Disasters, Invisible and Visible

One of my favorite stories from Chicago's recent history is the invisible flood that happened in 1992 that forced the shutdown of downtown Chicago for days. Repair work was happening on the Kinzie Street bridge, one of many that span the Chicago River. They were replacing nearly hundred-year-old pilings with updated ones that were driven deep into the ground beneath the river. Unbeknownst to anyone, one of the pilings was too close to an forgotten coal delivery tunnel that had been dug in 1906. Slowly, the clay soil between the piling and the tunnel eroded away and a small leak began to form.

As things do, that small leak became a bigger one, and that bigger one became a problem when, suddenly, janitors and maintenance managers across the Loop discovered deep water in the basements and sub-basements of their buildings. Some buildings reported nearly forty feet of water. The colossal Merchandise Mart found fish swimming in their sub-basements!

At first, nobody knew where it was coming from. The city turned off water mains, assuming there was a leak somewhere in their system. But eventually they figured out it was the old coal tunnels, which had long-forgotten openings in most of the buildings across downtown and to which there was never any formal map (many of them had actually been dug illegally). By the time they discovered it, the hole in the tunnel was 20 feet wide. You could see water swirling on the surface of the river like it was being flushed down a toilet. And yet, on the streets, everything was dry. My friends and I took the L downtown while it was happening. We walked the nearly-abandoned streets and marveled at the invisible disaster raging underneath our feet.

There's a different type of invisible disaster unfolding across Chicago now. ICE and Border Patrol agents have been terrorizing immigrant communities across the massive geographic expanse that is the greater Chicago area. Instead of focusing on the city proper (though certainly they've been there as well), they seem to be concentrating on border suburbs, especially on the southwest side, though they've ranged as far north as Waukegan and as far south as Joliet, two cities 75 miles apart from each other. The raids are often pre-dawn and lightning-fast, agents gone within minutes, though that's not always the pattern. A traffic stop by ICE in the light of day in northwest suburban Franklin Park left a dad, who had just dropped his kids off at school, dead two weeks ago.

The speed and unpredictability of the ICE roundups make hearing about them difficult. News organizations can't be everywhere all at once, not to mention most of the orgs in Chicago are in a defensive crouch from years of layoffs and budget cuts. As a result, there's much less visibility on this unfolding tragedy than there should be. While some days get lots of coverage, focused largely around the ICE detention facility in the suburb of Broadview where daily protests have been held for weeks, other days this disaster is nearly invisible unless you know where to look.

There is amazing coverage happening, don't get me wrong, but you have to work to seek it out. For me, my go-tos are largely on Twitter alternative Bluesky:

Unraveled Press is the load-bearing element to much of the up-to-the minute coverage of what's happening around Chicago. They're at the Broadview facility most days, and doing an admirable job of spreading disparate social media videos and reports of ICE raids from elsewhere across the region. That it's fallen on a tiny two-person outlet is pretty much everything you need to know about what makes this disaster invisible. It's also a reason to send them some money. I sent $50, and I'll be sending more once I've got it.
Shawn Mulcahy, the news editor of the Chicago Reader has also been at Broadview regularly and has been a must-follow on Bluesky for me. I wish the Reader was actually highlighting his work on their site more regularly, but they're going through it right now, so ¯\(ツ)/¯.
Organizer and author Kelly Hayes has also done a remarkable job of supplying to-the-minute information and photos from Broadview.

There are two news organizations that I also think are doing standout work:

Block Club Chicago, a local news startup that has been running laps around the incumbent Tribune and Sun Times for years now, has been doing good work covering raids and giving a wide-angle look at what's happening.
The TRiiBE is a growing, Black-owned news org that has been punching above their weight for a while now and has been doing good nearly-daily updates.

Other area news outlets, including stalwarts like the Tribune and Sun-Times, have been doing their best, but the coverage is often locked behind paywalls and gets buried under other stories quickly. But among all the Chicago news orgs, even the ones doing good work, the urgency of the situation isn't captured in the approach.

