**Fuera Chicago**
The community group Palenque LSNA—formerly Logan Square Neighborhood Association, now Liberating Spaces through Neighborhood Action—is decrying violent arrests across Chicagoland by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.
“You are not welcome, not welcome in our neighborhoods in Chicago,” said Bethzaira Charluisant, an immigrant community navigator for Palenque LSNA, at a September 18 press conference in the Montclare neighborhood on the city’s northwest side. “Leave. Leave Chicago now,” she said in Spanish.
Palenque held the press conference in partnership with the Northwest Side Rapid Response Network, a volunteer coalition that works to alert the community to federal immigration enforcement sightings, confirm immigration arrests, and inform people of their rights during encounters with federal agents.
Before Palenque held its press conference at 9:30 AM, federal agents were across town, outside a Home Depot on 47th and Western in the southwest-side neighborhood of Brighton Park. It was the second day in a row they’d taken people from outside the hardware store.
Video shared by witnesses on social media showed federal agents lifting a man’s leg and pushing him to the ground, screaming as the agents stood over him. As federal agents departed the scene, they nearly struck a 17-year-old on an electric scooter who told independent news outlet *Unraveled Press* he had been on his way to school.
“I could have been right there on the floor dying, and they wouldn’t have cared,” the teenager said.
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**Dave Byrnes Ta-ta, Talley**
Chicago police veteran Yolanda Talley is stepping down from her role as the department’s second-in-command after just seven months on the job, reports ABC 7 Chicago.
Police superintendent Larry Snelling named Talley his first deputy in March. Yet in July, the *Chicago Sun-Times* reported Snelling had taken over leadership of the Chicago Police Department’s bureaus of patrol, detectives, and counterterrorism—all of which had previously been under Talley’s purview.
Talley rose through the police department’s ranks, serving as district commander and later as head of the agency’s internal affairs division. In February 2022, while Talley was internal affairs chief, her car was involved in a west-side drug bust.
Officers watched a man throw a ziplock bag with 84 packets of heroin from the passenger seat of a car that was registered to Talley but was actually being driven by Talley’s niece, according to the *Sun-Times*. When police stopped the vehicle, Talley’s niece reportedly told the officers, “Don’t worry about it ’cause my auntie’s probably your boss.”
According to WGN, police later returned the car to Talley’s niece even though she was driving on a suspended license. The Office of Inspector General did not find that Talley violated any rules.
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**Antibias Training Boycott**
In February, Northwestern University introduced a mandatory antibias training for students called *Building a Community of Respect and Breaking Down Bias*. Almost immediately, protests followed.
The university’s chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace claim material presented in videos titled *Antisemitism Here/Now* and *Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab and Anti-Palestinian Biases* actually reinforce discriminatory biases rather than dismantle them.
Now, as the fall quarter starts and students must complete the module to register for classes, some are petitioning the administration to remove registration holds for people who refuse to complete the training.
In an open letter published by SJP on September 22, the organization details inaccurate historical information and calls on the school to drop the required training. The organization writes that one training video claims Israel was founded in 1948 on British land and doesn’t mention the existence or displacement of indigenous Palestinian communities.
According to SJP, the module on anti-Semitism was created with the Jewish United Fund, a Chicago-based philanthropic organization that serves Jewish communities around the world and advocates for foreign policy issues affecting the safety, stability, and security of Israel.
SJP also voiced concerns in its letter about changes to the school’s student code of conduct, which effectively forbids the public posting of anonymous written critiques of Northwestern from unapproved student organizations on campus.
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**Enlightened Disagreement**
Speaking of Northwestern, the university’s president, Michael Schill, announced earlier this month that he’s resigning from a three-year tenure that was marked by a whirlwind of campus scrutiny.
Schill presided over a football hazing scandal, a student encampment protesting Israel’s genocide in Palestine, and disingenuous accusations from congressional Republicans and interest groups that he allowed anti-Semitism to fester on campus.
Partisans in Congress also targeted a Northwestern legal clinic in March for providing free representation to activists who organized an anti-Israel blockade on the highway.
The day of Schill’s resignation, the Coalition Against Antisemitism at Northwestern (CAAN), a self-proclaimed alliance of Jewish and non-Jewish stakeholders connected to Northwestern, released a statement calling on the university’s board of trustees to take new, concrete steps to return Northwestern to its original mission of academic excellence, integrity, and student safety.
“The University’s failures span years and include tolerance of antisemitic activism,” the statement read.
A new center on campus seems to be the university’s attempt to get ahead of its critics like CAAN. The day before Schill announced his resignation, Northwestern unveiled the Litowitz Center for Enlightened Disagreement.
The center will reportedly help the university nurture constructive engagement and discourse in an increasingly polarized world. A $20 million donation from trustee Jennifer Leischner Litowitz and her husband, Alec Litowitz, made the project possible.
The Litowitz Center will infuse principles of logical thinking and enlightened disagreement into the learning goals of a first-year seminar at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, according to a press release. One thousand incoming students are required to take the course as part of their curriculum each year.
The center will also partner with the university’s student affairs office to develop a curriculum, supposedly based on research, that will prioritize cultivating open-mindedness, identifying internal biases, and collaborating with people with whom students disagree.
“The intent of the center is to teach this type of critical thinking to create a foundation of understanding for constructive discussion and debate,” said Alec Litowitz in the press release.
“The result may not be agreement, but something equally valuable: enlightened disagreement. Jen and I see this gift as an investment in the future of the Northwestern community that will help drive real progress and change.”
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*Make It Make Sense* is a weekly column about what’s happening and why it matters.
https://chicagoreader.com/news/make-it-make-sense/ice-immigration-yolanda-talley-cpd-northwestern/