Rehumanize Chicago

On Thursday, January 22, 2026, Rehumanize Chicago gathered for the Chicago Day of Horror and Hope, part of the National Horror and Hope Day of Action. We marched, chanted, and gave speeches for the Consistent Life Ethic.

The remarks we gave are gathered here.

Supporting Prenatal Rights outside Family Planning Associates

We are existing with an increasingly fascistic society. A society that sorts people into categories: disposable or not disposable, a person who deserves care or not enough of a person to justify care. The mainstream pro choice movement has decided to become a second face of fascism, beyond the obvious fascism within the Republican party: the smallest and youngest members of our species have been declared human non-people, whose worth are subject to how good circumstances they exist within, are.

People who obtain abortions in many, many cases are going through a lot, and their circumstances are often devastating. We as a society need to fight for as many people as we can. Every preventable loss is a tragedy worth mourning.

I hope and pray that the lives of women in tragic situations with pregnancy complications are also fully protected by law. I also hope and pray that within especially the American people, but also throughout global society as a whole, respect for unborn human life, accompanied by a love for women and a refusal to surrender them and their needs, grows and elective abortion is no longer considered a right. We carry forward and fight for the lives of all. I will mourn the dead, and fight for the living and for future generations.

People who consider any group of people, including the unborn, as disposable and not worth fighting for, are oftentimes declaring that there is a such thing as a human non-person, and I refuse to accept that.

No one is disposable because they are weak, tiny, or unwanted. A person is a person, no matter how small. Children are people, not property, from conception and fertilization to adulthood. No one owns us. We were all conceived free, equal, and worthy of Love.

We live in a world, currently, that grinds all of us, from the unborn to women to the poor to immigrants up, and chews us up and spits us out. The less powerful someone is, the more disposable they are being deemed by this current administration which is not truly pro life, and by the powerful in every administration under so many circumstances. I call upon the powerful to pay attention to the plight of all those less powerful than them. Money may not trickle down, but harm and preventable death most certainly does.

—Mary

Opposing War outside the former Boeing Headquarters

We are now standing in the shadow of the Boeing Building, which has been sitting nearly empty since Boeing moved their headquarters to Virginia a few years ago. We are here to acknowledge the ongoing problem of the military-industrial complex: a system that demands we keep spending our money, our taxes, on weapons. It spends our money on weapons that we hope we never have reason to use, but also on weapons like nuclear missiles that we know there is never a good reason to use.

This building is one of many places in the world where Boeing has left their stamp and moved on, but the sign of Boeing’s passage is more often a crater than a logo on a skyscraper. In that sense, at least, we in Chicago are lucky. Around the world, people and places alike still bear the scars- visible and invisible- of bombing campaigns, drone strikes, and other military actions executed by the US or its proxies and funded by our tax dollars.

The problem is not just that our tax money is wasted on weapons that destroy lives. The weapons that are not used in war are wasteful, too. Weapons manufacturers, in order to justify all of the money they take from us to build our arsenal, try to invent new uses for these weapons. When we see police forces militarizing with supplies that the actual military no longer has any use for, it’s because it’s an easy way for a member of congress to add to the amount of money they bring to their district. And having been given this military equipment, police forces feel the need to practice with and maintain it, which sometimes means looking for reasons to use it. And we have seen this year how quickly our country can recruit an over-equipped and undertrained police force to terrorize our communities—Yeah, I'm talking about ICE. Every time arms manufacturers tighten their grip on our government, they tighten their grip on us, too.

The UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which is the reason this is a day of hope and not just horror, is a sign of a world that wants to grow past a climate of fear that leads to so many resources going toward weapons of war rather than tools of peace, tanks instead of tractors, weapons targeting systems instead of medical equipment, swords instead of plowshares.

Boeing’s logo on this empty building is, in a way, also a sign of hope. There are things made through the military-industrial complex that still have a use in a peaceful society. There are many instances where aircraft carriers have served a valuable role in disaster relief, and this building, though now empty, may someday be useful again.

—Tim

Opposing Suicide and Supporting Torture Survivors outside the Hyatt

We’re here at the Hyatt. We’re not protesting the Hyatt per se, but we wanted to visit a place where we could talk about a couple of specific statewide issues, and the Hyatt is the source of the Pritzker family wealth.

We’re aligned with Pritzker in some ways. He’s fought for protestors and against the federalization of the National Guard in court, for example, but there are two issues we’re here to raise tonight.

First, we have to talk about the recent signing of the physician-assisted suicide law, which was shocking and saddening. A small act of resistance that is important to me is to call it a physician-assisted suicide law. I am not going to use euphemisms like “aid in dying” or “end of life care”. Proponents argue it is not “technically” suicide because the agents do not “feel” suicidal, which offends me as a person who knows what the word “technically” means.

