Tag: chicago

Chicago Teacher Placed on Leave Over Facebook Post Expressing Support for ICE

A Chicago-area elementary school teacher has been placed on administrative leave after daring to express support for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on his personal Facebook account.

According to Fox News, the teacher, who worked at Gary Elementary School in West Chicago, posted a simple message last week: “GO ICE.”

That was enough to trigger a full-scale meltdown from activists in the heavily Hispanic community, who immediately launched a coordinated campaign to have the teacher fired.

A flyer circulated online alongside a Change.org petition demanding the teacher’s termination and urging parents to keep their children home from school in protest.

One user wrote:

“To be clear — I will be keeping my kids home in solidarity with families in our community and across the country who are living in fear because of ICE, and as a clear message to [redacted] that what he posted is not acceptable to me. This is not about forcing the district to act prematurely or bypass due process—which could invite costly federal litigation or a national spotlight that brings ICE back to terrorize our community.

I do believe [redacted] needs to fully feel how hurtful and alienating his words were. An empty school makes it unmistakable that his views do not align with this community. Ideally, that discomfort will lead him to choose employment elsewhere—without the district being pressured to violate due process or risk inviting additional danger into our community. He must be held accountable for the harm caused, even as we allow proper process to run its course. I trust the district to handle this responsibly and with care.”

Fox News Digital reported it could not independently locate the Facebook post, and the teacher’s account appears to have been deleted.

In an email to parents obtained by Fox News Digital, West Chicago Elementary School District 33 Superintendent Kristina Davis revealed that the teacher initially submitted a resignation on Friday, then withdrew it before the school board could act, allowing him to report to work on Monday.

“The district has obtained legal counsel to conduct an investigation beginning on Monday,” Davis wrote.

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Bank Sues Former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot for Refusing to Pay Bill for 17 Months

JPMorgan Chase Bank is suing former Chicago Democrat Mayor Lori Lightfoot for letting her $11K credit card bill go unpaid for 17 months.

The media has learned that Lightfoot, who became the first Democrat Chicago Mayor not reelected to city hall in about 40 years, was served with a subpoena at her $900,000 Chicago home in October, the Chicago Tribune reports.

Chase ultimately decided in March that her $11,000 bill would be a charge-off, but her last payment of $5,000 on the debt was made on August 7, 2024, according to the bank’s records.

The bank reported that Lightfoot has had the card since 2005.

Lightfoot seems to be struggling to pay her bills despite claiming $402,414 in adjusted gross income in 2021 alone. The Tribune also notes that records show Lightfoot took out $210,000 in early distributions from her retirement account. She also earned $216,000 during each of her four years in office.

The ex-mayor seemed to have just as much trouble paying the bills for the city when she was mayor. As she was headed out of office in 2024, for instance, the city was suffering under an $85 million budget shortfall.

Lightfoot’s next appearance in court for her credit card debt is scheduled late this year.

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Supreme Court Blocks Trump’s Deployment of National Guard to Chicago

The U.S. Supreme Court on Dec. 23 ruled that President Donald Trump may not deploy National Guard troops to Chicago to protect federal immigration agents for the time being.

“At this preliminary stage, the government has failed to identify a source of authority that would allow the military to execute the laws in Illinois,” the court said in an unsigned order.

Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch filed dissenting opinions.

The new ruling could undermine Trump’s arguments for deploying the National Guard in other locations throughout the country.

On Oct. 29, the high court delayed ruling on whether the Trump administration’s deployment of National Guard troops in Chicago was lawful.

Instead, the justices directed attorneys for the Trump administration, the state of Illinois, and the city of Chicago to address what the term “regular forces” means in a federal law that allows the president to take command of state National Guard troops.

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Psychic Credited with Finding Critical Clue in Unsolved Chicago Hit-And-Run Case

A Chicago man searching for the person responsible for a hit-and-run accident that killed his mother received some surprising help in his quest for justice when a psychic pointed him in the direction of a critical clue. According to a local media report, Damion Martin’s mother, Tanja Safforld, passed away last November after being struck by a car that promptly fled the scene. A police investigation into the incident ultimately ground to a halt in March, leaving her son to pursue the matter on his own.

Taking to social media, Martin detailed the circumstances of his mother’s death and revisited the location of the hit-and-run in the hopes of finding someone who might provide new insight into the case. As luck would have it, he was soon contacted by a person who witnessed the accident and indicated that the vehicle in question was a gray sedan. This was particularly important because, during their investigation, police were under the impression that the car was black, which is undoubtedly why their search for the hit-and-run driver came up short. Martin managed to confirm the witness’s account after he received a rather wondrous message from an unexpected source.

