On March 18th, the Committee on Immigrant and Refugee Rights (CIRR) held a meeting to report on the Committee’s work supporting immigrants and refugees. The hearing also featured testimony from the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) on federal immigration updates.
The Committee also requested that the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant, Migrant, and Refugee Rights (IMRR), the Mayor’s Office on Public Safety, and Superintendent Larry Snelling from the Chicago Police Department give testimony on new arrivals spending, federal immigration activity in Chicago, and Welcoming City Ordinance reporting. They declined, after being advised by the Department of Law not to attend.
Watch the full meeting and check out a summary of the presentation below!
Committee Report
In 2024, CIRR held 29 engagement events across the City of Chicago, including:
- 12 Know Your Rights Trainings + Resource Fairs: trainings geared toward specific communities to provide information on immigration and criminal law, cultural norms, and city, state and county programs and resources.
- 7 City Key + Resource Fairs: local neighborhood events to register new arrivals for services and resources like City Key and Mobile DMV
- 3 Legal Clinics: clinics to assist immigrants and refugees with changing immigration court venue and application assistance for TPS and work permits.
- 5 Informational Seminars: educational seminars on topics like DACA court proceedings and federal immigration relief options
- 2 Business Corridor Workshops: workshops to provide local businesses with information and resources on topics of concern like street peddling.
- 4 Committee Hearings on topics like shelter and landing zone conditions, Mayor Johnson’s shelter eviction policy, and a resolution calling for an expansion of TPS status, among other topics.
In addition to the events above that CIRR hosted, the Committee also took part in events with community partners, including presenting to advocacy groups on city operations and resources for immigrants and refugees, assisting mutual aid groups with operational support for new arrivals, and participating in groups like the One System Initiative Data Working Group and Chicago is With You Task Force.
While our goal at the beginning of the term was to hold monthly hearings, in practice, attendance at Committee meetings has been spotty, which led to one hearing being cancelled due to lack of quorum. Therefore, the Committee has instead shifted to quarterly public hearings to discuss topics like federal immigration updates. We are supplementing those public hearings with a variety of public engagement opportunities that are more accessible for the public, including:
Immigration Briefings
Starting in February 2025, CIRR is hosting monthly virtual briefings from lawyers and advocacy groups covering high-impact federal and local immigration actions and their impact on Chicago’s immigrant and refugee communities.
The next Immigration Briefing will be held on March 25th at 1pm, and will likely cover the following topics:
- State of DACA
- Attempts to curb public benefits
- Immigration Registration Program
- 1st Amendment Violations
Register at bit.ly/CIRRBriefing!
If you missed the February briefing, you can view the presentation, which included topics like:
- Laken Riley Act
- Change of Immigration Options including TPS, Parole, Asylum, CBP One Program
- Immigration Enforcement Changes: sensitive locations, expanded expedited removal and detention
- 4th Amendment Violations
- Attempts to curb service providers
Know Your Rights and Immigration Trainings
These trainings are for immigrant and refugee communities to inform them of their civil rights and connect them with immigration resources.
Our aim is to provide in-language trainings to varying audiences that are affected by federal immigration changes differently—for instance, a Hindi/Urdu-speaking small business owner going through an I-9 audit needs different resources and training than a non-profit serving primarily Haitian residents impacted by TPS extension rescindment).
If your community is interested in partnering with us on an event like this, please reach out!
Chicago Is With You Task Force
The Chicago is With You Taskforce was launched in 2016 by City Clerk Anna Valenica to ensure the City delivers comprehensive services to immigrants and refugees. The task force is chaired by Clerk Valencia, Deputy Mayor Beatrice Ponce De Leon, and Ald. Andre Vasquez, and is comprised of stakeholders from city departments, sister agencies, community organizations and non-profits, immigration organizations, impacted unions, and other stakeholders.
This year, the CWY task force is organizing their efforts around four areas of focus:
- Reframing the Narrative: telling the Stories of the History and Impact of Immigration on Chicago, The History of Immigration Policy, the We Are Chicago communications strategy (tentative title)
- Business Corridor Support: support for Local Businesses impacted by the loss of traffic after ICE Raids, engaging with street vendor/peddler populations, partnering with Chambers of Commerce
- Mental Health Support: connecting support organizations and resources with those affected by the trauma associated with migration, family separation, mental health disorders
- Legal Fund Efforts: developing a system of legal funding for those who need immigration lawyers and those who are re-entering society after incarceration
If you are interested in getting involved in one of these working groups, please reach out!
Legislative and Policy Work
In addition to our community engagement work, the Committee is working on the following legislative priorities:
- Street Vendor Legislation: Understanding licensure, fines and fees for street food vendors and proposing administrative and substantive municipal code changes to bring Chicago in line with other major cities;
- Language Access: Understanding procurement, administrative and budgetary issues with Chicago’s Language Access Ordinance and proposing municipal code changes to improve program and service access;
- Communicating federal immigration actions on our website welcometochicago.org in a fast-changing landscape;
- Canvassing and connecting street peddlers to childcare, educational, and job opportunities, as well as domestic violence and human trafficking prevention resources;
- Deepening understanding of City of Chicago finances to reduce inefficiencies and rather utilize funds to support all vulnerable communities.
