Politics
From Immigration to Public Safety, What a Trump Victory Could Mean for Chicago
To hear Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson tell it, the prospect of former President Donald Trump returning to the White House represents an existential threat to Chicago and its residents.
As stalwart supporters of President Joe Biden, Pritzker and Johnson frequently spotlight the danger Trump poses to American democracy, pointing to his support for the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and his incessant lies about the 2020 election.
But in the week leading up to the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, which kicked off Monday, both Pritzker and Johnson told reporters Trump poses a specific — and dire — threat to Chicagoans.
“Trump’s plan to roll back the progress we have made to strengthen the economy, defend reproductive rights, protect the environment, uphold democracy, and more, poses a unique and serious threat to everything we hold dear here in Chicago,” Johnson said.
Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are set to be nominated at the Democratic National Convention Aug. 19-22 in Chicago, keeping the city — for better or for worse — in the white-hot glare of the national political spotlight and ensuring it remains in Trump’s crosshairs.
Pritzker told reporters he expected Trump to target Chicago if he is elected to a second term.
“When you put a convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, a congenital liar in place, and someone who is seeking to take revenge on anybody that didn’t support him, you know what that will do to the city of Chicago,” Pritzker said.
Trump’s well documented penchant for payback could affect Chicago’s ability to get federal approval for redevelopment projects or financing for other projects, such as the extension of the CTA Red Line south to 130th Street, set to break ground in 2025.
It would also scuttle any chance the city would get additional federal financial help to care for the nearly 45,000 migrants who have made their way to Chicago, many on buses paid for by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, as part of an effort to damage Biden’s chances for reelection and divide Democratic voters.
However, Chicago GOP Chair Chuck Hernandez, a former Chicago Police Department detective elected in May, said a second Trump term will mean a “return to prosperity,” citing the former president’s economic record between 2017 and 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic triggered an economic collapse.
“It will be easier to buy groceries under President Trump,” Hernandez said.
Overall annual inflation was 3% in June, down from 3.3% in May, according to the latest data from the Consumer Price Index, indicating inflation is waning, according to analysts.
Trump has vowed to replace the federal income tax with a 10% tariff on imports, a tax that would be assessed against a wide variety of goods and services. He has also vowed to extend the tax cuts he signed into law in 2017, which primarily benefited wealthy Americans.
Both policies could supercharge inflation, according to economic analysts.
However, Aaron Del Mar, a member of the Republican State Central Committee and the spokesperson for the Cook County GOP, said extending the 2017 tax cuts would strength the whole economy and reduce unemployment.
“Businesses would be allowed to flourish under President Trump,” Del Mar said.
The national unemployment rate remained steady in June at 4.1%, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Analysts consider an unemployment rate of 5% or lower to represent full employment, which keeps inflation in check and lets workers move between jobs while reducing the number of long-term unemployed people looking for work.
Crime and Courts
Hernandez and Del Mar said Trump would offer Chicago more help fighting violent crime, which Hernandez said was “out of control.”
During the first half of 2024, homicides dropped 12.2%, as compared with the first six months of 2023, returning to 2019 levels after a surge of crime during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Chicago police data.
That data does not include the 21 people killed and more than 100 wounded during the Fourth of July holiday weekend.
“Trump cares about our inner cities,” said Hernandez, who is also the Republican committeeperson for the 38th Ward on Chicago’s Far Northwest Side.
Johnson has repeatedly pleaded with federal officials for more help stopping violent crime, to no avail.
Hernandez said he was not concerned about Trump retaliating against Chicago, where approximately 83% of voters chose former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over Trump in 2016. In 2020, Biden won 82% of Chicago’s votes over Trump and secured Illinois’ 19 Electoral College votes.
Trump has repeatedly held up Chicago as the embodiment of all that is wrong with urban America — a “war-torn country” rife with voter fraud and consumed with violence and poverty.
Del Mar said he was not concerned that Trump’s rhetoric painting Chicago as rife with crime and violence would reduce tourism and business travel.
“The bigger issue is the crime and violence,” Del Mar said.
In January 2017, Trump threatened on social media to “send in the Feds” unless Chicago officials “fix the horrible carnage” in the city.
In June 2020, Trump sent more than 100 federal agents to Chicago to crack down on surging crime in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd. Those agents had no noticeable impact on crime in Chicago, which continued to surge until 2022, when it began receding.
“People welcome the tough talk,” Hernandez said.
Many of Trump’s campaign speeches and rallies focus on those he perceives as his enemies or un-American, and his promises to get even with those whom he believes have wronged him.
“I am your warrior, I am your justice,” Trump told his supporters at a May rally in Texas. “For those who have been wronged and betrayed, … I am your retribution.”
Trump has repeatedly vowed to direct the Department of Justice to prosecute his political enemies, including Biden and the district attorneys and special counsel who brought 88 felony charges against Trump. Trump was convicted on 34 of those charges after a New York jury found he orchestrated a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election by paying to silence an adult film star who said the two had sex shortly after the birth of his youngest child.