“A psychic wrote me out of nowhere and said, ‘go check a blue and yellow sign,'” he recalled, explaining that he returned to the scene and quickly spotted a nearby car dealership that matched the description provided by the mysterious mystic. When shown the business’s security footage from the time of the accident, the witness was able to identify the specific car that struck Martin’s mother. While police have since issued a new community bulletin with a photo of the vehicle, her son expressed dismay that a year has passed since the incident, leaving the culprit plenty of time to cover their tracks.

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Chicago’s Guaranteed Income Guarantees Less Opportunity

There have been more than 150 guaranteed income pilot programs implemented across the country, but only one has made its program permanent – Cook County, Illinois.

The county, which includes Chicago, became the first place in America to commit to a taxpayer-funded program indefinitely, serving as the nucleus for expanding the scope of these programs nationally. Taxpayers and recipients beware.

A guaranteed income program is simple: Give low-income people a monthly amount of money to use as they see fit. These payments are in addition to other welfare benefits they receive, and don’t come with any requirements to work, to learn better money management, or to get job training.

The idea is to promote equity and help the poor and disadvantaged, a noble goal, but in practice it can harm families by reducing work, income, and opportunity.

They’re extremely expensive, too, and threaten to wreck the finances of any city or state that implements them with ever-higher taxes.

Cook County used $42 million in funds from the American Rescue Plan to run a two-year pilot program that provided 3,250 low- to moderate-income participants with $500 per month.

The results? One firm committed to “equitable economic development” found four apparent benefits.

Their modeling estimated that households directly spent 55.8% of the money received. The $42 million investment generated only $8.3 million annually for local businesses and a $5.4 million increase in annual economic output in Cook County. Generating $286,000 in tax revenue, $44,000 of which stayed in Cook County.

One concern with these findings is that no results from a control group were reported. There’s no way of knowing if the increases were a result of these 3,250 recipients or if it was simply a post-pandemic boon.

The county is continuing the program in 2026 at a cost of $7.5 million to local taxpayers.

Another study of a more rigorous Chicago-area pilot program with a control group found that the program discouraged participants from working and reduced their earned income.

Taking part in the pilot actually lowered participants’ earned income by $1800, excluding program payments. Recipients’ workforce participation dropped by 3.9 percentage points. 

Participants and, surprisingly, others in the recipient’s household, ended up reducing their hours worked per week. Children who grow up around full-time working adults are more likely to climb the economic ladder, so this reduction in work threatens the future of participants’ children.

Still, the appetite for guaranteed income programs is rapidly expanding in Illinois and nationally. Illinois allocated $827,272 in its 2026 budget to fund a pilot.

In October, Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ) reintroduced the Guaranteed Income Pilot Act, with the stated goal of lifting people out of poverty. The federal program would select 20,000 participants.

Of them, 10,000 would receive “a cash payment each month equal to the fair market rent for a 2-bedroom home in the ZIP Code in which the eligible individual resides, or a substantially similar amount.” In Chicago, the payment would increase to $2,670 per month. In New York, it’d be $2910. A control group would contain 10,000 people.

A final report on the program would explicitly be required to study the feasibility of expanding the program. The goal of these programs – sometimes explicitly stated – is to cover more people.  

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Flushing Chicago’s Future When Rhetoric Replaces Revenue

It’s a sound we all dread: the toilet keeps running long after the handle drops. Water drains, money slips away, and the bill still comes. Anyone standing there nodding, pretending the noise signals progress, must live in Chicago politics—ignoring the damage quietly spreading beneath the floor.

A Mayor at War With Arithmetic

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson keeps insisting he likes business while governing as though payroll offends his values, despite policies that act like our running toilet: employers leave, investment slows, and taxes rise to plug holes, all while policies are openly hostile to growth.

Revenue is treated as an abstraction by leaders rather than wages earned by people who can still pack up and go. Budgets never care about slogans, because when employers exit, residents pay the difference. No matter how well-written, no speech fixes arithmetic.

A City Built on Strength, Undermined by Control

Once, in a time that seems like a galaxy far, far away, Chicago once stood for grit, industry, and upward mobility. Railroads, stockyards, steel, and trade rewarded their leaders’ effort and risk. Governance, consolidated power, and narrow decision-making did something that should never happen: they flushed that spirited grit away, leaving a political structure that rewards insiders and punishes independence.

It’s a script that never changes: predictable election outcomes, concentrated turnout that allows the machines to endure. Leaders hostile to growth arrive preselected rather than challenged.

