Chicago 312: Kristi Noem Doesn't Know Who You Are (But She's Sure You're a Terrorist)

Welcome to Chicago 312, a newsletter on Chicago municipal politics, institutional power, and how the city actually works. If someone forwarded you this, welcome! Subscribe here.

This week: A DHS secretary who can't name the people her agents shot, a war nobody voted for, two states competing to give a football team your money, the civilian oversight board telling civilians to be more civil, and Kansas inventing Uber but for transphobia.

3 Headlines:

1. Kristi Noem Told Congress She Doesn't Know Who Marimar Martinez Is. Marimar Was Sitting Right Behind Her.

Sun-Times / Tribune / NBC: This week, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem sat before the Senate Judiciary Committee and told Sen. Richard Blumenthal she was "not familiar with the details" of the shooting of Marimar Martinez — the Chicago teacher who was shot five times by Border Patrol agent Charles Exum in Brighton Park last October. Martinez was in the gallery, five rows back. Durbin also pressed Noem on DHS branding Martinez, Renee Good, and Alex Pretti as "domestic terrorists" immediately after their shootings and asked her to retract. She would not.

Why It Matters: DHS built a narrative machine around Operation Midway Blitz now being systematically dismantled in federal court. Noem is clearly on the outs, but that won’t stop her from continuing to run that narrative machine even while testifying to Congress.

2. The US Is at War With Iran. Illinois Gets the Bill.

WTTW / NBC / WashPost: A joint U.S.-Israeli bombardment killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday. Six U.S. service members have been killed — the first American combat casualties of the conflict. Trump says the operation could last four to five weeks and hasn't ruled out ground troops.

This is happening while DHS is already in a partial shutdown over its immigration enforcement budget. Congress can't fund the agency that runs ICE and CBP, and the same administration just opened an air war that Trump admits could take over a month.

Why It Matters: For Chicago specifically: every dollar and every political minute spent on Iran is a dollar and a minute not spent on the domestic fights that are actively reshaping life here — federal grants, housing, transit.

3. Two States Are Now Bidding on the Bears With Your Money

Sun-Times / Capitol News Illinois / Tribune: The Bears stadium saga officially became a two-state bidding war last week. An Illinois House committee voted 13-7 along party lines to advance HB 910, which would freeze property tax assessments on "megaprojects" and let developers negotiate payments-in-lieu-of-taxes with local governments. Hours later, Indiana Gov. Mike Braun signed a sprawling tax-incentive plan aimed at luring the Bears to Hammond.

Why It Matters: Two states are competing to see who can transfer the most public wealth to a private franchise. Illinois wants to freeze the Bears' property taxes for up to 45 years on a $2 billion development. Indiana wants to tax its own residents' restaurant meals and hotel stays to build a stadium the Bears would operate and eventually own. Chicago wants $630 million in state infrastructure money it wouldn't otherwise get. Everyone is calling their version "economic development."

If we have a billion dollars in public resources to deploy, is a football stadium the best use?

4. CCPSA Tells Chicagoans to "Trust the Police."

Block Club / Axios: The Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability held another hearing last Thursday. Superintendent Snelling, notably, did not show up. Chicagoans again demanded answers on whether CPD collaborated with ICE during and before Operation Midway Blitz: blocking streets for federal agents, escorting ICE vehicles, pulling over rapid response members, creating passageways for agents to escape protesters in Albany Park.

CCPSA president Remel Terry told the crowd they "need to trust our police department." They booed.

2,000 Chicagoans signed a petition forcing the first CCPSA hearing back in January. Over 40 complaints have been filed with COPA about CPD-ICE interactions since June. The Vasquez-Fuentes ordinance that would explicitly give COPA authority to investigate Welcoming City violations passed a joint committee 19-3, with Snelling's own letter of support. Then at the February 18 City Council meeting, an alder who had voted for it in committee blocked it on the floor. The ordinance is now punted to next month.

White told the crowd: "If and when this amendment is adopted, COPA will immediately begin investigating." That "if and when" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Why It Matters: The uncomfortable truth is that the CCPSA can hold hearings until the end of time and it won't produce a single prosecution. The people with actual power to act are State's Attorney Eileen O'Neill Burke and Mayor Johnson — and their public relationship on this issue has been a masterclass in dysfunction. Johnson signed his "ICE on Notice" executive order and said Burke helped draft it. Burke publicly called that "not true" and called the order "wholly inappropriate." Then two weeks later, Burke announced her own Federal Immigration Enforcement Action Response Protocol — which, per the TRiiBE, legal observers say mostly amounts to her "catching up" with prosecutors nationwide who'd been organizing since January. And while Burke has no problem drafting protocols for hypothetical future prosecutions of federal agents, she's still actively prosecuting nonviolent Broadview protesters — one of whom is facing a felony for spray-painting a concrete barrier.

