Oak Parker Andrew Freer felt like he needed to put a light on what was happening in his own backyard.
When Freer, a professional filmmaker and documentarian who settled in Oak Park in 2007 after a childhood spent living between Indonesia and Mansfield, OH, witnessed how President Donald Trump’s “Operation Midway Blitz” immigration crackdown was playing out in the village he felt called to put his skills to use documenting the impact of ICE and Border Patrol’s increased presence in the region. Freer has published several short documentaries under the name Go Fourth Media, the name a tribute to the U.S. Constitution’s 4th amendment — people’s right to protection from unreasonable search and seizure.
“The idea that people are being stopped without warrants, without reasonable cause based on the color of their skin or the job they have, or if they have an accent, is just a violation of what the Constitution stands for,” Freer said.
Freer started working on the project after his friend and neighbor Scott Sakiyama was arrested by ICE agents after he tailed them as they travelled through the village. Sakiyama, a local attorney, had been honking a horn and blowing a whistle while traveling behind the agents throughout south Oak Park when he was arrested by ICE agents outside of Lincoln Elementary, where both he and Freer have children enrolled as students.
Sakiyama is the subject of the first Go Fourth Media documentary, which features an interview with him and an animated reenactment of the arrest.
Freer has also published a documentary cut from footage he gathered while following ICE and Border Patrol agents around the area on Halloween. Documentaries in production will profile subjects including the group of Oak Park-area moms arrested during a sit-in at ICE’s Broadview Detention Facility last month, a Chicago man detained by ICE despite his status as an asylum seeker and Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino’s recent return to Chicagoland, he said.
Following Bovino last week took him from Harlem Avenue in Oak Park to O’Hare Airport, where he said he saw immigration agents question every rideshare driver who pulled through a parking lot, ignoring City of Chicago signage that said the area could not be used for civil immigration operations. From a few feet away, he filmed a man being pulled from his car and detained as he pleaded with agents.
“He was a little older, he said he’d had two heart attacks,” Freer said. “He was just pleading for them not to take him. It was hard to film. It was hard not to start crying while that was happening. But they were just illegally there and stopping people at an illegal checkpoint in a space that they were not supposed to be at.”
Freer said he’s taken a break from other projects to focus on Go Fourth Media like a full-time job. He is seeking donations to keep the project going.
The videos published so far quickly gained over 100,000 views across social media platforms, Freer said. He hopes that the videos will help contribute to the national conversation about immigration enforcement by showing how the operations have been playing out in Chicago.
“I don’t think you have to be an extremist to care about constitutional rights being violated,” Freer said. “I think that’s a core tenant of many Americans from the left and the right. I don’t think you have to be a radical to want to get involved and to protect Fourth Amendment rights, you know, to protect constitutional rights. I think there’s a lot of other reasons to be concerned by what has happened to our neighbors, but to me, I think that is a way to communicate with people across the board, across many different political ideologies. I think most Americans would agree with that statement.”
