WASHINGTON — One week before Donald Trump moves back into the White House, the Democrats representing the Chicago area in Congress are strategizing ways to limit the scope of the Republican president-elect’s plans.
Trump and his GOP allies have signaled that they would quickly target Illinois and other Democratic bastions once Trump assumes the presidency and as Republicans now control both chambers of Congress.
Tom Homan, Trump’s pick to lead immigration enforcement, told Chicago supporters last month that mass deportations would “start right here in Chicago, Illinois.” Congressional Republicans have teed up legislation to strip so-called sanctuary cities like Chicago of federal funds that could be used to help immigrants in the country illegally. And much of Trump’s larger agenda — from launching trade wars, pulling back federal support for electric vehicles or eschewing scientific research — could affect Illinois residents and the state’s economy.
“Trump has not been kind in his descriptions of Chicago,” said U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, who represents parts of Chicago and many northern suburbs. “There’s definitely going to be a lot of pushback (from Illinois officials), and it’ll be obvious what Trump is doing: He wants to punish certain blue states.”
Still, Illinois Democrats figure they have an avenue for some success in the latest Trump era.
They hope they can get Republicans to back off on some demands when the GOP will undoubtedly need help passing high-priority bills. Chicago-area lawmakers also plan to enlist business allies in their fight against higher tariffs and immigration raids and promote bipartisan proposals while Trump pursues a more polarizing agenda.
Whether the Democrats succeed will depend largely on whether Republicans on Capitol Hill can stick together. Though Republicans now control the U.S. House and Senate, the margins are especially tight in the House, where the GOP majority is as small as 217-215 as three seats formerly held by Trump nominees remain vacant.
And nobody’s taking GOP unity for granted these days, especially after conservative lawmakers nearly blocked the election of Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Johnson as speaker of the House in early January and rebuffed Trump over limits on U.S. government debt in December.
“We’ve had this dynamic over the last term that half of the Republican members of the House really don’t like the other half of the Republican members of the House,” said U.S. Rep. Sean Casten, a Democrat representing the west, southwest and south suburbs. Two physical altercations took place on the House floor in the last two years, Casten noted, and both involved a Republican attacking another Republican.
“You still have a Republican caucus in the House that can’t decide whether it wants to govern or not,” Casten said, “so I think getting things through the House when they only have one vote to lose is going to have to require on their end working with the Democrats.”
On the other hand, the incentives for Republicans to work together will be greater once the party controls the presidency and both chambers of Congress, said Laurel Harbridge-Yong, a Northwestern University political science professor who has studied political polarization.
“When you have unified government, we would typically expect that the majority party has the most incentives to engage in governing,” she said.
That means passing legislation they can point to as accomplishments while also more clearly bearing the responsibility for keeping the federal government open and performing basic tasks.
That’s a marked change from the last Congress when Republicans held only the House and Democrats controlled both the Senate and White House, Harbridge-Yong said.
“When you have a divided Congress is when you probably have the least incentive for anybody to care about governing, because it is often hard for voters to know who is actually to blame when something doesn’t get done,” she said.
A tumultuous first term
Illinois Democrats were shut out of power early in Trump’s first term but the impact wasn’t as harmful to Illinois residents — who were represented by mostly Democrats in Washington — as some might have thought.
First, when Trump entered the White House in 2017 there were still a few Republican members of Congress from the Chicago area: U.S. Reps. Peter Roskam and Randy Hultgren held seats in the western suburbs, and Adam Kinzinger’s district included far reaches of the metro area. Second, and more importantly, Trump’s first term was riddled with disorganization and considerable dysfunction.
While he secured tax cuts that favored the wealthy and appointed three conservative Supreme Court justices, he was stymied on several other policy initiatives. Republicans failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act, one of President Barack Obama’s signature accomplishments. Trump’s much-ballyhooed infrastructure proposal fell flat. And Republican control of Congress ended ignominiously two years into his term with a 35-day federal government shutdown — the longest in history — in a fight over funding for a “border wall.”
Outside of Congress, Trump tried to impose immigration restrictions that critics called a “Muslim ban,” which were tied up in court for years. He dismissed FBI Director James Comey, fought with his attorney general, raised tariffs on China that led to higher taxes on American farm exports and stepped up immigration enforcement.
