Editorial: City Council should keep close watch on federal immigration enforcement, but much is yet unknown

The Editorial Board, Chicago Tribune on Jan 16, 2025

Published in Op Eds

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President-elect Donald Trump takes office next week, and his border czar, Tom Homan, has made it clear that Chicago tops his list for deportations.

With a clear target on our backs, does the City Council have an opportunity to mitigate the fallout?

Aldermen Raymond Lopez and Silvana Tabares have been working for months to update Chicago’s welcoming-city rules to let officials here work with federal law enforcement when an undocumented immigrant commits a violent crime. The proposal, introduced in 2023, has languished in committee without a hearing. Now, Lopez, 15th, and Tabares, 23rd, have used a parliamentary maneuver to get their plan on the agenda for the Jan. 15 City Council meeting.

“All of those advocates who are saying this is wrong are playing a game of political chicken that puts undocumented immigrants everywhere at risk,” Lopez told the Chicago Tribune Editorial Board.

Mayor Brandon Johnson reaffirmed Chicago’s existing welcoming-city ordinance in a Jan. 10 press release. Under the current law, strengthened by former Mayor Lori Lightfoot in 2021, Chicago police and other local law enforcement officials are barred from cooperating with federal agents, such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), in all cases when they arrest a person who is undocumented.

The argument Lopez and Tabares are making — that undocumented immigrants who otherwise are law-abiding, productive residents of our city can be better protected from the coming federal crackdown if local law enforcement helps the feds identify the truly bad apples — is worth consideration. But we think acting now, before Trump even has been inaugurated, is premature.

In recent days, Homan has worked to temper the expectations of congressional Republicans that deportation efforts will start fast. In particular, he says he doesn’t have enough money to do much more in the early stages than target those still in the country who’ve been ordered to leave. This page — and indeed many Democrats — consistently have supported that position.

Let Homan get his team in place. By all means, city officials, including the mayor, ought to meet with Homan and other federal immigration-enforcement officials and understand their plans for Chicago in particular. Immigration, we have consistently pointed out, is a federal responsibility. Yet more chaos will result if local officials forget this truth.

We’ve long maintained support for providing a pathway to citizenship for so-called Dreamers, those brought to this country as small children and who’ve lived here for years, and we believe such immigrants could be an integral part of our city’s future. Tabares and Lopez fear that failing to get on board, at least up to a point, with the new administration’s aims leaves Chicago’s entire population of undocumented immigrants vulnerable to becoming “collateral damage” in the crackdown.

But the language the two have proposed could use some tightening. Their proposal specifies a number of criminal categories, including gang-related activities, drug-related crimes and sex crimes, in which local law enforcement could cooperate with ICE. The specific language, though, includes some offenses such as loitering that in and of themselves aren’t exactly violent crimes. There’s a lot of room for interpretation for local law enforcement that could defeat Lopez and Tabares’ purposes in some cases.

Aldermanic critics oppose Lopez and Tabares’ proposal as unnecessary; that stance, too, is premature. A position of total defiance of the new administration’s immigration positions is counterproductive. We need more talking, more sharing of perspectives, rather than saber-rattling. That goes for hard-liners on both the left and right.

But let’s be clear. If people who are in this country illegally are committing violent crimes, there’s no reason to allow them to stay here. Reports of undocumented immigrants accused of violent crimes are increasing, with a report last month of a 24-year-old Venezuelan migrant shooting and killing fellow migrant Peter Sangronis, described by crime news site CWBChicago as “a hard working, respectful, family oriented and loving father who came to America looking for the American dream.”

The city has a vested interest in protecting that dream, which cannot be fully realized if people aren’t held accountable for making our city unsafe.

Chicago’s undocumented community is suffering from uncertainty as it awaits action from the incoming Trump administration. Updating Chicago’s policies to target violent criminals, and not law-abiding undocumented residents, could well make sense and shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand, even if now is not quite the right time to act. City policymakers, from the mayor to the City Council, should be sending the message that Chicago wants to be welcoming, but not at the cost of our collective security.

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