can blow when they see ICE agents. And around the city, businesses as small as laundromats are displaying “NO ICE” signs, and “Know Your Rights” flyers have been plastered to placards all over the city.

Everyday Chicagoans are proving that they’re the first line of defense against this extraordinary federal incursion into this city. The federal government’s efforts, not least the deployment of the National Guard, go beyond standard immigration enforcement: They are an attempt to undermine the rule of law and to fulfill the strongman ambitions of our president, who has openly mused about invoking the Insurrection Act. It can happen here, and it is. Chicagoans are organizing against it, not just for the benefit of our city, but for the entire country.