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Immigration rally plans changed by police

By Antonio Olivo
Tribune staff reporter

April 30, 2007, 8:54 PM CDT

Chicago police, anticipating Tuesday's immigration march will be larger than first expected, announced Monday that demonstrators will be rerouted to Grant Park instead of Daley Plaza, where the rally had been scheduled to take place.

Police attributed the 11th-hour switch to public safety concerns, after anger over a bust at an alleged fake-ID business in Little Village last week stirred up emotions surrounding the march.

The change surprised march organizers, who had chosen Daley Plaza as the symbolic heart of the city. The venue, they hoped, would lend weight to calls to legalize the country's estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants and to stop federal raids.

After learning of the switch through news reports, organizers unsuccessfully sought to keep Daley Plaza as the venue for the scheduled 3 p.m. rally.

"There's going to be confusion, and it will create a lot more problems with people looking around and asking, `Where is this rally?' " predicted Jorge Mujica, one of the demonstration's principal coordinators.

The event will begin with two feeder marches, one departing from Pilsen and another from Humboldt Park, to Union Park on the Near West Side.

From there, demonstrators will now head toward Grant Park via Washington Street, Desplaines Street and Jackson Boulevard, police officials said.

Plans for the march were given new attention by the Little Village raid, in which federal agents swooped into a shopping plaza in the Southwest Side neighborhood with rifles and body armor, arresting 12 suspects in what authorities called one of the country's most elaborate fake-ID rings.

Many residents said the show of force struck terror in a community already on edge over a series of deportation raids.

With Spanish-language radio and other media buzzing about the federal action over the weekend, "we now believe we'll have too many marchers to fit inside Daley Plaza," Chicago police Deputy Supt. Charles L. Williams said Monday afternoon.

"For the safety of the marchers, we're going to direct the march to Hutchinson Field [in Grant Park] to make sure we have an area large enough to accommodate safely all the marchers who come down," Williams said.

He said police still expect the march will be peaceful, though the atmosphere surrounding immigration reform has hardened on both sides of the debate since last year.

A counterprotest by the Chicago Minuteman Project is planned for miles away Tuesday, outside the district office of State Sen. President Emil Jones, on the city's Far South Side. The Minuteman demonstration will focus on preventing legislation that would allow undocumented immigrants to obtain driver's licenses.

The downtown march is one of several "May Day" actions planned in U.S. cities to pressure Congress into passing immigration reform this year.

Chicago Transit Authority officials said the Chicago event could affect 46 bus routes as demonstrators make their way through the Loop.

Police will conduct "rolling street closures," depending on where the marchers are, in an effort to minimize traffic delays, Williams said.

As workers plan to take the day off to join the march, some 700 businesses along the usually bustling 26th Street shopping corridor in Little Village are expected to close, said Salvador Pedroza, president of the Little Village Chamber of Commerce.

"We have about 50 percent of all of our businesses participating and showing their support," Pedroza said. "Twenty-sixth Street is gonna be empty."

aolivo@tribune.com