The days of all-Republican control of Washington under Trump were tumultuous, but the long-term consequences were not as far-reaching as critics feared at the time, said Christopher Berry, a University of Chicago public policy professor and director of the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation.
“Democrats have been in the minority party before, and the world didn’t end,” he said.
“Anytime you’re in the minority party, you’re going to lose some influence in Washington,” Berry continued. “But was it a dramatic change? Did all the federal dollars dry up and throw Illinois into a crisis? No, I wouldn’t say most people think of 2017 as such a crisis.”
Partly why the impact was limited is that Congress has been largely ineffectual in recent years, regardless of who is in charge, he said.
“We have lots of experience over the last few years that tells us that neither party gets virtually anything done,” Berry said. “As frustrating as it was to a lot of people that the Biden administration got a lot less done than they wanted, that can be a comfort. It’s going to be just as hard — if not harder — for the Trump administration to get anything done because their party is more divided.”
Still, the second Trump administration could prove to be more effective than the first.
Trump enters his second term with more experience managing the federal bureaucracy and with appointees seemingly more prized for their loyalty than their expertise. An outside effort by the Heritage Foundation to provide a blueprint for conservative governance — known widely as Project 2025 — could offer direction for the new administration, especially because one of the document’s main authors will likely lead the powerful Office of Management and Budget under Trump.
“Can they actually withhold funding from Illinois? Typically, no,” Berry said. “But if you have a fully partisan bureaucracy that was making the federal grant allocations, would they be willing to ignore the formulas (in law)? Would they be willing to drag their feet on payments? It’s not inconceivable to me that they could do those things, even if they were ultimately deemed illegal.”
Immigration fights looming
Public sentiment on immigration nationally also has shifted since the start of Trump’s first term, with fewer Americans supporting the idea that undocumented immigrants should be allowed to stay in the country legally.
Congressional Republicans are already seizing the opportunity to expand immigration crackdowns. The House — including dozens of Democrats — passed a bill last week named for a 22-year-old Georgia nursing student who was killed last year by an immigrant living in the country illegally. The Laken Riley Act would require federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement to take custody of immigrants in the country without legal permission who have been arrested for theft-related crimes. It would also let state attorneys general sue the federal government for not adequately enforcing immigration laws.
The House voted 264-159 in favor of the measure, with all Republicans and 48 Democrats supporting it. Chicago-area lawmakers all voted against it, but two downstate Democrats — U.S. Reps. Nikki Budzinski and Eric Sorensen — backed it. The measure is now up for debate in the Senate.
U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, Illinois’ senior senator, said some aspects of the law are “impossible.”
“To say that if a person is arrested for shoplifting, they can be deported — not charged, not prosecuted, but arrested — that’s not fair,” he said. “We’ve got to change the language of that to make it reasonable.”
But Durbin declined to say whether he would support the bill with those changes, saying it would be “irresponsible” to make that commitment without seeing the exact language of the amendments.
Trump’s repeated vows to step up immigration enforcement have many Chicago-area representatives worried.
In Chicago, U.S. Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García shared a message on social media outlets trying to assuage the concerns of immigrants in his district.
“I know that there is a lot of uncertainty right now about what may happen to our immigrant communities when the Trump administration begins, but many people are with you,” he said in Spanish.
“Chicago is a sanctuary city, and Illinois is an inclusive state for immigrants,” Garcia said, referring to the city’s policy of not asking residents about their immigration status and not cooperating with federal immigration enforcement actions in most cases. “We will not be intimidated or let down our guard.”
U.S. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, who largely represents the northwest suburbs, said he recently had a doctoral recipient ask him about the possibility that Trump could end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program that allows undocumented people brought to the United States as children to remain in the country and receive work authorization.
“We have to formulate a legal strategy, obviously a political strategy, and then, from my standpoint as a member of Congress, our constituent services strategy to work with the agencies as they are (under Biden) and what they will become after Jan. 20,” he said. “We have to do whatever we can to help our constituents, whoever they are.”
U.S. Rep. Bill Foster, who represents the far west suburbs, said he’s heard similar worries, particularly in the Hispanic community in Aurora.
“People are just doing things to protect their families,” he said. “I’m aware of a couple of marriages that have happened to try to defend themselves against this.”