If you have any insight in any of these subject areas and want to work with us on policy development, please reach out!
A Note on CIRR’s Budget:
During the FY25 budget negotiations for the City of Chicago’s towards the end of last year, the Mayor’s Office of Budget and Management indicated that City Council Ward Offices and Committees should not expect an increased budget. Unfortunately, what was not communicated is the deep cuts ward offices and committees would be seeing. The Committee on Immigrant and Refugee Rights saw the biggest cut of the Corporate Fund-funded Committees at -10.3%.
While we are committed to continuing this work, we are disappointed that the Mayor’s Office would choose to disproportionately cut funding to our work with immigrants and refugees in Chicago, especially in this moment where the federal government is similarly cutting programming and benefits to these communities.
Immigration Policy Changes
At Tuesday’s hearing, the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) also presented on the recent federal immigration actions, and their impact on the Chicago immigrant and refugee communities. View the presentation in full, or see below for some of the main takeaways from the presentation of what trends immigration attorneys are seeing since January.
Increased Enforcement
NIJC reports that there has been an increase in arrests and detentions in Chicago. While the administration has said that their focus is on those with serious criminal histories, there has also been an increase in arrests of people with no criminal history, and have had no prior contact with immigration enforcement.
Chicago has also seen an increase in community arrests (people who are in their homes or on the streets, or, in one case, while coming back from the grocery store), as well as collateral arrests (when an agent arrests someone with a warrant, and then uses the opportunity to arrest someone else in the area for whom they do not have a warrant).
In addition to the increase in arrests, there have also been increased reports of:
- Increased use of ICE detainers;
- Pressure to accept stipulated removals, i.e. pressuring someone to sign a document agreeing to a deportation and waiving the right to have your case heard by a judge, sometimes under false pretenses;
- Workplace arrests, including 1-9 audits;
- Expanded expedited removal orders: under the current law, which has been in place since 1996, if someone is found within 100 miles of the border and has been in the U.S. for less than 2 years, you can be removed without a hearing. The current administration is looking to expand those removals to those anywhere within the U.S.
NIJC is working to protect communities by limiting warrantless arrests by ICE. The Castanon Nava settlement, brought in 2019, reinforces the fact that ICE officers must have a valid judicial warrant* to make arrests, and therefore should not make collateral or streetside arrests (i.e. stopping people when they are driving to ask about their immigration status). However, there have been 22 known violations of this settlement since January 2025, most of which had no criminal backgrounds.
*To see the difference between a valid judicial warrant and an ICE administrative warrant, see 40thward.org/KnowYourRights.
Changes in Federal Immigration Law
The passage by Congress of the Laken Riley Act has significantly expanded mandatory detention of undocumented immigrants to include not only those who have been convicted or have admitted to crime to those who have merely been accused of a crime; it also expands the category of crimes to include crimes like burglary, theft, shoplifting, and assault of a law enforcement officer.
The Alien Enemies Act Proclamation, passed in 1798, was last used during World War II to justify the mass internment of Japanese Americans. The act stipulates that you can only use it to detain people from countries with whom the United States is at war;
Over the weekend, over 100 Venezuelans were deported to El Salvador without due process. On March 15th, the ACLU sued and received a temporary restraining ordered. At least 3 flights disregarded that order and landed in El Salvador.
End of Parole Programs and TPS for Venezuelans
The U.S. has a number of parole categories, which allows non-citizens who may otherwise be ineligible for admission into the U.S. to enter and stay in the country temporarily. Under the Securing Our Borders executive order, all of these categories of parole have now been terminated, including:
- Uniting For Ukraine (U4U)
- Operation Allies Welcome (OAW) for Afghans fleeing the Taliban
- Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraugan and Venezuelan parole processing
Parolees are subject to immigration enforcement once their parole program ends if they do not have another application for relief (e.g. asylum). People whose parole has expired without another relief petition pending are at risk of being targeted for enforcement. This order also blocks individuals who have parole through these programs from seeking other forms of immigration status.
In addition to ending parole, the administration has also rescinded Temporary Protected Status––a designation for people who cannot safely return to their countries due to extraordinary and temporary conditions like environmental disaster or civil war––granted to Venezuelans by the Biden administration.
Immigration Policy Changes
Often referred to by immigration organizations as “Death by a Thousand Cuts,” these policy changes make it more difficult for people to navigate the legal immigration process. Here are some examples of these policies that have been put into place by the current administration:
- USCIS resources are being moved to “fraud detection” instead of their traditional role of adjudication of applications;
- Required Interviews on all applications, which slows down the application process;
- The return of the blank space policy, which states any blank space left on immigration applications (including fields that cannot be filled out on computer applications) will lead to the automatic rejection of that application;
- Increasing filing fees and rejecting or denying fee waiver requests;
- Changing form expiration dates to invalidate current application forms.
Thank you to the NIJC for providing these updates!
If you’d like to learn more, you can register for our next Immigration Briefing on Tuesday, March 25th, 1pm, at bit.ly/CIRRBriefing.