More than 700,000 Venezuelans have migrated to the United States since 2020. But US law enforcement has no idea how many of them have criminal records in Venezuela, because President Nicholas Maduro’s Marxist regime is hostile to the United States and does not share information with American law enforcement. In July, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yvan Gil dismissed the violent gang Tren de Aragua (TDA), which has wreaked havoc in communities across the United States, as “a fiction created by the international media.”
As a result of the Maduro regime’s non-cooperation, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to determine a suspect’s criminal history. “They could be wanted for murder in Venezuela,” New York Police Department Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny told the Wall Street Journal. “We wouldn’t know that.”
That is only one part of the problem.
More than 50,000 of undocumented migrants have settled in Chicago since August 2022, at a cost to taxpayers close to $600 million. That generosity has included money for rent, food stamps and even cars – a total welfare benefits package that is far more generous than longtime Chicagoans who are American citizens can lawfully obtain. Many African American residents say that landlords have avoided renting to them because they can get more money if they rent to migrants being subsidized by the taxpayers.
A growing number of city residents appear to have reached their limit, and the backlash has begun.
Chicagoans are furious with uber-progressive Mayor Brandon Johnson and his efforts to resettle unvetted illegal immigrants in the Windy City. And they are furious with Johnson and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who have aggressively defended bringing the illegals to Illinois and have tried to portray critics of this policy as “anti-immigrant” bigots. Johnson has blamed what he calls “an unclean spirit” that has “captured the right-wing extremists” for opposition to city policies.
Crime in the City
With that influx came a massive increase in criminal activity. In all of 2021, for example, a total of six Venezuelan-born persons were arrested in the city. From January 1 through November 12, 2023, according to the Chicago Police Department, the number of Venezuelans arrested soared to 686 – an increase of 114 times in only 10 months. (Hat Tip: CWBChicago.com and the Federation for American Immigration Reform.) The alleged crimes included one migrant shooting another outside a city shelter, a stabbing at a police station serving as a shelter, and almost 90 arrests for shoplifting from Macy’s and Nordstrom Rack.
In and around Chicago migrant shelters, authorities have been deluged with complaints about teenagers brandishing guns, as well as prostitution, human trafficking, drug-dealing, and open consumption of cocaine and heroin.
Critics say the hostility toward immigration enforcement, embodied by politicians including Mayor Johnson and Governor Pritzker, has had horrific consequences for innocent people.
Case Studies
George Levin, 63, was found tied up and beaten to death in the basement of his family’s home in the Norwood Park section of Chicago. Levin, his older sister and their mother had dinner in their house. At around 8:00 PM, Levin excused himself and went down to his basement apartment. It would be the last time his family would see him alive.
Two illegal migrants have been arrested and charged with his murder. One from Ecuador and the other from Venezuela, entered through Texas. The pair reportedly made contact with Levin on Grindr, a dating app. According to court documents, one had been wearing a Department of Homeland Security ankle monitor at the time, having been arrested earlier in January and charged with a misdemeanor count of assault for attempting to lure a 12-year-old girl into his car, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.
Then there is a member of TDA who entered the US in September 2023. He was arrested in Chicago on May 5, 2024, and charged with unlawful use of a weapon after he was caught trying to stash a stolen gun, CWBC Chicago.com reported.
After the arrest, ICE lodged a detainer in an attempt to take him into custody, but Cook County Judge David Kelly ordered his release and the suspect, unsurprisingly skipped town. He resurfaced in Denver – 1,000 miles away – on June 25, when he and 7 other men allegedly carried out a jewelry-store robbery in which two female store employees were pistol-whipped and threatened with death, the New York Post reported. The crime was captured on store video.
The Political Fallout
All of this has made Johnson very unpopular. A poll taken in February 2025 showed Johnson winning the approval of just 6.6 percent of voters, with 79.9 percent disapproving – a net favorability rating of negative 73.3, according to the pollster, M3 Strategies.
His credibility was not helped by a January 25 incident in which city school officials falsely accused US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) of showing up at an elementary school, while boasting that they turned immigration officials away. They later had to admit that ICE hadn’t come to the school; the visitors were actually Secret Service agents.
Johnson and others “have continuously stoked fear and anxiety in neighborhoods, spreading false information that the Trump administration and ICE were coming to round people up out of churches,” Alderman Raymond Lopez told “News Nation” TV in February.
Lopez (like Mayor Johnson, a Democrat) added that when he met with border czar Tom Homan in December, they agreed that detaining criminals who had entered the United States illegally was their major concern. The federal government wants “to focus on those dangerous, undocumented criminals that are here in their communities,” Lopez said.
Lopez added that many Democratic leaders oppose any working relationship with the Trump administration, and “that’s only going to hurt the people that they pretend to care about,”
In fact, Homan and ICE officials have made copious amounts of information available showing that they are arresting murderers, rapists, drug traffickers and violent gang-members in Chicago and across the United States. That hasn’t stopped Pritzker from attacking the administration for targeting “law-abiding” illegal aliens “who are doing the right thing.” The governor vows to “stand in the way” of Homan’s efforts to remove violent migrants from his state.
