Antifa militants stormed an Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in Chicago on Friday as part of a “May Day” protest.
Their efforts were pointless, as The Heartland Alliance building is currently vacant as it is undergoing renovations.
The Heartland Alliance is a non-profit organization that runs shelters to care for migrant children who have been brought to the country illegally.
In footage of the protest posted by a member of Antifa, masked militants are seen vandalizing the streets as they marched to the building and lighting explosives and smoke bombs upon their arrival.
As black-clad protesters lit fireworks around the building, others spray painted and vandalized the building with messages like “free them” and “baby jail.” They also dropped a banner from the roof of the building which read “close the jails, open the houses.”
“Brick by brick, wall by wall, burn down the prisons — free them all,” the protesters chanted as a militant stood on the roof with smoke all around them.
A report on the trespassing was published on the Antifa blog “It’s Going Down,” which referred to the unoccupied shelter as a “torture chamber.”
“We are occupying this building in solidarity with all of the rebellious children who have been detained here in the past, those who are still being detained elsewhere, incarcerated people everywhere, and all who continue to experience violence at the hands of the state. With each passing day of this pandemic, we realize, as some have long known, that coronavirus is not the only thing killing us – it’s effects are weaponized by systems we are told to trust and rely on but which are actively harming and disposing of us,” the activists who stormed the building said in a statement.
The statement went on to claim that Heartland Alliance is a “a non-profit organization masquerading it’s sinister program of social control as altruistic endeavor.”
“This detention center is currently empty, not because Heartland has started releasing kids to their families but because the brick and mortar cage is being renovated and re-secured to continue detaining and traumatizing children or to transform it into another type of carceral facility to hold our houseless neighbors while thousands of CHA units remain vacant. Regardless, this building’s purpose will be to surveil, control, and criminalize,” the statement continued.
The Clarion Project reports that “after police were called to break up the protest, one protester had to be tackled by officers on the facility’s roof. Police, who were forced to bring a fire truck, climbed up to the roof on the truck’s ladder, only to have the protester dangerously grab the ladder. The protester was subsequently tackled on the roof by a police officer.”
It is unclear how many arrests were made, if any at all. The Gateway Pundit has reached out to the Chicago Police Department for more information and will update this story if it is provided.
