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By Billal Rahman
Immigration Reporter
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In the South Side of Chicago, where immigration enforcement agents have increased operations targeting local communities, one local pastor has become a visible figure leading nonviolent protests.
Reverend David Black of the First Presbyterian Church of Chicago has drawn national attention for confronting federal authorities while emphasizing faith, forgiveness, and calls for accountability.
Chicago has become a focal point in the national debate over immigration enforcement as federal authorities escalate operations under the Trump administration’s Operation Midway Blitz. The initiative has involved increased ICE activity across the city, including arrests and targeted actions in neighborhoods with large immigrant populations. Critics say the operations have heightened fear among residents and strained community relations, while federal officials argue the measures are necessary to enforce immigration laws and detain individuals with criminal records. The city’s prominence in these enforcement efforts has drawn attention from civil liberties groups and local leaders like Black.
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Black said he was taking part in a protest outside the Broadview ICE facility last month when federal agents fired on him, striking him seven times in rapid succession with pellets that released a chemical irritant, including two shots to his head, one on the top of his head, and one along his hairline on his face.
"I arrived at Broadview in the early evening with a clergy colleague, and almost immediately when I arrived, I felt very moved to just pray for the ICE agents," Black told Newsweek. "I stepped up towards the building, didn't cross any lines, didn't block any cars. I just stood by the building with my hands out, stretched in prayer, and warned the ICE officers of the spiritual consequences of what they were doing."
"As I was praying for them, they opened fire on me," Black said
"As a Christian and as a minister of the grace and mercy of God and the beneficiary of that grace and mercy, I forgive these ICE officers, and as an American citizen and a neighbor to my neighbors, I need them to be held to account," Black said. "I need to see justice and accountability for their actions and for the actions of those who are creating the protocols and giving them orders, because this is not acceptable."
The Department of Homeland Security offered a different account. DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said on social media that protesters had been blocking an ICE vehicle from leaving the facility, impeding operations, and ignoring repeated verbal warnings.
McLaughlin said some participants threw rocks, bottles, and launched fireworks at law enforcement officers.
She emphasized that the facility held individuals with criminal records, including gang members and drug offenders, and that obstructing law enforcement could put officers, detainees, and the public at risk.
"If you are obstructing law enforcement, you can expect to be met with force," McLaughlin posted on X on October 8.
"This is the same 'pastor' who flipped @Sec_Noem and our team the bird when we were there last week," she added.
Black has joined a federal lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s handling of protests in Chicago. The American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit, filed by journalists, clergy, and residents, alleges that federal agents used tear gas, pepper balls, and other force to intimidate peaceful demonstrators and reporters, raising First Amendment concerns.
"What ICE is doing in Chicago is absolute viciousness, and what we are observing is that they're testing out tactics. They're seeing what they can get away with," Black said.
Meanwhile, a federal appeals court has temporarily upheld a lower court’s decision, blocking the Trump administration from deploying National Guard troops in Illinois. The ruling allows the troops to remain under federal control but prevents their use on the streets of Chicago or elsewhere in the state while litigation continues.
The decision follows a previous ruling by U.S. District Judge April Perry, who found no substantial evidence of rebellion in Illinois and criticized the Department of Homeland Security’s justification for the deployment. The Trump administration has indicated it may consider invoking the Insurrection Act, a 1807 law that grants the president authority to deploy military forces to suppress civil disorder, if courts continue to block the deployment of troops.
The court rulings and the administration’s consideration of the Insurrection Act highlight the ongoing tension between federal enforcement efforts and local communities in Chicago, a landscape where Black’s ministry and activism have become increasingly prominent.
Black is an ordained teaching elder in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and has served as pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Chicago since 2020.
He was raised in a variety of Protestant and Evangelical traditions around the world and is spiritually influenced by Quakerism. Black earned a Master of Divinity, a Master of Arts in Christian Education and Formation with a focus on Ministry with Young People, and a Certificate in Black Church Studies from Princeton Theological Seminary in 2018.
His ministry emphasizes community engagement and supporting individuals and groups who have experienced marginalization.
"It's, in my view as a Christian minister, a miracle of God's grace and glory and power that nobody has been killed by what ICE has been doing to protesters," Black said.
