Crime & Law
U.S. District Judge William Orrick agreed to allow Chicago and 33 other cities and counties, including Los Angeles, Denver, Boston and Baltimore, to join the lawsuit that claimed the Trump administration was unlawfully trying to force local officials to help federal immigration agents conduct deportation efforts.
The ruling, which is likely to be appealed to the Illinois Supreme Court, endorses the effort backed by the city’s largest police union to upend the system used for 60 years to punish officers.
A federal grand jury returned an indictment charging Elias Rodriguez, 31, with several new counts including murder of a foreign official, hate crimes, first-degree murder and assault with intent to kill more than two months after he allegedly killed Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim outside the Capital Jewish Museum.
Chicago police, along with the U.S. Marshal’s Service and the Great Lakes Regional Fugitive Task Force, announced the child was found with their mother after they had gone missing in 2018.
Violence Prevention Groups Sound the Alarm Over Funding Cuts: ‘We Are Trying to Sustain Communities’
“We need our government officials,” said JaShawn Hill, executive director of Chicago Survivors. “We need philanthropic communities and people who believe in our mission to step in and to help leverage us, because if they don’t, we will not be able to provide the quality of care that we have been able to do.”
People just started gathering in Pilsen for four days of food, music and carnival rides at the Fiesta del Sol festival — an annual Latino cultural celebration drawing more than 1 million people.
The family of Virginia Giuffre, who was among Jeffrey Epstein’s most well-known sex trafficking accusers, said that it was shocking to hear President Donald Trump say the disgraced financier “stole” Giuffre from him and urged that Epstein’s former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell remain in prison.
“It feels (like) a sense of relief, but it’s been too long coming. It should have happened a long time ago,” Soto said at the courthouse. “It’s kind of hard going into the very courtrooms where Dave and I received an injustice to try and get some semblance of justice.”
“When a life is taken so violently and so publicly, our legal system must respond accordingly,” the family’s attorney Patrick A. Salvi II said in a statement. “While nothing will fill the void (in) the hearts of Peter’s loved ones, the filing of this lawsuit is a step toward justice for the family and will expose any failures that allowed this tragedy to occur.”
The encampment along the North Shore Channel is now set to be removed, possibly displacing dozens.
There is no sign Chicago Police Board President Kyle Cooper's pleas will break a legal stalemate that has lasted more than 16 months, keeping the system Chicago officials used for 60 years to hold officers accused of the most egregious misconduct in a deep freeze.
Chicago is seeing a historic drop in violent crime in the first half of the year. According to the Chicago Police Department, homicides and shootings are both down more than 30% in the first six months of the year compared to 2024.
Officials said they are working to identify a cause of the fire that happened along the west bank of the North Shore Channel just south of Peterson Avenue, however fire investigators found multiple gas cans and propane tanks at the site.
A provision in Trump’s tax bill instructed the federal government to end Medicaid payments for one year to abortion providers that received more than $800,000 from Medicaid in 2023, even to those like Planned Parenthood that offer other medical services.
The new database launched after WTTW News reported the city spent $510.9 million on employee overtime in 2024 — 1.5% less than in 2023, with more than half of the total amount used to compensate Chicago Police Department officers for working extra hours.
Michael McClain and three codefendants — former ComEd CEO Anne Pramaggiore, ex-ComEd lobbyist John Hooker and former contract lobbyist Jay Doherty — were each convicted of bribery conspiracy and willfully falsifying the utility company’s books in the 2023 “ComEd Four” trial.