“In Illinois, the immigrant community is viewed as a very positive economic influence,” he continued. “Somehow Trump was able to convince the citizens of South Dakota or North Dakota or wherever that immigrants are wrecking their communities, whereas, in fact, they’re the lifeblood of a lot of areas, like Aurora or the Chicago metro area.”
Across the rotunda, shortly before he handed the gavel over as head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Durbin held a committee hearing focused on the potential negative repercussions of widespread deportations. The senator said he doesn’t want dangerous people entering the country or staying here.
“Having said that,” he said in an interview, “the vast majority of undocumented people we’re talking about are honest, God-fearing, hard-working, tax-paying people, and I believe they ought to be given a chance.”
Durbin said he “dismissed” Homan’s promise to start deportations in Chicago as “fiery campaign rhetoric,” and that he hoped Trump would work on a solution for DACA recipients, as the incoming president suggested he would do on a December appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Durbin also said he would push in the Laken Riley Act to include protections for DACA recipients, who also called “Dreamers.”
Budget leverage
One place where Chicago-area Democrats could hold some sway in the coming months is in budget and spending negotiations because many conservative Republicans have been unwilling to support spending deals that don’t include major cuts.
Congressional Republicans hope to pass what Trump has called “one big, beautiful bill” in the early days of his administration that could include a wide swath of policy changes, from extending the 2017 tax cuts to energy policy to building a border wall. GOP lawmakers can avoid a Democratic-led filibuster in the Senate by using the “reconciliation” process for spending-related bills, though doing so would require nearly unanimous support from Republicans on Capitol Hill.
Many Republicans already balked last month at Trump’s push to raise the “debt ceiling,” which would make it easier to pass large tax cuts and other big-ticket items on Trump’s agenda.
“If the Republicans truly want to do their tax cuts — and they don’t want to do things like cut Social Security — they’re going to have to raise the debt limit,” Foster said. “One way or another, someone’s going to have to break promises if they don’t, unless the Republicans are willing to work with Democrats. We will be asking for certain things in return for Democratic votes to raise that limit.”
U.S. Rep. Brad Schneider, who chairs the centrist New Democrat Coalition, predicted it would be “very difficult” for Republicans to pass a major spending bill on their own.
“We’ll be ready and willing, if and when they fail, to sit down and talk,” he said.
One potential area for compromise could be raising the cap on the tax deductions for state and local taxes. To pay for their tax cut package, Republicans in 2017 limited how much taxpayers who itemize their tax deductions could write off for the “SALT deduction.” The move largely affected people in higher-tax jurisdictions, including many cities and suburbs in Illinois.
The moves over the SALT deduction were led by Roskam, who chaired the House Ways and Means subcommittee on tax policy, despite representing a wealthy west suburban district with large property tax bills. Casten defeated Roskam the following year.
Casten and U.S. Rep. Lauren Underwood, who represents the far west suburbs, introduced legislation last week to raise the cap from $10,000 to $15,000. Democrats have pushed similar efforts since 2019 but have so far been unsuccessful.
Schneider also raised the prospect of raising the cap.
“It has been penalizing Illinois taxpayers now for eight years. It affects Lake County, for example, where almost half of tax filers are affected by the cap on the SALT deduction,” Schneider said. “This is not a singular partisan issue. It’s bipartisan … and I’m hopeful that I can find a handful of Republicans whose constituents are being hammered by a SALT cap, and we might be able to have a positive impact that way.”
Schakowsky said Republicans will pay a price with the public if they go ahead with plans to cut benefits to Medicare or Social Security recipients. When her Republican colleagues discuss those proposals during Budget Committee meetings, she said she tells them: “Go ahead, make my day.”
“There’s no partisan divide among all families,” she said. “Let them try to cut Social Security and in the meantime give a big tax cut to the wealthiest Americans. … There’s going to be some disappointment pretty quickly from people who think, ‘I didn’t mean that.’”
U.S. Rep. Jonathan Jackson said Republicans could lose control of the House if they push through tax cuts for wealthy residents.
“We have to defend our gains as Democrats and have to let the American people know that when he comes in for tax cuts for people that can afford it,” Jackson said. “What is wrong with asking the people that have benefited the most from this country’s tremendous resources and infrastructure … to pay their fair share of taxes?”
Daniel C. Vock is a freelance reporter. Chicago Tribune’s Alice Yin contributed.
