Chicago Week in Photos: Grief, ICE at O'Hare & More

Chicago spent the final days of March grappling with grief, immigration enforcement, and the quiet rhythms of neighborhood life, all of it captured through the lenses of photographers working the city’s streets.

The week’s heaviest story centered on Sheridan Gorman, an 18-year-old Loyola University freshman fatally shot in the early morning hours of March 19 at Tobey Prinz Beach along the lakefront. Gorman had been walking with friends when the shooting occurred. By that evening, the Loyola community filled the Madonna della Strada Chapel for a vigil, with mourners kneeling in prayer inside the university’s lakefront sanctuary. The loss cut through the Rogers Park neighborhood and the broader Loyola community with particular force. One image captured a solitary man walking toward the pier at Tobey Prinz Beach that same Thursday morning, park benches empty around him, the lake indifferent behind him.

Immigration enforcement made itself visible at O’Hare International Airport in ways that drew immediate attention from city officials. TSA and ICE agents were photographed monitoring passenger exits at Terminal 1 on March 23, and by March 25, during spring break travel, an ICE agent was captured taking a snack break near a security line in Terminal 2 as travelers moved through the checkpoint around him. The images prompted alarm from local officials, who have repeatedly positioned Chicago as a sanctuary city resistant to federal immigration sweeps.

Mayor Brandon Johnson turned up the volume on that resistance with the unveiling of an “Abolish ICE” snowplow on March 25 at the city’s salt storage facility at 2502 W. Grand Ave. in West Town. Johnson spoke at the ceremony, which carried both a practical and symbolic message from an administration that has been publicly critical of federal immigration operations. The timing, with ICE agents photographed at O’Hare in the same week, was not subtle.

The city also paused to mark a closing chapter in the Lakeview restaurant scene. Michael and Helen Cameron, owners of Uncommon Ground at 3800 N. Clark St., were photographed inside their restaurant on March 23. The couple is retiring after 35 years in business. Uncommon Ground built a reputation over those decades not just as a neighborhood dining institution but as an early champion of rooftop farming and sustainability in Chicago’s restaurant industry. Their exit closes a long run that outlasted countless competitors across the North Side.

Out in Logan Square, a different kind of creative enterprise got its close-up. The production crew behind “For Alien Eyes Only,” a puppet web series made for adults, posed with their characters for a portrait taken earlier this month. The series is produced out of Logan Square and represents the kind of low-budget, high-concept creative work that has long drawn artists to the neighborhood’s cheaper commercial spaces.

The week’s photographs also reached back to threads that have not yet resolved. Images from February showed Maria Lopez tending to the memorial of Silverio Villegas González, a man killed by ICE agents outside Chicago. A separate photograph showed protesters gathered outside the FBI’s Chicago field office, calling for accountability in that case. As of late March, little movement has been reported on any formal investigation into the incident.

At Cinespace Chicago Film Studios on March 19, Gov. JB Pritzker spoke to press amid the props and memorabilia of the “Chicago Fire” production workshop. Illinois has spent years defending and expanding its film tax credit program, and Cinespace has been a central piece of that economic argument, drawing productions that bring jobs and spending to the city.

Taken together, the week’s images reflect a city managing multiple pressures at once: a community burying a teenager, federal agents working airport corridors, a mayor staging political theater with a snowplow, and a couple in Lakeview locking up after 35 years. Chicago has always run several stories simultaneously. This week was no different.