Photo: Colin Lloyd

The most consequential damage inflicted by Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem and Gregory Bovino’s bad-video-game-realized-in-real-life is, of course, in the lives being destroyed by ICE and its Operation Midway Blitz. But there is also a very real artistic cost shouldered by Latino musicians, artists, fans and storytellers, bleeding our city’s richest cultural veins in real time.

The first major cultural fallout came in July, when Michelada Fest—the two-day Latino music festival that drew roughly 15,000 people a day to Oakwood Beach last year—abruptly canceled its 2025 edition. Organizers bluntly blamed the political climate, saying they couldn’t secure visas for international performers or guarantee the safety of artists and audiences. A festival built by Latino entrepreneurs, showcasing dozens of Mexican, Central American and Caribbean acts, disappeared to avoid being a target of deportations.

Two months later, El Grito Chicago, the city’s primary Mexican Independence Day celebration, was called off. More than 25,000 people had been expected in Grant Park. Instead, organizers warned that holding the event “puts the safety of our community at stake.” Local mariachis, folkloric dancers and vendors lost one of their biggest annual stages.

Carlo Basile (right), the artistic director of Chicago-based Las Guitarras de España

That same fear has also crept into smaller rooms sporting Latino music. Carlo Basile, the artistic director of Chicago-based Las Guitarras de España, who has spent decades performing Spanish guitar with Surabhi Ensemble (an internationally touring Spanish, Indian, Middle Eastern and African-inspired performing troupe with a history of playing music for refugees and at orphanages), watched the bottom fall out over the summer. “Hispanic fans told me point-blank they were afraid to come downtown,” he says. Basile’s late-summer show at City Winery, which normally attracts a strong crowd, came in well under projections. “It was obvious who was missing,” he says. “The Latino side of our audience just didn’t come. They were scared to leave their neighborhoods.”

Basile also described the surreal tension behind the scenes. “There are Hispanic ICE agents pointing the agency toward neighborhoods they know well, telling them where other Latino people are living. People are really hurt by that, and they don’t know who to trust.”

Juan Dies, co-founder, guitarist and singer for the Grammy-nominated Sones de México Ensemble/Photo: Ricardo Oropa

Juan Dies, co-founder, guitarist and singer for the Grammy-nominated Sones de México Ensemble, has been hit just as hard. Dies, born in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, has been a cultural anchor in Pilsen for almost thirty years, teaching, touring and keeping regional Mexican traditions alive individually and as a founding member of Sones. He tells me that a Night Out in the Parks show at Dvorak Park, an affair that normally brings in 300 people, drew only twenty-five this year. Their community classes, which help fund the ensemble, saw enrollment collapse.

He also notes that their participation in Chicago’s World Fest U.S. was cut short after organizers faced disastrous attendance. “Even people with their papers in order are staying home to avoid harassment,” he says. When I ask about economic impact, Dies points out that it’s been a tough year for Sones de México and other collectives prior to the federal presence in Chicago. He mentions that DOGE-driven cuts to federal cultural agencies, including the NEA, NEH and IMLS, led to one of Sones de México’s approved grants being rescinded—a $20,000 matching grant intended to underwrite a multi-state tour. “Participating presenters would have matched the funds and at least doubled the amount of the grant,” he says. “The impact was not only the loss of the grant amount but also the opportunity to tour and multiply this funding.”

According to a University of Illinois at Chicago and Great Cities Institute report, Chicago’s nonprofit arts sector generates roughly $1.7 billion in annual economic activity, supports about 11,000 jobs, and produces more than $250 million in local and state tax revenue. Census Bureau data indicates nearly thirty percent of Chicago’s population is Latino. So roughly a third of our city’s performers (and their fans) are undermined by all of this, which is certain to drive economic and cultural impacts we cannot measure until this mess is over.

This injustice is driving at least one cultural phenomenon, born out of an inevitable response to ICE and DHS’ deployment in our city. Chicago’s Black and brown communities have a history of being thoughtlessly segregated in our city, leading to complex tensions between them, and prior to ICE and DHS’ deployment, it was rising. In 2024, Politico reported that Chicago’s decision to place large migrant shelters in Black neighborhoods— including giving some new arrivals six months of free rent—“stirred deep resentment among longtime Black residents who have spent decades asking for the same resources.”

The highly reported raid at 7500 South South Shore Drive, which produced viral videos shared by outraged Chicagoans (later propagandized as promotional material by Kristi Noem), has surfaced a unifying energy between these groups. The midnight operation targeted a five-story property with a racially mixed population in a historically Black neighborhood. About forty recently arrived Venezuelan families lived there alongside longtime Black U.S. citizen tenants.

VicMensa, 2017/Photo: Fr8nkmorales

Vic Mensa, the cerebral Black rapper who grew up in Hyde Park–not far from South Shore—penned an op-ed for the New York Times in October as a direct response to the raid.

In that piece, Mensa draws the tension back to Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s stunt of busing 50,000-plus Venezuelan migrants to Chicago. He describes meeting newly arrived Venezuelan families in 2023, and cooking for them with a local restaurateur. He writes about how that strain—and the resentment it produces—is exactly what Abbott and the Trump administration intended: to manufacture further discontent amongst these two populations. Mensa argues that what’s happening in Chicago isn’t a Latino issue or a Black issue; it’s a federal attack on both, designed to pit them against each other and to justify escalating force.

The engineered divide is being combated artistically. Chance the Rapper flashed a “Fuck ICE” sign at a local show while performing “Drapetomania,” a 2025 track that calls out federal enforcement. On the underground side, Recoechi, a South Side artist who is outspoken about the raids, dropped “Concentration USA,” a song written directly in response to ICE’s militarized presence. Carlo Basile also points out “Vencerá” by Las Guitarras de España, a new track on his album written with longtime collaborator Patricia Ortega, which frames the raids through lyrics about endurance, dignity and everyday immigrant life. Taken together, these three tracks form an early soundtrack of a moment where Chicago’s Black and brown artists are raising an artistic middle finger to the infiltration of one of America’s most diverse cities.