1 Big Question: Why Is Kansas Making It Easier for Randos to Go After Trans People?

Kansas just passed SB 244, which doesn't just ban trans people from using bathrooms matching their gender identity in government buildings. It creates a private right of action: any person who suspects someone is trans and in violation can sue them for $1,000. After a first warning, a second violation is a $1,000 civil penalty. A third is a Class B misdemeanor. The state voided legally issued driver's licenses retroactively, with no grace period, and the Kansas Department of Health and Environment says it'll take months to manually review 1,800 birth certificates — without notifying people when their documents get changed. Trans Liberty PAC issued its first-ever formal evacuation order for a U.S. state. The ACLU filed suit Friday.

This is the same mechanism Texas used with SB 8 in 2021 — the "bounty hunter" abortion ban, where any private citizen could sue anyone who "aids or abets" an abortion for $10,000. The architect, Jonathan Mitchell, openly said the structure was designed to make the law "immune from court challenge" because courts can block government action but struggle to block private lawsuits.

Now map that onto what's happening with ICE. The Trump administration has spent the past year building out a civilian cooperation infrastructure — tiplines, community reporting, the whole apparatus of turning neighbors into informants for federal immigration enforcement. Kansas SB 244 formalizes the same model through civil courts.

They’re building the legal architecture and incentive structure to say we're just empowering citizens to protect their communities. 

2 Red Flags:

🚨 A Substack Post Just Moved the S&P More Than Most Regulators Can

Guardian / Motley Fool: Citrini Research published a speculative scenario on Substack imagining what happens if AI agents keep getting better at their current rate. The scenario runs from now through June 2028: agentic AI guts SaaS companies, mass white-collar layoffs start a reflexive loop, private credit markets seize up, mortgage defaults spike, unemployment hits 10.2%. The S&P drops 38%.

Citrini calls it "a scenario, not a prediction." But on Monday, the S&P dropped more than 1%. The software component of the index hit its lowest level since the tariff announcements. One Substack post moved more market capital in a single day than the SEC moves in a quarter.

To Springfield's credit, it's not completely asleep. Illinois HB 3773 — which bars employers from using AI in hiring, firing, or promotion decisions in ways that discriminate against protected classes — took effect January 1 and is already one of the most aggressive AI-in-employment laws in the country. The Illinois Generative AI Task Force, co-chaired by Rep. Rashid and Sen. Peters, dropped a landmark report in January covering civil rights, education, labor, and consumer protections. And in February, Springfield introduced over a dozen additional AI bills in a single week: a chatbot safety act, an AI provenance data act, a frontier model safety act, a "meaningful human control" act, and more. Illinois is building a real policy table here — it just hasn't connected that table to the fiscal time bomb Citrini described.

🚨 Kansas Built a Gig Economy for Transphobia — and the Model Is Designed to Travel

I made a video breaking down Kansas SB 244 in full — watch it here — but here's the red flag standalone: another part of the bill is that Kansas retroactively voided legally issued driver's licenses and birth certificates for trans residents without a grace period.

The Alliance Defending Freedom, Heritage Foundation, and American Principles Project have spent years flooding statehouses with model legislation — the ACLU tracked over 490 anti-trans bills introduced in 2023 alone, a 2,489% increase since 2015.

The right-wing policy network has said this explicitly. Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, told the New York Times in 2023 that after losing on marriage equality, they needed a new wedge issue and "threw everything at the wall." None of this was demanded by the people who live there. It was manufactured by organizations that view Kansas as a testing ground and its residents — all of them — as acceptable collateral damage.

Before you go:

Rev. Jesse Jackson's public homegoing is this Thursday, March 6 at House of Hope Presbyterian, 930 E. 50th St. Doors at 8am, service from 10am to 2pm. Everyone is welcome.

Early voting is open at all 50 Chicago wards for the March 17 primary. Find your site.

And: if you want to do something weird and good with your brain today, I'm running a sci-fi journaling workshop — speculative writing as a way to think about the futures we actually want and the ones we're sleepwalking into. It's at Gerber Hart Library and it's free. Sign up here.

What Are You Reading?

I finally finished a Brontë kick — turns out that if you read enough Victorian novels abou decaying institutions, you're basically prepped for Chicago municipal governance anyway.

More obviously relevant to 312 readers: I’m reading Helen Shiller's Daring to Struggle, Daring to Win is scrambling my brain in the best way. Shiller was the alderman for Uptown's 46th Ward from 1987 to 2011 — came up through the Rainbow Coalition, part of the Black Panther Party, won her seat the same year Harold Washington got re-elected, and spent 24 years in City Hall fighting gentrification and being hated by the Tribune editorial board. It reads like a manual for every fight Chicago is still having. Highly recommend if you want to understand why the 46th Ward is the way it is.

Next up: Dominic Pacyga's Clout City: The Rise and Fall of the Chicago Political Machine, which traces the machine's rise and collapse.

See you next week.

— H