Revcom.us was able to interview Dr. Alli Muhammad MD, national leader of the Revolutionary Black Panther Party and an eyewitness to the raid last Monday night/Tuesday morning on an apartment building in South Shore. (The interview has been edited for clarity and length.)

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Q: You described before how you were woken up by the sound of helicopters… just go on from here…

A: Yes, early in the morning of Tuesday, September 30, I was actually resting. This was around 1 a.m. I began to hear… my building was actually shaking. Then I looked out the window. There was a Blackhawk helicopter, and another helicopter. And, you know, just background on myself, how I grew up, my parents being from the turbulent ‘60s and ‘70s, we grew up within our own structure—“the pigs are coming, the pigs are coming”—that kind of energy growing up. It’s something that’s followed me throughout my life… 

So I thought it was something like that, you know? So I didn’t immediately go outside. I just cut off everything, didn’t really know what was going on. My neighbor, who is an actual veteran—he was in the Marine Corps, did a couple of tours. He went out, came back in, filled me in on what was going on. So then I went downstairs. 

As I went downstairs, all you can see is from the top of that building, eighth floor to the first floor, was a series of “boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom”—and these are flash bangs. They actually were shooting at this building. And then ultimately, they began to have people come outside from that building, zip-tied. Children zip-tied. Poorly clad, in their underwear with no shirt on, no shoes, and zip-tied to each other. Black children zip-tied to each other, Latino children zip-tied to each other, Black people zip-tied to each other, Latino people zip-tied to each other. Black people put in one van, and Latino people put in another van. Ultimately, this came down to them saying they were checking Black people for warrants, and Latino people for their status…

My community where I live in South Shore, this is the building adjacent from us. This is war. This is what it felt like, that we were actually in the middle of war… So it was a very traumatic experience as well...

And so they were slowly doing this attack throughout the night. And this is an attack. Whether they say it’s federal agents, they had no right to do that. They had no right to take over an entire building of people. They claim, as I see and read now, they supposedly had a warrant for five people—they don’t even list what that is. They had the whole building. That’s not even legal. The other dynamic is that, you know, you cannot do that in the United States of America. This is fascism. All the acts that this regime is doing is war crimes and crimes against humanity. 

And there’s a lot of confusion that goes on throughout the community. A lot of people who felt that it was not directly affecting them say, “oh, this isn’t our fight, it’s not our fight.” But this is ignorance, you know? As I stress over and over again, fascism doesn’t have a limit. So it can be, you know, Julio Gonzalez yesterday, Tyrone Jenkins today, and Billy Cronkite tomorrow. And what’s going on in Portland shows that. Portland is considered one of the whitest cities in America. They call it the biggest white city in America. And he sends troops there. So that’s showing that no one is off limits. And that’s how we have to understand it’s our fight. Yes, Tuesday, September 30, 2025, this happened in my neighborhood in Chicago, South Shore, Chicago. But they’re showing that this is for anyone, ultimately. 

Summarizing this, he [Trump] also said that, you know—he went from just saying the word “homegrown” to the “enemy within,” an “invasion from within.” So now we’re enemies from within. So this is the language and action he’s using. He said, in so many words, Chicago is to be a “training ground” for the U.S. military. And I got information today that 300 National Guard are coming to Chicago. This is what the ultimate dynamic of that is. This is where we’re at. This is the experience from Tuesday, September 30th, 2025.

Q: As people were being brought out, how were they being treated?

A: They were treated like animals. It reminded me of images I’ve seen of slaves during slavery, during the trans-Atlantic slavery—the pictures of slaves being bound together. This is the image that they wanted to… it seems like it’s intentional optics that they wanted to do. ’Cause that’s why they had them bound, just like that, within line, zip-tied to each other. It looked like slaves being led into slave ships. Except it wasn’t slave ships, it was new type of vessels, which was actual vans. They had vans, but I also saw bigger, bigger vans that looked like buses. So they had that around as well. That’s what it looked like. They looked like slaves. 

Q: And what was the reaction of the children?

A: Crying, and afraid and frightened, you know, very much so. Some of the neighbors that weren’t from that building cried, you know. When I asked why the children being treated so inhumane, there was a soldier who told one of the neighbors, “f those children.” This is the attitude and what they’ve done and the behavior. 

Q: You’ve lived there and you’ve lived across the street from that building so you see the people from that building come and go and people from your building come and go. How did people get along?

A: Everybody gets along fine. This is, you know, pretty okay. To be honest, it’s peaceful. We don’t hear any shooting or anything like that, it’s a very peaceful neighborhood. Lake Michigan, aka “the beaches,” right there. Rainbow Beach, it’s right here. So right where we’re at, it’s also on the beach or the lakefront. That’s where we are, so it’s pretty peaceful. It’s a peaceful, you know, 97 percent, 95 percent Black community, and it’s peaceful. 

Q: Do you know anything about the percentage of people in that building?

A: Yeah that building also, the thing about that building is that it’s almost 99 percent Black, the make-up of the building. There is, you know, some Latinos in that building. But it’s overwhelmingly, just like my building, and all the other buildings—these buildings are overwhelmingly, predominantly Black people. There is a few, you know, Latinos. Also, like in my building, there’s probably about three Caucasian people. But for the most part it’s 99 percent Black. 

Q: How did the fascists treat the other people around?

A: Horribly. They were, like, to me… “Get away!” and all that other stuff, acting like bullies. Same way they act at Broadview [the ICE “processing facility” that has been the target of weekly protests, which have been violently attacked by federal forces]. Same way the people who may not have been at Broadview, as we all have, the same way you see on television and news snippets or clips, is the same way they acted towards everybody. Like they were dealing with, you know, enemy combatants in a war zone. That’s how they treated the people, as enemy combatants. The behavior that ICE is doing, the behavior that the U.S. Border Patrol is doing, the behavior that whatever branches of the military or federal agents and officers are doing, is the behavior and actions that you do to enemy combatants in a war zone. You cannot do that to civilians in the United States of America. You can’t just take them all out the building and zip-tie them. You can’t actually shoot tear gas at them and pepper balls at them. Those are violations of international law, and war crimes, actually, at this particular point, what they have done.