CHICAGO — From a back row of Jordan Temple Church, Katrina Thompson wiped her eyes, got to her feet and raised her hands in prayer as a black-and-white clad choir sang about the excellence of God.

When the Rev. Stephen Richardson took the lectern, she whispered to herself in response to his declaration that “God is not going to let us go down like this.”

“Mayor Thompson, those of you that live in Broadview, Maywood, Proviso Township —” Richardson said. “We’re going to be all right.”

“When we see the military come in—” Richardson said.

“We’re going to be all right,” Thompson repeated.

“When we see the National Guard come in —” Richardson continued.

“We’re going to be all right,” Thompson said again.

Throughout the service Sunday, Thompson’s Apple watch lit up with news notifications and updates from Broadview village staff. The 2.2 square-mile, majority-Black village, where Thompson is in her third term as mayor, has become the locus of what she sees as both a spiritual fight and a political battle.

It had been about a month since chaos erupted outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing center just inside Broadview’s village boundary. Confrontations between federal agents and people protesting “Operation Midway Blitz” have put the tiny suburb, and the first Black woman to lead it, under a national spotlight.

They have also forced Thompson into a tough balancing act as agents’ liberal use of chemical crowd controls have disrupted life for many of Broadview’s roughly 8,000 residents. As she’s decried the actions of the federal government and drawn parallels between the anti-ICE protests and the Civil Rights Movement — a cornerstone of her own political upbringing and philosophy — Thompson has also moved to limit demonstration hours outside the facility and called in state police to help corral protesters, saying her first obligation is to Broadview residents who must live with the effects of the confrontations around the clock.

“I know that I have to be kind,” she said. “I know that I have to make decisions. I just can’t take a position of fear.”

Coming to Chicago

Thompson’s first thought when she moved to the Chicago area almost exactly 30 years ago was: “I don’t own a coat. I don’t own a pair of close-toed shoes!”

Then 25, Thompson had called her mom from Inglewood, California, where she and her sister had grown up, and asked if she could follow her halfway across the country to west suburban Bellwood, where her mother had remarried into one of the village’s well-established Black families.

Thompson, now 55, said the ideas of service and being there for others had been entwined with her upbringing, starting with her and a friend’s habit of spending time with and reading to residents of a nursing home next door. Her grandparents, both born in the South in the 1930s, held onto memories of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington, his 1968 assassination and the 1965 assassination of Malcolm X.

When she arrived in Bellwood on Oct. 17, 1995, Thompson gave herself a month to find a job. If it didn’t work out by then, she said, she was going to head back to California. She got hired as an administrative assistant a month later.

At another early job, Thompson was working as the principal’s assistant at Lindop Elementary School in Broadview’s District 92, across the office from LeTisa Jones.

Jones, who described herself as more passive, was immediately struck by Thompson’s assertiveness. The first day they shared an office, she said other employees kept coming in and invading her desk space, much to Jones’ irritation.

“(Thompson) looked at me and she said, ‘You don’t have to back down to nobody,’” she said.

Thompson encouraged Jones to speak up for herself and to go out for a position as a seventh and eighth grade language arts instructor, which she ended up teaching for several years. They formed a friendship outside of work, bonding over their children and becoming so involved with each other’s families that they became more like sisters — Jones, now 56, refers to Thompson’s 26-year-old daughter as her niece.

Thompson first got involved in local politics through the Broadview Park District when her daughter was a toddler, working as a volunteer, then as a board member and later stepping down to become the district’s executive director. Jones was working as an executive assistant in a different school district before she became the first village administrator of Broadview in 2017, when Thompson won her first term as mayor.

They now work down the hall from each other. Although they see each other every day, they also make sure to see their other two best friends at least once a month, Jones said. Together, the circle of women say they make up the BAD sisters — short for “Blessed and Delivered.”

Jones said she had no fear about what the future might hold in the village, describing Thompson as “always ahead of everything” with faith to fall back on.

“It’s not bigger than God to us,” she said. “We know that God is over everything.”

Dealing with ICE

Thompson lived in a few suburbs before a realtor found her a nice second-floor condo in Broadview in 1997. There were two other draws — a good school district, for when she eventually had children, and the suburb’s reputation.

“My parents kept saying that Broadview was nice and quiet, and that’s what I wanted,” she said. “And I still have that today. Until ICE showed up.”

It is less a matter of ICE showing up and more that the agency’s activity has again attracted attention. Thompson found out the processing center existed in 2006 or 2007 because prayer vigils and other protests were taking place outside. One of those demonstrations shut down traffic on 25th Avenue at one point, she remembered.

Her campaigns for office have focused on issues that tend to dominate municipal elections such as fiscal responsibility and improved transparency. She is particularly interested in environmental safety and justice, a significant issue in a village with such a heavy industrial presence.

The fact that ICE runs a processing center in the village had never been an issue in any campaign she’s run, she said.

Nor has there been a relationship between the village and the federal government. As activity has spiked around the processing center, Thompson said she would like for that to change.

“We would like them to tell us what they’re doing, or at least make us aware. We get word when —” she paused. “When (expletive) hits the fan.”

She couldn’t recall any unusual activity at the facility during the first surge of immigration enforcement, shortly after Trump took office for his second term. It wasn’t even clear if the building was in use.

When “Operation Midway Blitz” began in early September, Thompson’s first thought was not for her own village, where there are very few, if any residents in the country without legal permission, and more for nearby suburbs, including Melrose Park and Franklin Park.