“I think Donald Trump will use every tool in the toolbox to go after people all across the country and I’m talking about the people of Chicago who didn’t vote for him,” Pritzker said, calling Trump a “vindictive, selfish, narcissistic person” who would ultimately be rejected by the American people.
Pritzker’s certainty that Trump would use his power to inflict pain on Chicago and its people during a second term as president comes after Trump did exactly that during his first term in office. Trump and his aides have promised to exercise nearly unchecked executive power if elected to four more years in office.
Immigration Under Trump
One of the first things Trump did when he took office in January 2017 was to sign an executive order that sought to revoke millions of dollars in public safety grants to cities like Chicago, which has been a self-proclaimed sanctuary city since 1985.
The city’s Welcoming City ordinance, first approved in 2006, ratified an executive order issued by former Mayor Harold Washington. That ordinance has been amended twice, most recently in 2021 to ban Chicago police officials from cooperating with federal immigration agents in all cases.
Read More: What Does It Mean That Chicago Is a Sanctuary City? Here’s What to Know
Lawyers for Chicago defended the city’s status as a sanctuary city in court, ultimately winning a total victory that was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2020.
But Trump has promised a redoubled effort to crack down on all forms of immigration and launch what the official platform of the Republican Party calls the “largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” While awaiting deportation, people will be held in camps, according to the plans outlined by Trump’s closest aide, Stephen Miller, in an interview with the New York Times.
That would put the thousands of undocumented immigrants who call Chicago home at risk of deportation, threatening to uproot families and decimate communities.
Even if Trump fails to make good on those plans, Trump’s reelection will likely prompt many undocumented immigrants to return to life in the city’s shadows, unwilling to seek help from city officials for health care or protection from the Chicago Police Department for fear of exposing themselves or their families to deportation, immigrant advocates said.
However, Del Mar, whose father immigrated to America from the Philippines, said concerns that Trump would fulfill his promises to deport millions of undocumented immigrants were overblown.
“That’s just incendiary,” Del Mar said, adding that immigrants who do not commit crimes did not have anything to worry about. “Trump is not going to bring in the troops.”
Spotlight on Project 2025
The plan to deport millions of undocumented immigrants is included in the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, more commonly known as Project 2025, a 900-page manifesto titled “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.”
The plan calls for Immigration and Custom Enforcement Agents to be allowed to conduct deportation operations at schools, churches and playgrounds and to deport all undocumented immigrants, not just those accused of criminal acts.
In a post on his social media site, Trump called parts of Project 2025 “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal” without identifying which parts he objected to and claimed that neither he nor his campaign had anything to do with Project 2025.
But in fact, the plan was crafted by 140 people who worked in the Trump administration, including six former Cabinet secretaries. In 2022, Trump explicitly praised the push to craft what became Project 2025 in a speech at a Heritage Foundation dinner.
“This is a great group, and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do ... when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America,” Trump said.
The plan explicitly puts Christian nationalism at the heart of government policy. Project 2025 calls for a ban on pornography, which includes anything related to LGBTQ+ people, and promotes laws that encourage “marriage, work, motherhood, fatherhood, and nuclear families.”
“We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless ― if the left allows it to be,” Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said.
The plan also calls for efforts to combat climate change to be stopped, in part by eliminating the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency because it is “responsible for driving climate change alarm.”
But the plan’s biggest impact on Illinois would be to reverse efforts by Pritzker to expand access to reproductive and gender-affirming health care in Illinois, which has become a magnet for people from states where abortion was banned after all of the justices Trump appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the constitution does not protect the right to end a pregnancy.
“Conservatives should gratefully celebrate the greatest pro-family win in a generation: overturning Roe v. Wade, a decision that for five decades made a mockery of our Constitution and facilitated the deaths of tens of millions of unborn children,” according to Project 2025.
Project 2025 calls for a national abortion ban and calls for the FDA to reverse its approval of abortion pills and criminalize their distribution.
The official platform of the Republican Party does not call for a national abortion ban, which Trump has said he opposes. However, the platform invokes the 14th Amendment as part of its promise to “protect unborn life.”
That would require courts to treat fetuses as people endowed with rights under the U.S constitution, which could open the door to a national abortion ban and an end to fertility treatments like in vitro fertilization.
Del Mar called concerns about a national abortion ban or fetal personhood overblown, since state law protects abortion in Illinois and said it would not be a “priority” of the Trump administration to criminalize the mailing of abortion pills.
The decision to host the convention in Chicago links Biden’s fate with the city’s, with some critics predicting chaos.
While Chicago's Chief Operating Officer John Robertson acknowledged this week that while Chicago’s “haters ... don’t believe Chicago is ready,” Johnson is confident.
“My vision for the DNC, ultimately, is to have a safe, energetic, vibrant convention, and I'm confident we will be able to deliver that," Johnson said.
Contact Heather Cherone: @HeatherCherone | (773) 569-1863 | [email protected]
