A short woman in a plastic Guy Fawkes mask strolled in front of the cherry-red, two-and-a-half-ton truck pulling into the driveway of the Swissôtel on East Wacker. Armed with a megaphone, her head barely above the hood, she chanted at the driver: “Heartland Alliance jails kids for money!” The truck crept forward, making contact with her torso and pushing her back one tiny step at a time. As dozens of protesters in carnival masks, feather boas, and tulle skirts beat empty plastic buckets, and chanted and jeered from the sidewalk, hotel security guards in suits shuffled her out of the truck’s path.
“The dude said there’s also like a teachers’ conference here tonight?” she said after he walked away, her voice rising.
The organizers also mounted a campaign against the other headliner, Eileen Mitchell, president of AT&T Illinois and former chief of staff for Mayor Rahm Emanuel. She also didn’t ultimately speak at the event, though a spokesman for AT&T did, Heartland confirmed.
About an hour before the Heartland gala began at 5:30 PM, the sidewalk in front of the Swissôtel was teeming with protesters. Two people in frilly pink prom dresses were disguised as effigies of Evelyn Diaz, Heartland Alliance’s president, and Mary Meg McCarthy, executive director of the National Immigrant Justice Center, a prominent legal aid organization also under the Heartland umbrella (McCarthy was in fact one of the headliners of the 2017 Women’s March). The protesters’ heads were covered in garish cardboard replicas of the women’s faces and they waved massive clawlike hands smeared with red paint. Chants of “Free the kids, close the camps!” “These are concentration camps, they’re not shelters!,” and “Free them all!” filled the air to incessant drumbeats. Swissôtel guards hovered nearby, staving off people who stepped ever more boldly in front of cars trying to pull into the driveway.
Although the protesters have been demanding community-created alternatives to the existing detention centers, Diaz said that closing more Heartland shelters wouldn’t improve any kids’ lives or set children free. “Instead, they would enter into for-profit prison systems across the country.”
In the heat of the traffic-jamming demonstration on Wednesday, a man with a British accent behind the wheel of an SUV caught by the blockade poked his head out of his window. “You’re putting my kids at risk,” he exclaimed, asking to be let through so he could pick them up from school.
