Lightfoot moves to strengthen Welcoming City ordinance — but leaves ‘carve-outs’ in place for now

Mayor Lori Lightfoot moved Wednesday to strengthen Chicago’s Welcoming City ordinance but stopped short of eliminating “carve-outs,” as demanded by the ACLU, immigrant advocates and the City Council’s Progressive Caucus.

Currently, Chicago Police officers are permitted to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement if targeted individuals are: in the city’s controversial gang database; have pending felony prosecutions or prior felony convictions; or if they are the subject of an outstanding criminal warrant.

For years, immigrant activists, the Black Youth Project and Hispanic aldermen have demanded removal of all of those exceptions. Lightfoot campaigned on the promise to do just that.

The ordinance introduced by the mayor at Wednesday’s City Council meeting leaves the carve-outs in place, for now.

It was described as a “first-step in a longer process of strengthening” immigrant protections, “which must include eliminating exceptions to the Welcoming City Ordinance.”

Still, the mayor’s office billed the “Accountability on Communication and Transparency” measures as “one of the largest expansions in Chicago’s immigration protections” in the history of the Welcoming City ordinance.

It would limit “city entities and employees from assisting” with immigration enforcement operations or sharing data with ICE.

The Chicago Police Department would be required to document requests for assistance from federal immigration authorities.

The city’s corporation counsel would be required to “develop policies for city facilities” to make certain they “remain safe and accessible to all Chicago residents, regardless of immigration status.”

And the city would be required to take “reasonable steps” to establish a service through its 311 non-emergency system that “provides callers with information on immigration resources, even if the caller has limited proficiency in the English language.”

Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa (35^th), dean of the City Council’s Socialist Caucus, said he’s OK with the mayor’s go-slow approach.

“The carve-outs are included in the ongoing litigation with the federal [government]. The fear was that, if we touch the carve-outs at this point in time, that it would jeopardize the case that the city has against the Trump administration,” Ramirez-Rosa said.

“So, after lots of meetings and consultation with immigration lawyers, the city’s lawyers, immigrants and advocacy groups, we decided that, in the interim as a first step, we would, instead, strengthen the existing language. We’re not touching the carve-outs. We still have the intent of pursuing that once the litigation is wrapped up. But, in the meantime, we’re amending other portions of the ordinance.”

Ramirez-Rosa said what he likes most about the mayor’s ordinance is that, “The current tactics that ICE uses to try and compel local law enforcement agencies to assist them in deportation — it clearly spells out that our local police officers cannot abide by those requests.”

A press release about the ordinance quoted Lightfoot as calling it a “statement of faith” about Chicago’s values.

“Chicago will always stand and fight for the safety and protection of our residents and families, no matter the cost,” Lightfoot was quoted as saying, apparently referring President Donald Trump’s threat to withhold federal funding from so-called sanctuary cities.

Chicago’s days as a “sanctuary city” where undocumented people can access city services and live without fear of police harassment date back more than 30 years.

In 1985, then-Mayor Harold Washington issued an executive order prohibiting city employees from enforcing federal immigration laws. He made the move to protest the federal government’s decision to question people seeking city services and conduct random searches of city records in an effort to find undocumented immigrants.

Four years later, then-Mayor Richard M. Daley affirmed the executive order. In 2006, the City Council turned the order into law as the immigration debate raged on in Congress.

It prohibited city agencies from asking about the immigration status of people seeking city services. The ordinance also prohibited Chicago Police from questioning the immigration status of crime victims, witnesses or other law-abiding citizens.

Despite that city policy, there remained a legal loophole.

When Chicago Police made a stop, ran a criminal background check and found a deportation order, there was no specific standard on what they should do amid mounting pressure from the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to turn them over.

As a result, a 54-year-old mother from Cameroon stopped after failing to signal a turn was detained for two nights in 2012 after police found a deportation order on her record.

The case of Rose Tchakounte — who was turned over to ICE, but never deported — became a cause célèbre for the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.

In response, now-former Mayor Rahm Emanuel and now-former U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.), united behind the so-called “Welcoming City” ordinance that prohibits police from detaining undocumented immigrants unless they are wanted on a criminal warrant or have been convicted of a serious crime.