When Rhetoric Replaces Revenue

The latest version of leadership talks endlessly about equity while ignoring flight. Taxes increase not by choice but by necessity after revenue leaves. Businesses respond to pressure the same way families respond when their neighborhoods become dangerous.

They move.

When each person or entity leaves, their departure tightens the vise on those left behind. Leadership talks endlessly about equity while ignoring flight. Taxes rise not by choice, but by necessity after revenue leaves. 

Businesses respond to pressure the same way families respond to unsafe neighborhoods. They move. Each departure tightens the vise on those left behind. With rising property taxes, multiplying fees, and already-weakened services, officials scold rather than adjust, blaming greed rather than reading the trail they’re leaving.

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Cook County’s electronic monitoring system is putting people in danger. Fix it now.

When we learned that the man who allegedly set 26-year-old Bethany MaGee on fire on a Blue Line train last month not only had been arrested more than 70 times but was also out on electronic monitoring after assaulting a social worker at MacNeal Hospital — in spite of the Cook County state’s attorney’s request that he be held — we were alarmed. That man, Lawrence Reed, had violated his electronic monitoring terms multiple times prior to the attack.

Given the shocking, high-profile nature of this story, you might be tempted to believe it an anomaly.

It is not.

In June, Chicagoan Arturo De La Mora was sentenced to 52 years in prison for murdering his girlfriend while he was on electronic monitoring for a prior felony gun case, crime news site CWBChicago reported. In October, a Chicago man received 22 years in prison for carjacking a Facebook Marketplace seller at gunpoint while on electronic monitoring for an earlier case in which he allegedly tried to kill a Cook County sheriff’s deputy.

A little over a year ago, Lacramioara Beldie was stabbed to death in Portage Park by her estranged husband, Constantin Beldie, who was on electronic monitoring at the time. A wrongful-death suit filed this month alleges he had dozens of monitoring violations leading up to the killing without any meaningful intervention from the county or its monitor vendor.

These are but a few horrific examples of a disastrous system that must be fixed, and quickly.

We spoke Tuesday with Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke about this serious problem. Burke assured us that her office is committed to requesting pretrial detention whenever the public is at risk, and the data she shared encourages us that the state’s attorneys arguing these cases on the front end are doing their part to prevent more danger.

Her team touted an increase in pretrial detentions under her watch, noting that, for example, detentions for aggravated domestic battery cases had increased to 85% from 61% under her predecessor. For cases involving handguns converted to the equivalent of machine guns, Burke’s office requested detention in 97% of cases, with judges approving pretrial detention 76% of the time. Again, these numbers and the higher frequency of judges approving prosecutors’ requests for detention are encouraging. But the problem of past detention refusals that have left violent folks on the streets with inadequate guardrails — and the potential for more in the future — continues to plague us.

“Electronic monitoring needs a law enforcement component,” Burke added, addressing the need to be able to enforce electronic monitoring terms and restrictions when people don’t comply. She’s right. As the system exists today, there’s next to no accountability and no muscle at all to ensure compliance while people remain free ahead of their court dates. Burke described herself as “the skunk at the garden party” for questioning what happens when someone, say, cuts off their monitor ahead of trial.

We need answers to questions like that. The county cannot continue operating a system without clear protocols for violations, otherwise Chicagoans and visitors to our city aren’t safe. Thankfully, the new chief judge understands this and is taking action. On Dec. 2, Cook County’s new Chief Judge Charles Beach ordered an urgent review of the county’s electronic monitoring program.

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Chicago Public Schools Blew $23.6 Million on Luxury Trips. The Full Story Is Far Worse.

Public school districts exist for one purpose: educating children. They are entrusted with public dollars, charged with preparing the next generation for citizenship and the workforce, and expected to manage resources responsibly. 

But in many major districts, that mission has collapsed under political control, financial irresponsibility, and a refusal to prioritize students. Few places illustrate this breakdown more clearly than Chicago Public Schools.

As The Gateway Pundit previously reported, a recent report from the CPS Office of Inspector General detailed $23.6 million in improper or wasteful travel spending—dollars that should have gone directly toward recovering from historic learning losses. 

Instead, district employees used public funds for high-end hotel suites, airport limousines, first-class airfare, and “professional development” conferences that resembled vacations more than training. One staff member extended a four-day seminar into a weeklong stay at a Hawaiian resort costing nearly $5,000. 

Another principal booked a luxury suite on the Las Vegas Strip and quietly extended the trip to celebrate an anniversary. In one school alone, 24 employees billed taxpayers $50,000 to attend a single Las Vegas conference.

