Chicago is climbing aboard a legal bandwagon challenging President Donald Trump’s efforts to punish sanctuary cities amid warnings that his so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” provides an “enormous amount of money to pursue deportations.”
Six weeks ago, Corporation Counsel Mary Richardson-Lowry highlighted more than 30 legal actions the city has taken — with “some areas of significant success” — to challenge the layoffs and frozen federal grants ordered by Trump and his Department of Government Efficiency led at the time by billionaire Elon Musk.
On Tuesday night, Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration made it 31 legal actions.
Chicago joined a federal lawsuit filed by 66 cities in the Northern District of California. It challenges an executive order and other actions by Trump’s Justice and Homeland Security departments aimed at withholding federal funding from Chicago and other sanctuary cities that prohibit their police and other employees from enforcing federal civil immigration laws.
Other plaintiffs in the case include San Francisco, San Diego, Oakland, San Jose, Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, Baltimore, Boston and Denver.
“Federal funding should never be used as a tool to coerce local authorities into compliance with unlawful mandates,” Richardson-Lowry said in a press release. “This legal action reaffirms our commitment to defending the rule of law and protecting the ability of local governments to set policies that serve their communities.”
Deputy Corporation Counsel Stephen Kane said the U.S. Constitution prohibits the Trump administration from “requiring the city to expend its resources enforcing federal civil immigrant law in order to receive federal funds.”
Former Democratic strategist-turned-CNN commentator David Axelrod told the Sun-Times Wednesday he expects the “confrontations that you’re seeing now in Los Angeles” to be repeated in Chicago as Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents ramp up raids aimed at removing immigrants without legal status.
Axelrod said “resistance to Trump has some political cache” for Johnson, whose public approval rating is deeply underwater — as low as the single-digits in some polling.
But it’s a two-way street, Axelrod adds: “Trump also derives benefit from those fights.”
Axelrod noted that Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, delivered a “very provocative” speech before a Republican gathering on the Northwest Side in early December declaring Chicago “ground zero” for mass deportations.
“Chicago was in their sights back then and I expect that we’ll see that. They’ve repeated it recently,” Axelrod said. “Now with this bill that Congress passed last week, they’ve got an enormous amount of money to pursue deportations and I think they’re going to thicken their troops. You’re going to see some of the things that we’ve seen in L.A., on steroids, in other cities like Chicago.”
Like predecessors Rahm Emanuel and Lori Lightfoot, Johnson has burnished his own political reputation in Chicago by opposing Trump. But if the raids take an ugly turn, Axelrod has his doubts about the rookie mayor’s ability to handle it.
“There is nothing about the way that he has handled many of the political challenges [he has faced] that suggests he’s going to be really adroit in the handling of Trump,” Axelrod said. “But we’ll see.”