Free Republic

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund will receive an $80,000 payout after representing an illegal immigrant couple whose former Chicago landlords threatened to call Immigration and Customs Enforcement on them. The landlords were banned from discriminating against tenants based on actual or perceived immigration status under the Illinois Immigrant Tenant Protection Act of 2019, according to a Thursday report from NBC News. Cook County Circuit Court Judge Catherine Schneider ruled that landlords Marco Antonio Contreras and Denise Contreras had to pay damages, as well as attorneys’ fees and costs, for violations of that law.

Indiana House Speaker Todd Huston has announced a legislative proposal to incorporate 33 Illinois counties that have expressed a desire to secede from their state. This initiative comes after these counties, frustrated with the political dominance of Chicago and Cook County, voted in favor of exploring separation.

The Trump administration has filed suit against the state of Illinois, Cook County and the city of Chicago, arguing their sanctuary laws “interfere” with Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s ability to arrest and deport illegal migrants — the first of many such lawsuits to come, Justice Department officials told The Post. The suit singles out several state and local laws that the Justice Department identifies as inhibiting the federal government’s ability to enforce US immigration law. “We’ve identified Illinois, the city of Chicago and Cook County as all having laws and ordinances on the books that impede federal immigration enforcement, in...

CHICAGO — A Cook County judge elected in 2024 to her first six-year term has been reassigned after circulating an image of a fake toy called “My First Ankle Monitor” that included a rendering of a Black toddler wearing an electronic monitoring bracelet. “My husband’s idea of Christmas humor,” Judge Caroline Glennon-Goodman wrote in a text that she allegedly circulated to another member of the judiciary by mistake. The image was taken from a TikTok video. Glennon-Goodman has been assigned a pretrial courtroom at 26th and California since April 2024, where she ruled on detention petitions and set conditions of...

The outgoing top prosecutor in Illinois reportedly failed “compliance” and is no longer authorized to practice law. Former Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx famously handled the case of actor Jussie Smollett after he staged an attack against himself. Her term ended on December 1, but she reportedly did not complete mandatory continuing education requirements. A search for the progressive’s name on the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission website shows that Foxx is “unauthorized to practice law as [the] attorney has not demonstrated required MCLE [Minimum Continuing Legal Education] compliance.” ... All continuing education credits that were completed had...

Sean Hill, the incorrigible nuisance arrested 75 times since 2015 and 12 times this year, will not be getting arrested for a while. That’s because a judge finally decided to send him to prison. Many of the 54-year-old’s arrests involved allegations of randomly battery people and grabbing women he did not know, usually downtown. But he’s going to prison for robbing an Old Town liquor store twice this year. On March 9, he allegedly took a bottle of Tito’s vodka from Garfield’s Beverage, 1437 North Wells, and told a store employee that he had a gun. One month later, he...

AChicago woman is fighting to keep her home after a government mix-up led officials to sell her house from underneath her on account of supposedly "delinquent taxes." Robin McElroy bought her home in the Morgan Park area of Chicago back in 2012. Since then, she said she has paid the taxes owed on the property and even kept receipts of her payments. "I do not like wasting money. ... I pay my bills," McElroy told CBS News. Despite those consistent payments, in 2019, McElroy began receiving notices that her property taxes were in arrears and that her property was in...

Samantha Steele, a Democratic official on Illinois’s Cook County Board of Review, was arrested Sunday for drunk driving and crashing into another car, Chicago Police records said. Police allegedly discovered the 45-year-old commissioner prone on the sidewalk near two cars that had “extensive” damage after arriving at the scene, the Chicago Sun Times reported. She confessed to driving into the other vehicle, police said. Officers found an open bottle of red wine on the passenger side of Steele’s car, according to the records. “I observed her eyes were bloodshot and glassy,” a police officer wrote, according to the outlet. “I...

The gunman who opened fire on a Jewish man walking to synagogue in Chicago is an illegal migrant from West Africa who was released into the US last year — and he targeted the victim because of his faith, law enforcement sources tell The Post. Sidi Mohamed Abdallahi, 22 — who hails from Mauritania — crossed into San Diego in March 2023 and was screened by border agents, who quickly released him into the US, officials said. Federal investigators believe Abdallahi was specifically targeting Jews in an antisemitic attack when he ambushed a 39-year-old Orthodox Jewish man in the city’s...

More than five years after Jussie Smollett staged a phony hate crime against himself, and nearly three years since his conviction by a Chicago jury, lawyers for the former Empire actor are asking the Illinois supreme court to overturn the guilty verdict. Defense attorney Nenye Uche argued on Tuesday that Smollett’s case should never have gone to trial because the actor had already entered into a binding agreement with the Cook County state’s attorney’s office not to prosecute him in exchange for him voluntarily agreeing to forfeit his $10,000 bond and perform community service, according to a report in the...