The abuses extended overseas. CPS employees charged more than $142,000 for travel to South Africa, Egypt, Finland, and Estonia—complete with hot-air balloon rides and game-park safaris. These trips took place while Chicago families were told that there wasn’t enough money to fully address learning gaps or chronic absenteeism.

Most troubling, the waste accelerated when federal pandemic relief funds flooded district budgets. 

Of the $23.6 million identified, $14.5 million was spent in just 2023 and 2024. 

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Chicago Council Committee to Consider Ordinance Restricting Hemp THC Sales to Licensed Dispensaries

On Wednesday, a Chicago council committee will discuss and potentially vote on an ordinance that would prohibit all non-dispensary businesses from selling hemp-derived cannabinoid products, limiting sales exclusively to state-licensed cannabis stores.

The measure, sponsored by Alderman Marty Quinn, would repeal the city’s existing cannabinoid ordinance and replace it with a stricter framework. The proposal creates a broad definition of “hemp-derived cannabinoid product,” covering any intermediate or final product made from hemp that contains cannabinoids of any kind, whether natural, synthetic, or manufactured. It includes items intended for inhalation, ingestion, or topical use. It also defines “concealment” as knowingly hiding or preventing the discovery of these products.

Under the proposed language, no licensed business—except for state-licensed cannabis establishments—would be allowed to possess, sell, give away, barter, exchange, or furnish any hemp-derived cannabinoid product on their premises. The ordinance also bans any act of concealment involving these products. Violations would carry fines between $2,000 and $5,000 per offense, with each day the violation continues counted as a separate offense. Repeated violations could trigger license suspension or revocation.

The Illinois Healthy Alternatives Association announced its opposition ahead of Wednesday’s hearing, arguing that the measure goes too far and would disrupt businesses offering non-intoxicating hemp products.

“We all recognize the importance of implementing responsible regulations to prevent these products from reaching minors,” said Craig Katz, President of the Board for the Illinois Healthy Alternatives Association. “Our members are actively collaborating at both the state and federal levels to create a regulatory framework that safeguards minors and ensures product safety. We can achieve these objectives while still enabling our members to offer their customers the healthy alternatives they require. We are eager to partner with the City Council to find effective solutions.”

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Chicago Mayor Claims Crime Fell “Because of Him” as Texas National Guard Prepares to Leave

Chicago’s crime crisis did not disappear overnight, but you wouldn’t know that from listening to Chicago’s Democrat mayor.

This week, Mayor Brandon Johnson stood at a press conference and claimed that crime fell “because of him,” while attacking the Texas National Guard and President Trump for “wasting taxpayer dollars.”

The performance would have been comical if the stakes were not so serious.

Just hours before the event, at 11:00 p.m., an unknown individual attempted to start a fire outside City Hall.

Security footage shows the suspect lighting the exterior of the building before fleeing.

A CPD officer put out the flames before they spread. Instead of focusing on the conditions that allow attempted arson outside the city’s central government building, the mayor pivoted to politics.

He called the National Guard withdrawal an “unconditional surrender by the Trump administration,” as if the presence of Texas troops—not Chicago’s own governance—were the reason the city remains unsafe.

According to the mayor, Guard troops “sat idle for six weeks doing nothing,” a claim that conveniently ignores why Texas deployed them in the first place: to support overwhelmed border states and help cities impacted by the migrant influx created by Democrat sanctuary policies.

Chicago asked for migrants, boasted about being a sanctuary city, and then attacked Texas when the consequences arrived.

The mayor also complained that these deployments cost “hundreds of millions of dollars,” even though his own administration spends billions on bureaucracy and programs that have failed to reduce violence.

He criticized federal spending on Argentina while ignoring the billions Chicago spends without improving basic services.

Meanwhile, the attempted arson outside City Hall demonstrates exactly why a heightened security presence has been necessary.

He then targeted CPB official Greg Bovino, whom he claimed “left a trail of tears” and “undermined” the city’s work, even though federal officers arrived in September, and yet the mayor took credit for crime reductions from the summer months.

His argument was so weak that he joked Trump must think “September counts as a summer month.”

What he did not explain is how a city with increasing violence, collapsing public schools, and overflowing migrant shelters can possibly credit its problems to Texas or Trump.

The mayor framed the withdrawal as a victory against “unconstitutional federal overreach” and claimed Trump is waging a “war on poor and working people.”

But under Democrat leadership, Chicago remains one of the most dangerous cities in America, with residents fleeing, businesses closing, and families begging for basic safety.

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