President-elect Donald Trump’s vow to enact mass deportations — and his famous antipathy toward Chicago — have girded local immigration activists for the immediate aftermath of his inauguration.
But how would such an effort, which has not happened before in modern U.S. history, actually unfold? And how real are Trump’s threats to try to go after asylum-seekers, naturalized citizens and other groups on top of immigrants in the U.S. without legal permission?
Trump border czar Tom Homan has designated the nation’s third-largest city as ground zero for his plans to round up immigrants in the country illegally and other groups at an unprecedented scale, saber-rattling that could set up a high-profile showdown between progressive Mayor Brandon Johnson and the incoming Republican administration.
Chicago officials are mobilizing a legal and resource playbook to stop federal immigration agents from carrying out raids at businesses, shelters, police lock-ups and beyond.
It’s unclear what exactly the president-elect will do after his Jan. 20 inauguration, as he promised mass deportations before his first term, too, and they largely did not materialize. Still, local leaders told the Tribune the danger is even more real this time around, citing the rightward shift of the courts and his four years of previous White House experience to embolden him.
“I think we need to take every threat that Trump makes seriously and be ready to be able to fight it,” said Eréndira Rendón, vice president of immigrant justice at The Resurrection Project. “We also need to realize that some stuff is very much for show. … We are staying pretty focused on making sure that we are growing our ability to take on as many deportation cases as possible, without getting distracted.”
Johnson has vowed to unequivocally protect Chicago’s immigrants, including via the sanctuary city policy. In an interview with the Tribune, his deputy immigration mayor, Beatriz Ponce de León, said her team is holding a public education campaign, featuring a flurry of “Know Your Rights” workshops for immigrants.
“We have heard very publicly on the news that Chicago could be a target on day one for raids,” Ponce de León said. “It is reassuring that we live in a city and in a state that has these protections. … Although Homan might be threatening to do those things, it is not necessarily something that is allowable and that wouldn’t be violating people’s rights.”
Gov. JB Pritzker has also promised Illinois immigrants that they are safe, though violent criminals who lack permanent legal status are not. “You come for my people, you come through me,” he declared to Trump after the November election.
The promise, and limits, of a ‘Welcoming City’
Homan has lately offered sanctuary cities such as Chicago a choice: Cooperate with rounding up criminals in the U.S. without legal permission, or see Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agencies on the streets.
“More agents in the jails means less agents in the neighborhood,” Homan said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” earlier this month. “That’s why I’m pleading with sanctuary cities: Let us in the jail to arrest the bad guy. … What’s going to happen when we go to the community and find that person, find that criminal alien, it’s probably going to be with others. Others we will have to arrest.”
Chicago’s sanctuary city ordinance — or Illinois’ statewide version, the Way Forward Act — bans official cooperation between local law enforcement and federal deportation authorities, while ensuring immigrants living without legal permission can use city services. Cook County’s statute bans ICE agents from the jail and other facilities unless they have a criminal warrant unrelated to immigration.
“I would say yes and no,” Nicole Hallett, clinical professor of law at the University of Chicago, said when asked if these laws kneecap immigration enforcement. “The Welcoming City ordinance does not prevent any enforcement from happening in the city of Chicago or anywhere else. ICE can fully operate … (but) it can make it a lot harder for the federal government to have an effective immigration enforcement plan.”
The intent is to ensure immigrants in the country without legal permission can still report crime without fearing deportation, while depriving the feds of a key resource — local police, who were traditionally ICE’s sources on who to detain outside of border areas, Hallett said. But two Johnson critics in the City Council hope to roll back Chicago’s ordinance.
Ald. Raymond Lopez, 15th, and Silvana Tabares, 23rd, plan to use a parliamentary move during this Wednesday’s council meeting to force a vote on an amendment that would allow Chicago police to work with federal agencies on cases with individuals accused or convicted of gang activity, drug-related crimes, sex trafficking or sex crimes with minors.
“I absolutely do believe that that assertion is serious,” Lopez, who met with Homan last month, said about the threat to flood Chicago with ICE agents. “Quite frankly, in refusing to turn over that small percentage who choose to commit crimes, you are endangering our entire undocumented community by forcing the feds to find them. I don’t want to see them in my neighborhoods.”
Homan, a former ICE official in Trump’s first administration, has opened the bomb bay doors in his rhetoric against Johnson. “Chicago’s in trouble because your mayor sucks and your governor sucks,” he said at a December event hosted by the Northwest Side GOP Club:
“We’re going to start right here in Chicago, Illinois. If your Chicago mayor doesn’t want to help, he can step aside,” Homan said. “But if he impedes us — if he knowingly harbors or conceals an illegal alien — I will prosecute him.”
Johnson has not met with the Trump administration, though Ponce de León said the mayor’s team would welcome a chance to do so after the transition to “make clear” the Welcoming City ordinance and gain clarity on Trump’s immigration plans for Chicago.
But unlike New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who was spared Homan’s ire after backing a plan to focus on deporting violent immigrants in the country without legal status, Johnson’s political brand hinges on leftist bona fides that position him as a progressive foil to Trump.