The Community Speaks
Many working-class Chicagoans say the illegal influx of migrants has been a disaster for the city. Over the past year, many Black residents have gone public with their concerns, and city council meetings have been dominated by their angry denunciations of Johnson and his allies who they say are more interested in importing poor people from all over the world than in providing services to American citizens.
“We don’t want illegals in our community,” local activist O’Cyrus King told Mayor Johnson and city council members at a raucous December hearing. King said that even as violent migrants were “terrorizing” other Chicagoans, city officials were demanding more money for them ‘“when you have Black people already struggling” who are in dire need of assistance.
Tyrone Muhammad, 53, is a former enforcer for a Black city gang, the Gangster Disciples. After spending 20 years in prison for murder, he now runs a street patrol and violence prevention group called Ex-Cons for Community and Social Change on the South Side. In a September 2024 interview with the New York Post, Muhammad slammed the federal government for allowing criminals and gang members to infiltrate the United States and warned that Chicago could go up in flames if tensions between local gangs and TDA escalate.
A Post reporter travelling through the city last year could see TDA members flashing gang signs outside a migrant shelter in downtown, where two city police officers told the Post that TDA members were attempting to challenge a local gang’s territory near a 7-11.
Employees of the shelter denied the presence of TDA and said there had been no crime in the shelter. But Terry Newsome, a local activist, teamed with Muhammad to make dozens of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, yielding hundreds of police incident reports from the shelter and three other city migrant shelters in downtown Chicago. The crimes included sex trafficking, child pornography, illegal weapons, narcotics and spousal violence.
Looking for Change
One of the first Chicagoans to speak out against the city’s welcoming approach was Cata Truss, a government worker and a longtime Democrat who went on national television in January 2024 to urge the city to end the sanctuary policy because it was diverting resources from American residents. City officials refused to meet with her and Truss eventually filed a suit against Chicago to force it to end the policy. Interviewed one year later, Truss said she was heartened by the new federal administration’s tougher stand on illegal immigration.
In early 2025, she told Fox News Channel, “We’re excited to see that something is about to happen, that there’s about to be a change. We cannot continue to hemorrhage money in this city the way we have been.” Truss said she was concerned, however, about reports that the city government has been holding classes to teach illegal migrants how to evade ICE. Truss, who switched her party affiliation to the GOP, added that she is “excited” about the appointment of Tom Homan as border czar.
“In spite of what you might hear our mayor and Gov. Pritzker say about how Chicagoans feel… we are not happy about what is happening here,” Truss said, adding that city residents want to ensure that “criminals, who came here to set up their criminal operations again are sent home.”
The Justice Department
Sanctuary city opponents like Truss also gained a powerful new ally in US Attorney General Pam Bondi, who announced in February that the Justice Department has filed a suit against the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois accusing them of obstructing federal immigration law.
Officials there have had a practice of providing “minimal” cooperation with immigration enforcement efforts and “and oftentimes affirmatively thwarting” enforcement of “federal immigration laws over a period of years,” the DOJ alleges in the suit. These practices have “resulted in countless criminals being released into Chicago who should have been held for immigration removal from the United States,” the lawsuit added.
Bondi criticized state and local officials for “choosing illegal aliens over the safety and security of their own citizens and the men and women of law enforcement who are out there trying to protect their citizens.”
Pritzker dismissed the lawsuit as “garbage” and warned the Trump administration to tread carefully in enforcing federal immigration law in his state.
Johnson called immigration raids targeting illegal aliens with criminal records “unconscionable and abhorrent” and vowed that Chicago will remain “a city that opens its arms to people from around the globe.”
Rejecting Compromise
In 2025, Chicago marks its 40th year of openly flouting US immigration law. In 1985, Mayor Harold Washington declared Chicago a “Welcoming City” by executive order, which barred police and other employees from asking city residents about their immigration status. In 2006, the policy was enacted into law by the Chicago City Council.
After he was elected president in 2016, Donald Trump warned that sanctuary cities could lose federal financial support, but no real effort was made to act on Trump’s warning, and Democrats in the Illinois legislature took that as a green light to move forward with new efforts to violate federal immigration law. In 2017, lawmakers passed a bill called the Trust Act, which limited state and local law enforcement’s participation in federal immigration enforcement. Among other provisions, the law bars police from keeping someone in custody solely because of a request from ICE. The state’s last Republican governor, Bruce Rauner, signed the measure into law.
In 2021, Pritzker signed a bill making it more difficult for officials to inquire about the immigration status or citizenship of someone in custody and barring local governments from signing contracts with the federal government to detain illegals.
In 2021 under then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot, Chicago enacted an expanded Welcoming City ordinance.
The stated reason for sanctuary policies is that they are necessary to protect law-abiding working immigrant families, not violent criminal aliens. But, in January, when Lopez and another Democrat, Alderwoman Silvana Tabares, proposed amending the Welcoming City ordinance to allow police to cooperate with ICE in cases involving serious criminal activity, the council voted 39-11 to kill the measure – even though it would have barred cooperation in cases where the only crime was being illegally in the United States.
Johnson is “absolutely not concerned about the people who will bear the brunt of his actions,” Lopez said. Chicago’s immigration future remains unclear.
Joel Himelfarb is a communications consultant for the Jewish Policy Center.
