Mayor Brandon Johnson's "ICE-Free Zone" executive order is hollow and performative
Mayor Brandon Johnson has puffed himself up as a warrior leading his own little Confederate insurrection with an executive order purportedly creating "ICE-Free Zones" in Chicago in his ongoing effort to impede lawful immigration actions and to further indulge his obsession with protecting illegal aliens.
On Monday, October 6, Johnson made a big show of signing his executive order to create his anti-ICE zones in which he claimed to ban federal law enforcement from using any city-owned properties (parking lots, libraries, schools, etc.) as staging areas to launch immigration actions or to serve as holding spots for illegal aliens who have been detained.
"In recent weeks, federal agents used several City-owned properties — including parking lots near Harrison and Kedzie, and a vacant lot at 46th and Damen — as staging sites for immigration enforcement. Such use of City property undermines community trust and runs counter to Chicago’s Welcoming City Ordinance, which ensures that all residents — regardless of immigration status — can live, work, and seek services without fear," Johnson exclaimed.
"That means that city property and unwilling private businesses will no longer serve as staging grounds for these raids," Johnson said.
"We have a rogue, reckless group of heavily armed, masked individuals roaming throughout our city that are not accountable to the people of Chicago," he raged. "Their actions put all Chicagoans at risk."
"Our school parking lots are not for ICE to load their weapons; they are for Chicagoans who drop their kids off to learn,” he added. “Our libraries are not for ICE to prepare for a raid; they’re for Chicagoans to read and relax. Our parks are not for ICE to set up checkpoints; they are for Chicagoans to play and enjoy.”
The activists loved all this bloviating, granted. And that is all it was really for, after all. It was meant to burnish Johnson's profile among the violent migrant activists besieging local ICE facilities. Because there really isn't much by way of legal force behind any of Johnson's dubious "orders" and his bellicose, insurrectionary rhetoric.
The White House called the "ICE-Free Zone" order a "disgusting betrayal" of Chicago residents.
"Today, in a disgusting betrayal of every law-abiding citizen, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson declared city spaces as 'ICE-free zones.' Johnson’s pathetic excuse that enforcing our nation’s immigration laws somehow 'undermines community trust' exposes his true loyalty: to criminal illegal alien predators, not the terrified families of Chicago," the White House said in an Oct. 6 statement.
"Shielding the most depraved, violent criminal illegal aliens from justice is not only an insult to every Chicagoan, it’s also a dangerous intensification of Democrats’ lunatic 'sanctuary' agenda where criminal illegals come before American citizens," the statement added, before showing the sort of illegal criminals Johnson's "sick policy" is protecting.
Johnson's disrespect for federal authority makes him an insurrectionist no different than the Confederacy in 1860 or the secession-minded nullificationists from the 1830s. Each of those historical insurrectionists thought they had the power to nullify federal authority, too. Even back then, it turned out they were wrong.
The fact is, local authorities have absolutely no legal right to interfere in legal federal law enforcement actions. Johnson can rail all he likes, write all the empty "orders" he wants, and it all amounts to little else but a publicity stunt meant to burnish his activist bonafides.
On top of all this, when Trump said in a post on Truth Social “Chicago Mayor should be in jail for failing to protect Ice Officers! Governor Pritzker also," what did Johnson do? He played the race card, always his first and last resort.
"This is not the first time Trump has tried to have a Black man unjustly arrested. I’m not going anywhere," he blubbered in a post on X.
So, as he is wont to do, Johnson is operating by a previous mayor's proclamation that "one should never let a good crisis go to waste" and operating under the rubric that every incident can be twisted to push his radical, left-wing political agenda.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Facebook at: Warner Todd Huston | Facebook, X at @WTHuston, or Truth Social at @WarnerToddHuston.
