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Good morning, Chicago. Keep your week going strong this Tuesday with these stories from WTTW News.
Pat Hynes, the Democratic candidate for Cook County assessor, appears on “Chicago Tonight” on March 18, 2026. (WTTW News)
Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi lost his reelection bid to Pat Hynes, a one-time employee of the incumbent’s office, in the Democratic primary. Hynes ran on a platform of providing accurate assessments and restoring trust and economic development. He will now face off against Libertarian Nico Tsatsoulis in the Nov. 3 general election. No Republican filed to run in the race.
On why his campaign resonated with voters: “I think that there’s an abject frustration with the way property taxes are going right now in Cook County, coupled with our authenticity. You know, we worked very hard to communicate with as many voters as possible. I think the fact that I’ve had 30 years of experience, ... I think that authenticity really resonated with the voters we talked to.”
On what an assessor does: “In the city of Chicago we’ve got about $8.9 billion of a property tax burden and in the suburbs a little over $9 billion, so the role of the county assessor is to have a fair and equitable distribution of that burden. The burden remains relatively fixed, and so our job is to value every property in the district and figure out the way to divvy up that burden according to the market value of every property.”
On divvying the tax burden: “We have to capture value according to the law. We have to divvy the tax burden according to the law. And we need to do it in a way that’s predictable, so our taxpayers aren’t finding surprises, they’re not having problems bearing that burden, because you know frankly in Illinois the property tax burden is robust.”
On what property owners should expect: “They should expect an awful lot less volatility — when you have data that’s not accurate, you change your rubrics, you get a result that’s all over the board and that’s the experience that taxpayers have had in the last eight years. ... And that’s why taxpayers are really frustrated with what’s happening right now. And as boring as it is, it’s really important to get the data right to get the assessment right.”
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Federal immigration agents walk through Terminal 5 at John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) in the Queens borough of New York, Monday, March 23, 2026. (AP Photo / Ryan Murphy)
Armed federal immigration officers in tactical gear moved through terminals at some of the busiest U.S. airports Monday, standing near security lines and checkpoints after President Donald Trump ordered their deployment during a partial government shutdown that has disrupted air travel nationwide. The Trump administration said they would supplement Transportation Security Administration staffing at certain airports but provided few details about exactly what they would be doing. Still, after intensified immigration enforcement and protests in cities across the country over the past year, their presence has unsettled some travelers and raised new questions. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said his office was monitoring the deployment of federal officers at O’Hare International. Monday’s deployments came as hundreds of thousands of Homeland Security workers, including from the TSA, have worked without pay since Congress failed to renew DHS funding last month.
More context: Darrell English is the president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 777, the union representing TSA agents in Illinois and Wisconsin. English said that if the shutdown persists, many TSA agents could be at risk of missing rent or mortgage payments and losing their homes. “They haven’t received a full paycheck since the end of January,” English said. “They’ve been going by on their loans and things of that kind of nature for the last two months. Now coming up in April, it will be a second month they will be missing their mortgage or rent. This is gonna cause a lot of officers to get evicted or lose their homes and houses.” English urged congressional leaders in Washington to set aside policy disagreements over immigration enforcement at the center of the shutdown and stop using TSA as a political “pawn.”
Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees — which represents TSA officers — said in a statement that his members “deserve to be paid, not replaced by untrained, armed agents who have shown how dangerous they can be.” ICE and TSA have been “working together so far very well,” Trump said at Monday in Memphis. Still, he said he would “bring out the National Guard” if more personnel is needed.
Long wait times persisted at some major hubs Monday.
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(WTTW News)
The Chicago man accused of starting the fire inside a Rogers Park apartment building that killed firefighter Michael Altman allegedly got into an altercation with residents there a day earlier and told them they were “going to pay,” prosecutors said. A Cook County judge on Monday ruled Sheaves Slate, 27, will be detained in Cook County Jail pending trial on charges including first-degree murder, felony murder and aggravated arson stemming from the fatal fire last week.
Some backstory: According to Cook County prosecutors, Slate previously lived in the three-floor apartment building in the 1700 block of West North Shore Avenue. Prosecutors said Slate had a history of squatting in the building, making threats to residents and acting erratically. After an argument with a tenant on March 15, Slate was overheard saying they “are going to pay.” On the morning of March 16, he allegedly used a handheld lighter to set a mattress in the boiler room on fire, and when he realized he couldn’t put out the flames, he positioned a door to conceal the mattress and left the building without calling 911 or alerting anyone inside, prosecutors said. Just before 11:30 a.m. March 16, residents noticed the smoke from the fire and called 911, leading Altman and other firefighters to be dispatched to the scene. Once there, firefighters in the basement moved the door that Slate had allegedly placed there, which caused the ceiling above them — which was the first floor of the building — to collapse. Altman, who had been on the first floor, fell into the fire and was engulfed in flames, prosecutors said. He was hospitalized with burns to 90% of his body and was pronounced dead the next day.
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More From WTTW News:
A wonderful, grand-scale “Opera Night” concert came to Chicago’s Symphony Center this past Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Critic Hedy Weiss raves about the performance led by maestro Riccardo Muti, CSO's music director emeritus for life.
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Back in the Day: March 24, 1966 - Mayor Daley Meets Martin Luther King Jr.
On this day 60 years ago, Mayor Richard J. Daley met with a delegation of 40 religious leaders to “discuss solutions for the problems of slums, poverty, ignorance, and lawlessness in Chicago.” The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was among the group, and the symposium marked the first time he had spoken with the mayor in person since he moved to the city that January to start his “Chicago Campaign,” highlighting poverty and economic segregation. "I believe the mayor is concerned in his search for answers, but this alone doesn't negate the fact Chicago has a long way to go, as all major cities have—in various social problems," King said in an interview after the closed-door
meeting. Daley, in turn, pushed back. “I think Dr. King is a religious leader who feels intently the causes he espouses,” he said. “But you can't lay the deprivation of education and slums solely to Chicago. The city's problems in these areas did not originate here but came from the various southern states.”
This Week’s Staff Recommendations
Every Tuesday, WTTW News staffers highlight their favorite things in Chicago. This week, it’s editor Erica Demarest on local spots for ice cream, gelato and sorbet. Erica Demarest: While some people might associate ice cream, gelato a