“This is a city that will remain a welcoming city,” Johnson said in his first news conference after Trump’s November victory. “I promise you that we will not bend or break. Our values will remain strong and firm. We will face likely hurdles in our work over the next four years, but we will not be stopped, and we certainly will not go back.”
Public records requests show the Johnson and Pritzker teams met last month to talk about “Shelter Raids,” indicating they think the city-state’s new single shelter system for migrants could be one of the target areas for ICE activity.
Daisy Contreras, a spokesperson for the Illinois Department of Human Services, said the discussion “to protect vulnerable populations in Illinois in shelter settings” included brainstorming “potential trainings that shelter staff may need if engaging with federal immigration enforcement officials and/or handling and responding to immigration-related documentation.”
Johnson’s deputy mayor of community safety, Garien Gatewood, stressed the city’s goal was to prep shelter operators with legal guidance and resources should a shelter raid scenario arise.
“None of us are looking for a physical standoff between federal agents and our local law enforcement agents,” Gatewood told the Tribune.
Johnson’s corporation counsel has provided guidance for the rest of the mayor’s cabinet on how to protect Chicagoans from ICE threats, Gatewood said, with a memo going out to city commissioners on Friday.
What Trump, Homan have said
Rendon, with The Resurrection Project, said Homan and Trump should not be trusted at their word to only deport criminals.
“It seems like the narrative is that that is who the target is,” Rendon said. “But in actuality … no matter how deep or long your ties are to the U.S., no matter if you have U.S. citizen children or not, no matter if you’re a homeowner or a business owner — it does not matter. Under the actual policies that Trump had, anybody who is undocumented was the priority for deportation.”
Federal agents require probable cause to detain individuals or else risk accusations of unconstitutional profiling, but Homan’s threats could lead to a chilling effect in immigrant-heavy communities and workplaces, Hallett added.
Though Trump’s first term ultimately saw fewer deportations than either of President Barack Obama’s terms, it was still marked by frequent ICE raids and family separations. His operation faced costly and time-intensive hurdles when it came to deporting immigrants, however, including a heavy backlog in the court system and shortages in law enforcement personnel and detention space.
There are currently a record 3 million pending cases in U.S. immigration court, per the latest government data.
To get around due process, Trump’s second administration could attempt to ramp up deportations via expedited removal, a law that allows circumventing due process for those who arrived without documents, Hallett said. He has also hinted at activating the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th century law invoked to enact deportations during wartime, as well as using the military, which would break longstanding norms and likely lead to legal showdowns with blue states.
To get around the fiscal limitations inhibiting mass deportations, the Trump White House will likely look at the GOP-controlled U.S. Congress to allocate more funding to the effort.
Beyond those with criminal histories or removal orders, Trump’s incoming administration has said they would target other classes of immigrants and even citizens.
That includes the asylum-seekers who flooded Chicago and elsewhere after arriving from impoverished countries such as Venezuela, becoming an animating force during the 2024 presidential election given their plights and extensive need for city resources. But the U.S. is not allowed to deport those migrants — more than 51,000 who have come through Chicago — while their applications are processed.
What Trump can do to target them is change the law to make asylum status easier to deny, so that after their cases are adjudicated, they become immigrants subject to deportation. But in the meantime, their fates are in the hands of immigration judges, who vary widely on how many asylum statuses they grant.
On Friday, President Joe Biden extended Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of migrants from Venezuela and other countries as a bid to preempt Trump from jeopardizing the benefit.
More unusually, Trump and his administration have talked about going after birthright citizenship, a right enshrined in the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment for children who were born in the country. This will surely draw legal challenges — but Trump could be counting on the 6-3 conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court to undo that protection.
Still, even the highest court of the land has not always sided with the president-elect on immigration cases.
“I think that’s absolutely what they’re doing,” Hallett said about engineering a landmark birthright citizenship case. But regardless of the legal outcome, she said “it will lead to lots of anguish and worry and anxiety, and even if it’s resolved in two years … they’ve managed to alienate a large group of people who are U.S. citizens and always have been.”
Trump’s incoming deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller has also said naturalized citizens could be subject to deportation. That would be a resource-intensive process of rooting out those who omitted or lied on their citizenship applications.
Lastly, Chicago and Illinois could be in the crosshairs of federal funding cutoffs once again should leaders obstruct deportations, as Homan has floated. That played out during the first Trump White House, when then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel sued the Justice Department in 2017 after it withheld federal grants to Chicago because of its sanctuary city policy.
Emanuel prevailed, though that legal fight was largely symbolic because the amount of money at stake was a small fraction of the city’s police budget: just $1.5 million that he wanted to use to help pay for the ShotSpotter gunshot detection system.
“The fear is knowing that the administration — not just him, right — is coming in with already four years of experience,” Rendon said. “But we have been very focused for the last eight years on increasing the legal capacity to be able to represent immigrants. … The main thing for folks to be able to protect themselves in case of ICE raids, or in case they have an encounter with ICE, is that they know what their rights are.”
Chicago Tribune’s Dan Petrella and A.D. Quig contributed.
