HAPPY HALLOWEEN

FROM HELL

Chicago’s ghosts wear Kevlar now. ICE has turned Halloween into a hunting season — not for candy, but for human beings. While the rest of us hang fake cobwebs and plastic skeletons, federal agents are out there making real families disappear. J.B. Pritzker asked DHS for a 72-hour pause so immigrant kids could trick-or-treat without fear. Kristi Noem, Trump’s executioner-in-chief at Homeland Security, said no. She didn’t even blink. That’s the America we live in now: where the government won’t stop terrorizing people long enough for a child to eat a Reese’s Cup.

The reports read like dispatches from a dictatorship. ICE stormed Chicago’s South Side under something called “Operation Midway Blitz,” as if they were storming Normandy instead of neighborhoods. Agents body-slammed protesters, fired pepper balls near a children’s parade, and dragged people into unmarked vans. The air stung with gas. Parents screamed. Kids dressed as superheroes learned what real power looks like — and it wasn’t justice. It was armored men with no faces, doing the work of a regime that feeds on fear.

Elsewhere, the nightmare metastasizes. In Louisiana, queer and trans detainees say they were forced into hard labor and sexually assaulted — not by make-believe monsters, but by officers with payroll numbers and pensions. Across the country, ICE runs secret black-site rooms where people are held for weeks without sunlight, lawyers, or medical care. They call them “temporary holding facilities.” We used to call that a dungeon.

And it’s not just immigrants. At least 170 U.S. citizens — Americans — have been detained, beaten, and held by ICE this year. Citizens. People born here. People who showed ID and were told it didn’t matter. People who disappeared into the system anyway. Every single one a reminder that authoritarianism doesn’t stop at the border; it just starts there.

Trump’s America calls this “restoring order.” But order built on terror isn’t peace — it’s choreography for cruelty. ICE has become the regime’s favorite horror franchise: a sequel that never ends, with fresh victims and the same old script. They don’t wear hockey masks or clown makeup. They wear ski-masks and government-issued windbreakers. And when they kick in the door, nobody yells “Cut.”

Governor Pritzker is still trying to push back, still pretending Washington might be capable of shame. But shame is a ghost too — it’s been dead since 2016. DHS mocked him for even asking. Because under Trump, empathy is treason, and mercy is weakness. They’ve turned compassion into contraband.

So tonight, when you open the door for trick-or-treaters, remember that other doors are being kicked in. Remember that while your kids sort their candy, someone else’s kid is watching strangers in body armor drag their mother away. Remember that Halloween costumes come off, but fear doesn’t.

This isn’t a haunted house anymore. It’s the whole country. The fog is tear gas, the masks are real, and the monsters are on the payroll. If you still believe in the promise of America — the one that doesn’t vanish at gunpoint — you’d better fight for it. Because the knock you hear tonight might not be kids looking for candy.

It might be the sound of your own government coming for someone who looks like you.

Happy Halloween.

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This isn’t journalism for the comfortable. It’s for the haunted, the furious, the ones who still believe truth should hurt like hell. Closer to the Edge isn’t the light at the end of the tunnel — it’s the torch we carry through it.