But as protests intensified around the city and suburbs the week after ICE agents shot and killed Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez in Franklin Park, federal agents began major deployments of tear gas and other chemical crowd controls against demonstrators outside the Broadview processing center at 1930 Beach St. That put Thompson on notice about two things, she said.

One: “Broadview was under a microscope.” Two: “This is bigger than a processing center.”

And she asked herself a question, alongside and encompassing both: “How do I keep people safe?”

Broadview’s tiny police and fire departments could not handle the crowds and other calls for service alone, she said, and they struggled at first to get assistance from neighboring suburbs.

Since then, Cook County and state officials have kicked into gear to help Broadview manage the confrontations outside the building — although the increasingly walled-off approach to the facility and additions of a “free speech zone” monitored by Cook County sheriff’s police and Illinois State Police troopers have prompted some protesters to accuse local agencies, including Broadview, of undercutting the mission of the demonstrations. State Rep. Emanuel “Chris” Welch, speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives whose district office is less than a mile from Broadview’s Village Hall, called and “asked to be kept in the loop.” Cook County President Toni Preckwinkle had been checking in daily, Thompson said. Former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot had been advising on “how to remain calm” as events churned on.

Thompson is sympathetic to the protesters and believes that the federal agents have violated their First Amendment rights in a way that is “not American.” She also sees the action on Beach Street as a new chapter of the Civil Rights Movement whose stories she grew up on.

“African Americans went through so much hard (that) was all based off of fear and intimidation,” she said. “And then you fast forward to 2025, where we are right now, and it’s different because it’s immigration, but it’s bigger than immigration.”

If people cannot express their dissent, she fears, the crackdown isn’t on illegal immigration anymore but something even more fundamental.

“If they take that away from us, guess what happens?” she said. “That’s against all of us.”

At the same time, she said, her first obligation is to Broadview residents, whom she routinely points out have no place to go when federal agents chase people into private backyards or deploy pepper balls that linger in the air.

“Our whole thing is not to antagonize or arrest people,” she said, discussing a recent executive order that limits protests to between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. “We just want people to come and show our community dignity and respect. Because when you leave here, you don’t live with the aftermath.”

A neighbor’s perspective

Bellwood Mayor Andre Harvey said it’s the job of people such as Thompson to “make sure those protesters go in and come home safely.”

“I don’t see that as assisting ICE,” he said. “I see that as traffic control. The village needs to ensure that they have safe travel.”

Harvey refers to Thompson as his little sister. They were both elected in 2017 and “made a pact that we were going to stay like sister and brother.”

They’ve navigated the ins and outs of public office together, he said, particularly the challenges of representing and advocating for small, majority-Black villages where “sometimes people write us off a little bit and have a perception of what our communities are just by the color of our skin.”

Over the last month, Harvey said, he’s watched from across the Eisenhower as Thompson has learned on the fly “while sitting in the command seat.” They have often compared notes on public safety issues, drawing on Harvey’s background as the village’s former fire chief and director of public safety, and he’s tried to offer help from his own experience as the protests and federal blowback have mushroomed.

“One thing that I tell her (is that) we didn’t create the problem, but safety is paramount,” he said. “And we’ve got to make sure that we manage the safety of everybody that’s involved.”

Harvey and Thompson each have a wooden painting depicting their faces alongside former Maywood Mayor Edwenna Perkins, underneath the words “BLACK HISTORY” hanging in their offices.

“Back in the day, (Thompson) would have been a candidate for the Black Panther Party,” Harvey said. “She wears her passion on her sleeve. She’s going to speak her mind.”

Practice love and kindness

Thompson frequently says she is not a person who makes hasty decisions. It took more than two weeks, three letters and one alleged threat of a “s—show” from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security before she called a news conference about the state of affairs outside 1930 Beach St.

Addressing reporters alongside other suburban officials and former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, Thompson said agents’ response to the demonstrations were un-American and called to mind “Putin’s Russia.”

The next day, she walked back into the Village Hall chambers for a meeting of the Broadview-Westchester Joint Water Agency and set down a cup of coffee before shaking hands with the other board members.

“I can’t imagine how you are, mayor,” a trustee from neighboring Westchester said.

Thompson assured him that she was well and the meeting got underway. After the discussions of hydraulic concrete and awarding of contracts and filling of vacancies wrapped up, Thompson closed the meeting with a plea for those present and people watching to “hang in there” over the coming days.

“We don’t have to participate in the negative chaos,” she said. “Please practice love and kindness because that will counteract the hatred we are seeing on display.”

Thompson holds that practice above all others politically, and has incorporated the ask into almost every one of her public appearances or statements since tensions began to rise outside the processing center. She has been gratified to see the phrase “love and kindness” gain traction around the village and held up a T-shirt printed with the message someone had sent her at her desk during an interview earlier this month.

Her office is decked out in symbols of contemporary Black history, from Michelle Obama to Maya Angelou, reminders of her family and the faith that helps her stay focused and calm in tense moments.

“Sometimes I feel like nobody’s protecting me, so all I’ve got is the shield of God,” she said.

That Sunday, when Thompson attended services at Jordan Temple, the morning’s reading was from the Book of Matthew. The Rev. Stephen Richardson spoke to the congregation about going into the world “as sheep in the midst of wolves.”

Thompson tuned out the news banners on her Apple watch. She took occasional notes from the sermon on her phone. She sang along with the choir. She laughed when Richardson floated the idea of bringing a picnic lunch to the federal agents in Broadview and wishing them a good day.

When services ended, a congregant in a black and white dress came up to Thompson to give her a hug.

“I’m praying for you, sister,” the woman said. “Everything is going to be all right.”

Thompson smiled. “It already is.”

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