What's unfolding every day—neighbors snatched off the streets, protesters teargassed and shot with pepper balls—should be treated like a disaster: pull down the paywalls and subscription pop-ups, make the coverage accessible to all comers. Get people up-to-speed on what's happening every day in a way that is comprehensive and accessible. In a way that makes the invisible visible.

To me, the gold standard for this comes from an unexpected source: The (formerly) food-focused website LA Taco, who found themselves in the position of doing the best reporting when ICE swept through Los Angeles and disproportionately targeted the same street food vendors that LA Taco had covered for years. They realized that, like it or not, they were best situated to cover this unfolding disaster.

What the folks at LA Taco, not the LA Times, figured out was that while it was impossible to have on-the-ground reporting from sweeps happening across a metro area as colossal as LA, we live in a time where most everything is documented and uploaded to social media in near-real time. They took to compiling these social media videos and reports into a vertical video Daily Memo that simply runs down where ICE has conducted raids that day across the vast LA area. The LA Taco Daily Memo is required viewing now for folks in LA that want to keep up with what's happening there. They make their Daily Memo available as a video and as a written update on their website. I wish they provided them in Spanish as well, but they are a very small shop with limited resources. The Daily Memo is one of those ideas that's so obvious now that someone's doing it that I wonder why it hasn't been the standard all along.

So, in the hopes that obvious ideas can be grabbed and run with easily, here's a few thoughts from me on how to flesh LA Taco's Daily Memo idea out even more. If you're a news org in Chicago or anywhere else looking to do this, feel free to borrow, expand, and—most importantly—build.

Have someone whose dedicated beat through the duration of this disaster is to monitor social for reports/video/etc of ICE activities. Verify those reports, then put them in a spreadsheet. (Bonus points, make that spreadsheet open and available to all.)
Use that spreadsheet to build out a whole host of Daily Memo-style roundups:
- Like LA Taco, create vertical videos that you can put on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, as well as share on Bluesky, Twitter (ugh), and elsewhere.
- Make text-based roundups that are available on your website at a consistent location and with findable, predictable titles and tags. Daily Memos, for instance, always lead with, what else, "Daily Memo:" in their headline. That makes finding them really fast and easy.
- Use that text-based roundup to ground an ICE-specific mailing list that sends those daily updates directly to your readers. You can use that same mailing list for breaking alerts when necessary. Don't try and clog it up with other coverage. Stick to what's most important to the folks that subscribed. Respect their inbox.
- You've got each incident in small, atomized, texted-sized chunks, so push those to Bluesky, Twitter (ugh), and the others too. You could even push to phones via text if you have the infrastructure for it.
- Create a short audio roundup that you can push out to podcasting apps for people to listen to on their commutes or whenever. Again, we're talking quick hits here.
Please, do this in English and Spanish if at all possible.
This part is important: Dedicate a place on your website that won't get blown away by all the other news of the day that collects all of this and that is easily accessible from your home page, so that people can find your work immediately and accessibly. Make the URL simple: /ice or something else memorable.
- If your CMS is so inflexible that you can't do that (and trust me, I've worked with some of them and they definitely are that inflexible), build out a quick-and-dirty secondary site that you can host at a subdomain like ice.yoursite.com.

This is a list of every possible permutation I can think of. I know it's a lot! Pick and choose. Some orgs are already doing some of this, and that's great, push to do more. Not all of it is a heavy lift—even just creating clear headlines will go a long way. All of it is important. Does this take people? Yes. Does it take time? Also yes. If a freak earthquake hit Chicago, you would find the people and time to cover it. If those old tunnels opened up again and the Loop flooded, you'd find the people and time to cover it. This is a disaster that has claimed hundreds of victims so far. Cover it like it should be covered.

Make the invisible visible.

Published September 26, 2025. |

Have new posts sent directly to your email by subscribing to the newsletter version of this blog. No charge, no spam, just good times.

Or you can always subscribe via RSS or follow me on Mastodon or Bluesky where new posts are automatically posted.