"Chicago is not OK. What makes me deeply hopeful is the people of Chicago who are showing up with $40 of protective gear to face down ICE agents with rifles and $50,000 of tactical gear. That is a level of valor and solidarity and love for our neighbors that is breathtaking to me."
Read the interview With Pastor Black Below:
What inspired you to go around Chicago and start protesting?
I was inspired by my faith. Christianity is a religion that teaches that God came into the world to be among us and to go with us and to suffer as we suffer. So when my neighbors in my community are suffering under very similar conditions to the ones that Jesus was born and raised under, the occupation of an imperial regime, I am moved to live my faith in an embodied way, the way that I believe Jesus calls all of his followers to do. So for me, there's been no question about where my faith calls me to be at this moment, as my neighbors and people in my community are being kidnapped and zip-tied, elders and children, people who are citizens and people who are non-citizens, being abducted and disappeared and brutalized in the process.
How would you describe the situation on the ground in Chicago?
It's hard to find a word to sum it up. I live and I work in a community that is a few blocks away from the neighborhood of South Shore where just recently, a few days ago, federal agents flew in on a Blackhawk helicopter, a war zone helicopter, to be dropped into a residential apartment building, breaking down doors indiscriminately, dragging people out, regardless of whether they were citizens or non-citizens, regardless of whether they were children or elders, zip-tying children and putting them into the back of a windowless U-Haul van.
Chicago is not OK. What makes me deeply hopeful is the people of Chicago who are showing up with $40 of protective gear to face down ICE agents with rifles and $50,000 of tactical gear. That is a level of valor and solidarity and love for our neighbors that is breathtaking to me.
And they continue to show up even as they are brutalized by ICE because they have such a deep conviction in the importance of showing up for our neighbors and demanding, against all hope, and just demanding that they be released because we want our neighbors to come home. And that gives me a lot of hope to join people who are singing songs of liberation and praying and chanting and peacefully applying all the power that we have in our bones to seek the liberation of our siblings and our friends.
What do you hope to achieve by peacefully protesting?
I do not believe that we can just wait for the government to save us from the government, that we can wait for kings and new leaders and heroes to step up and save us. The orthodoxy of my faith teaches that the Messiah has already come and he is already king over all of this, but we are called to be his body, to be the Body of Christ in the world, which means that every one of us needs to be activated in this moment to claim our agency. Democracy is not a spectator sport.
It is a creative process, and we are required to claim our agency as neighbors among neighbors, friends among friends, and organize, organize the world that we want to live in because it is available to us. What I keep seeing as I show up with protesters and clergy and such an enormous plurality of people who are gathering at these protests, what I keep discovering is that we are world-building, that we are becoming in the moment the world that we want to live in. We are practicing taking care of each other, keeping each other safe.
Earlier this year, the Department of Homeland Security overturned the policy that restricts ICE agents in locations such as churches. What are your views?
It's very consistent with a larger strategy that I see in the Trump administration of coming against community organizations like churches and other communities of faith that have been striving for decades and generations to keep our communities safe and organized so that we can protect each other. There is a strategy at work to dismantle, threaten, and intimidate these community organizations. And I find it very disturbing.
What's your message to people?
I find myself being hopeful in this moment. Because the witness of my faith and what Jesus taught is that the end of the world is near, and that it is good news.
Because the ending of what feels like the end of the world is actually just the birth pangs of a new creation. That is the gospel. And that is what I feel called to preach and to proclaim.
Because people are afraid, people are cynical, and people are disenchanted. But when I show up with my neighbors to bear witness against the cruelty and the viciousness of these federal agents, I get to see in real time that new creation being birthed into the world. Because of these people who are anonymously and so valorously stepping up to protect one another and to demand the liberation of our neighbors, it is such a privilege and a blessing to be shoulder to shoulder with these incredible people.
And I truly hope that more people in this country will avail themselves of the opportunity to be a part of this new and amazing thing that is blooming out of the wreckage of our systems in America. And so I hope that people have that hopefulness as they step out. People can leave behind despair and know that what we do in this moment is defining what the world is becoming in this moment.
We are not powerless. We have each other. And we can accomplish remarkable things when we show up in love and solidarity.
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