When I was suicidal I was given unconditional suicide prevention. No one at any point—for a number of years!—asked me if I had a “good reason” for wanting suicide because the it is the position of the state that I should be protected under the law.

The State of Illinois now says such protection under the law is conditional. It is only my privilege as a person who does not have a qualifying diagnosis that entitles me to suicide prevention, and after this law goes into effect, anyone who loses that privilege could be legally assisted in suicide without the requirement of a screening by a mental health professional.

The other issue I want to mention briefly is torture and criminal justice. As I’m sure many of you know, this city suffered illegal police torture for several decades. The Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission is appointed by the governor and tasked with reviewing cases and freeing the people who were wrongfully convicted after having false confessions illegally tortured out of them. However, unfortunately, most victims are still incarcerated. At the rate that they’re currently working, it would take the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission many more decades just to review all of the unreviewed cases. Many innocent people will live and die in prisons in this state who are innocent torture victims who should be free.

We have reason to hope though. The governor could unilaterally grant clemency to torture victims, and there is presently an ongoing campaign led by the Chicago Alliance Against Racism and Political Repression to encourage Pritzker to free them all. We’re going to be right there with them and give them a boost at every opportunity.

We haven’t given up on raising awareness and freeing torture survivors, and we haven’t given up opposing assisted suicide, and we haven’t given up on opposing ICE, and that’s where we’re headed next!

—Eleanor

Supporting Immigrants' Rights and Opposing ICE outside ICE Headquarters

Why are we here? What does immigration enforcement have to do with “life issues”? The death penalty ends human life. Abortion ends human life. Suicide, medically sanctioned or not, ends human life. War ends human life on a massive scale.

ICE? Immigration enforcement? That doesn’t kill anyone.

Why protest this organization’s very existence? Is what ICE does comparable to the slaughter of unborn children at abortion clinics, or the war in Ukraine or the war in Gaza, or anything else in this pantheon of “life issues”? Is ICE really THAT bad?

As a consistent life ethic activist, as someone who protested ICE during the Obama administration, as a pro-life advocate who stands and prays outside of abortion clinics, and a concerned citizen of the United States, my answer to that question is, “yes.” ICE is that bad. How? Why?

The short answer is: that ICE systemically violates human dignity.

Let’s take it for granted that ICE doesn’t intentionally or actively kill people, that the death of Renee Good, while tragic, was ultimately justifiable. Ok, fine. Let’s set aside the countless examples of people whose deportation was effectively a death sentence.

Why are we setting the bar so low? You don’t need to actively kill someone to violate their dignity. There are all sorts of ways to violate human dignity.

• physical and sexual abuse
• torture or “enhanced interrogation”
• police brutality
• wage theft and dangerous working conditions

These are things that “shock the conscience”, things that offend our moral sensibility. You don’t need to make an argument that these things are wrong—we can intuitively sense that there’s a moral gravity to these things, that a line has been crossed, that something has been transgressed, or, more specifically, somebody, another human being, has been unnecessarily and unjustly hurt.

It shouldn’t have to be said that detaining and imprisoning someone indefinitely, without proper food, clean water, or medical care, is a violation of their human dignity.

It shouldn’t need to be stated that forcing someone to travel thousands of miles with nothing but the clothes on their back to a place they haven’t been to in decades, if ever, is something that cries out to heaven as a grave injustice, especially when then the stated reason, and often, the only reason for doing so is because of a minor civil infraction in the distant past.

The reality is that ICE is predicated on, and continues to systemically commit, exactly these kinds of horrors that make our souls weep. Millions upon millions of detentions and deportations, mostly of people who are not criminals in any meaningful sense of the word. Children left without their mother or fathers, or without any caregiver or next of kin. Churches, schools, and other community institutions robbed of their lifeblood. This is ICE’s legacy, what ICE stands for, what it’s designed to do, and what it continues to do to this very day, up to this very moment. That’s why we’re here. That’s why we protest.

Because even though it shouldn’t have to be said that mass deportation is wrong, sometimes some people need a reminder that human dignity isn’t dependent upon citizenship, that it doesn’t go away because you crossed a country’s border illegally, and the other people that don’t need a reminder deserve to know what ICE is actually doing: the organized, systemic violation of human dignity in the form of unjust detention and deportation.

And so because of this we stand here today, in horror, yes, but also in hope that these terrible things might one day come to an end and we’ll continue to protest and advocate for human dignity until the day comes.

ABOLISH ICE!

—Andy