You Can't Reject the National Guard and Then Shrug at ICE

Happy Thursday.

I just got back from ONA26 with the Project C Creator Cohort, and I have a lot of thoughts about narrative infrastructure and our post-truth media landscape.

This week: CPD Superintendent Snelling finally sits in the hot seat (update: just kidding), the tipped wage fight moves to Springfield, and I talked to CAIR-Chicago about what tonight’s CCPSA hearing actually means.

3 Headlines:

1. Superintendent Snelling Faces the Public on CPD + ICE Tonight

Block Club: CCPSA is hosting a special hearing tonight, April 2, at 6:30 PM at Kelly High School (4136 S. California Ave) — and for the first time, Superintendent Larry Snelling will be in the room to answer questions about CPD's interactions with federal immigration agents.

This has been a long time coming. Back in January, 500 people packed Thalia Hall demanding answers about whether CPD violated the Welcoming City Ordinance during Operation Midway Blitz. District council members had to collect 2,000 signatures just to force CCPSA to hold that first hearing — and even then, the commission took months to act, and Snelling didn't show. He'll be there tomorrow — but only after his office told the commission he wouldn't participate if immigration attorneys, constitutional law professors, or police reform experts were on the panel.

Tonight’s hearing will also include a vote on whether to recommend that the Inspector General audit CPD's implementation of the Welcoming City Ordinance.

Why It Matters: The question tomorrow isn't "did CPD help ICE?" — the question is whether Snelling will even attend, what CCPSA will do about it, and whether any of Chicago's oversight mechanisms can actually produce consequences. CCPSA has the power to draft new CPD policy, haul the superintendent in for questioning, and initiate no-confidence proceedings. Tomorrow we find out if those are real powers or decorative ones. Keep reading for more on this.

2. Johnson Vetoes the Tipped Wage Freeze. Springfield Says Hold My Beer.

Block Club: Mayor Johnson used his third veto — the third in a single year— to kill the City Council's 30-18 vote to freeze the tipped minimum wage at $12.62/hour. It stays on track to keep rising toward parity with the full minimum wage ($16.60) by 2028, as the One Fair Wage ordinance intended.

But the Illinois Restaurant Association has already taken this fight to Springfield. A bill that passed the House Labor and Commerce Committee 22-4 would strip Chicago's ability to set its own tipped wage entirely, handing that authority to the state. If it passes, Chicago's tipped minimum drops to the state rate of $9/hour — a 30% pay cut for the workers Johnson just fought to protect.

Why It Matters: The veto is a win for workers. The Springfield bill is an attempt to make that win meaningless, so that when progressive cities pass things that business interests don't like, they can go to the state and preempt them.

3. Nine Judges Have Left Chicago's Immigration Court Since January 2025

Chicago Tribune: Chicago's immigration bench is down from 21 judges to 14 permanent and two temps. The backlog is in the low hundred thousands. To keep calendars moving at all, the feds are plugging gaps with military lawyers on short details — people with no immigration law background doing temporary stints in a system where a procedural error can end someone's life in this country.

And the people trying to watch it happen are getting pushed out too. In San Diego, federal agents detained volunteer court observers inside a courthouse and cited them for loitering — people whose entire job is to sit quietly and document whether the system is functioning.

Why It Matters: ICIRR runs a Court Watch volunteer program where you can observe hearings. If you have a few hours a month, this is one of the most concrete things you can do right now.

1: What’s Going On With ICE and CPD?

For this week’s 1 Big Question, I talked with Jordan Esparza-Kelley, the Communications Coordinator at CAIR-Chicago. Tonight’s CCPSA hearing is the first time Superintendent Larry Snelling will face the public on CPD's role in federal immigration enforcement. He also writes about politics and culture at heavybutlite.com.

For people who haven't been following this: what is this hearing, and why did it take this long?

About six months ago, organizers got a petition going because they were trying to figure out — especially based on what happened in the summer of 2025 with ICE and CPD — what exactly is being done to hold CPD accountable to our Welcoming City Ordinance and the new executive orders against ICE collaboration. They successfully petitioned for a public meeting, and a big one took place at Thalia Hall in January. And I think the energy from all these groups together really changed the direction around this.

That reframed this: somebody is complicit in letting this stuff happen to our community. And we give the people who are complicit so much money, every single year, while they're letting entire neighborhoods get harmed.

That energy led to Mayor Johnson's ICE on Notice executive order, which was an objective good thing. But it exists as part of this large bureaucratic process. And that's what this meeting is about: who is going to enforce this against CPD?

What happened in between now and the last hearing?

A quarter of the year went by and nothing happened. And that's on top of all of Operation Midway Blitz, where nobody was held accountable and so much harm happened.

I think it's important to view these things from the perspective of how much neglect and inaction has taken place. Everybody's sitting around like, "What can we do? Do we need a new policy? Does the policy we already have work?”

But the facade really dissolved when JB and others rejected the National Guard: if you can reject the National Guard, why are we acting like there's nothing to be done about ICE?

Why does it matter that Snelling is actually in the room this time?

He controls the whole CPD. People have asked him before — do officers know about these orders? And he says yeah, they've been trained. But we have five new executive orders in the past year. Have they been retrained? Have cops who've been on the force for 10, 20, 25 years been retrained? What is the training? We've never seen it. We don't know what any of this looks like.

And then there's the other part of this, from the abolitionist lens: training isn't going to cut it. You either inherently understand that you're actually supposed to protect people, or you don't.

Zooming out — why does all of this matter?

Behind all of these incidents — underneath them, in the background — there's still all these people that have been harmed. All these families and neighborhoods that have to continue existing on edge, or in the broken remains of everything. We've had people shot and killed here in Chicago. We've had entire neighborhoods tear gassed. Just because it doesn't look as bad right now in the news doesn't mean there's not still harm going on.

The city of Chicago needs to step up with the biggest, strongest stick possible and address what has been happening to people.

Tomorrow night: CCPSA special hearing with Superintendent Snelling. Kelly High School, 4136 S. California Ave. 6:30 PM. Register for Zoom here. Sign up for virtual public comment: [email protected].

2 Red Flags

🚨 Every Newsroom in America Is About to Make the Same Mistake Again

Garbage Day: Ryan Broderick has the definitive piece on the current pivot-to-video cycle and it is the most useful thing I've read this month for anyone thinking about progressive media infrastructure, though a little depressing to read at ONA.

Basically, he asks: are all of these news sources chasing a format — (short vertical clips) — that is already oversaturated, propped up by low-level ad fraud, and increasingly produced by content farms in the global south charging $10,000/month to clip podcasts for distribution across platforms? As Broderick puts it: "People don't listen to Joe Rogan because they think he's better at his job than CNN; they do it because they hate CNN."

🚨 The Clock is Running to Tax the Rich

At the No Kings rally in Grant Park this weekend, Mayor Johnson announced a day of action on May 1 to pressure the ultra-rich to pay their fair share. Good timing: Pappas’ office just showed Cook County property tax levies have grown at double the rate of inflation since 1995, hitting South and West Side neighborhoods hardest — Oakland saw a 636% increase, East Garfield Park 447%.

On Tuesday, former Gov. Pat Quinn and State Rep. La Shawn Ford launched a campaign for the "Millionaire Amendment" — a constitutional amendment putting a 3% surcharge on income over $1 million to fund direct property tax relief.

The legislature has until May 3 to pass it for the question to hit the November ballot. The budget fight last December proved that progressive revenue dies without organized constituent pressure. This is the next one.

—

BTW, the city is running Financial Future Task Force town halls right now — a great time and place to figure out how to tax the rich.