Mayor Brandon Johnson defended Chicago’s policies that limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement agents and asked members of Congress to pass federal immigration reform in his testimony in front of the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday, March 5.
“Every violent crime is devastating, but scapegoating entire communities is not only misleading, it is unjust and it is beneath us,” Johnson said in his opening statement.
The mayors of Boston, Denver and New York, and the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute participated in the hearing.
When mayors were pressed on how much their cities have spent on care for migrant arrivals, Johnson did not provide a concrete number.
Chicago has spent $638.7 million on care for new migrant arrivals, according to FOX32 Chicago.
The Welcoming City Ordinance limits cooperation with federal law enforcement. During the congressional hearing, Johnson attributed a downturn in crime to the ordinance.
“The Welcoming City Ordinance ensures that our local residents communicate and trust local law enforcement to ensure that criminals and crime is being addressed, and that is why violent crime has gone down in the city of Chicago,” Johnson said.
Kathleen Arnold, director of the refugee & forced migration studies program at DePaul, says the city’s limited cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) does not prevent local police from enforcing the law.
“The police have done either a good job or not a good job just by themselves. They don’t need ICE to help them find criminals,” Arnold said. “And so to cooperate, from what I’ve heard, would simply get Trump off City Council’s back.”
This congressional hearing comes as the Department of Justice is suing Chicago, Cook County and Illinois for allegedly being an obstacle to federal immigration enforcement, and the lawsuit cites a 2021 repeal to the Welcoming City Ordinance in its argument.
In 2021, the City Council voted 41 to 8 to eliminate certain exceptions to the Welcoming City Ordinance. This included repealing a section that previously allowed local law enforcement to cooperate with federal immigration authorities when someone had an outstanding criminal warrant, a pending felony charge, had been convicted of a felony, or was identified as or admitted to being a known gang member.
In January, Ald. Raymond Lopez (15th) and Ald. Silvana Tabares (23rd) reintroduced a proposal to consider amending the Welcoming City Ordinance to once again allow local law enforcement to cooperate with federal agents if an undocumented person had been arrested for or had been convicted of certain crimes. Their proposal was struck down in a vote of 39-11.
Ald. Timmy Knudsen (43rd) said he voted against the proposal to consider amending the ordinance. He said it would allow any undocumented person who was arrested for a crime to be deported.
“People could get arrested and separated from their families for something they didn’t even do,” Knudsen said. “So, legally, I hated it. We pushed back on it, of course, and also I think the timing of it was strategic by the group that was pushing it to try to really limit the sanctuary city ordinance in Chicago.”
Ald. Brian Hopkins (2nd) said he voted to consider amending the Welcoming City Ordinance because the unexpected influx of thousands of migrants warranted it.
“You’ve got to change the laws when the conditions change, and the conditions have changed and clearly there is a need to do a better job addressing what happens when a criminal flees his home country to try and avoid prosecution and comes here,” Hopkins said.
Hopkins said the murder of 63-year old George Levin in Norwood Park by two undocumented migrants from Ecuador was a reason for considering an amendment to the Welcoming City Ordinance.
“That’s not to say that I trust the Trump administration to do the right thing. I don’t,” Hopkins said. “I think we need to vigorously defend the lawsuit against our city and our state, because we have the municipal authority to do this. We also have the municipal authority to amend it to make it better.”
Arnold says that if the DOJ wins the lawsuit and the policies are invalidated, local police may begin to cooperate with ICE detainers and engage in unconstitutional policing.
“What the Trump administration is asking is for us to suspend the 14th Amendment for some people, even before they have been convicted of a crime,” Arnold said. “And so this will undermine the Constitution. It will undermine any form of criminal justice, and we will start using this simply to get foreigners out of the city without due process.”
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