Soros-backed Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx preemptively announced that she will not prosecute protesters who are “peaceful” at the Democratic National Convention (DNC). This sudden turn toward leniency runs against what she claimed in April, Wirepoints reported. Despite the attention to “peaceful” protesters, Foxx also announced ahead of time that she will not prosecute anyone arrested for misdemeanors — such as disorderly conduct, public demonstration, unlawful gathering, criminal trespass to state-supported land, and even curfew charges. The policy is not new, though. The prosecutor, who was given a $408,000 donation from a George Soros super PAC in 2016, has...

Prosecutors have charged a suburban man with two felonies after he allegedly threw a Big Gulp on Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx during an argument near her Flossmoor home. William Swetz “had no idea” who Kim Foxx was when he crossed paths with her as he drove in the 800 block of Sterling Avenue on Friday morning, Assistant Public Defender Catherine Stockslager said during his initial appearance this afternoon. Foxx was on her morning walk when Swetz, 34, encountered her while driving his GMC pickup truck around 10:30 a m., officials said. Courthouse veterans who spoke with CWBChicago on...

VIDEO It's a miracle! In the Democrat primary race for Cook County State's Attorney the law and order candidate, Eileen O'Neil Burke, was leading her standard Democrat (meaning NOT law and order) opponent by over 10,000 votes in the March 19 primary election. And then the miracle happened! A few days after the election 10,000 uncounted ballots were found! And then, miracle of miracles, almost all of those ballots were cast for the leftist candidate opposed to law and order. And WHO counted those votes? Why a radical leftist defund the police communications director for the Chicago Board of Elections,...

CHICAGO (CBS) -- The gap in the race for Cook County State's Attorney has narrowed even more. The Chicago Board of Elections added more than 10,000 votes to its total count on Saturday after its director of public information said he mistakenly left out some vote-by-mail ballots. The unofficial count now stands at 368,990 ballots cast after the 10,659 additional votes were added, bringing the citywide turnout to 24.44%. There are 1,509,554 active registered voters. "In adding up the total number of Vote By Mail ballots the Board had received back so far, I mistakenly left out additional ballots that...

In a surprise move, an Illinois judge has removed former President Donald Trump from the state’s ballot based on the 14th Amendment’s so-called “insurrectionist ban.” The decision is paused, giving Trump a short period of time to appeal.

Cook County, or Chicagoland, has a higher illiteracy rate than Illinois, as well as the rest of the nation, which is either proof that the Democrats suck at successful policy-making, or dumbing down the people is the agenda. Here’s this, from a new education report by Hannah Schmid at the Illinois Policy Institute:One-fifth of Illinois adults are functionally illiterate, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.…In Cook County, 25% of adults are functionally illiterate.So what does it mean to be a “functionally illiterate” adult? Well according to Schmid, the functionally illiterate person “cannot understand the meaning of sentences, locate...

CHICAGO — Four months after hearing arguments, the Illinois Supreme Court will release an opinion on Tuesday that will either eliminate cash bail in the state or keep it as the law of the land. The court “anticipates” releasing its opinion in Rowe v. Raoul at 9 a.m., according to a statement. The state legislature sweeping criminal justice legislation passed in 2021, known as the SAFE-T Act, banned using cash deposits as a pre-trial release “surety” effective January 1, 2023. But dozens of state’s attorneys, sheriffs, and other local officials filed lawsuits challenging the law’s constitutionality. Those cases were combined...

CHICAGO — Prosecutors yesterday charged Nicolas Ramirez, 20, with carjacking a woman at gunpoint in Little Village on Tuesday. Ramirez was on bail for another armed carjacking case and on probation for a felony gun case at the time. And, for good measure, he had warrants out on both cases because he stopped showing up for his court dates. When we report stories like the one you’re about to read, people often ask us, “How in the world was that person out on the streets?” It depends. But, in the case of Nicolas Ramirez, the answer is Cook County Judge...

The victim was 32 weeks pregnant at the time of her murder. Court documents suggest that the fatal shooting of a pregnant woman in downtown Seattle on Tuesday was unprovoked. Suspect Cordell Maurice Goosby, 30, who is a convicted felon with a history of mental health issues, allegedly approached the victim's vehicle and shot the 34-year-old pregnant woman four times, including in the head, which resulted in the death of her unborn baby. The victim Elna Kwon was 32 weeks pregnant at the time of her murder, court records show. Following the shooting, the victim was transported to Harborview Medical...

CHICAGO (CBS) –Mayor Brandon Johnson spoke Friday in favor of a basic income guarantee program at a conference held in Chicago. "We are ushering in a more dynamic, prosperous economy by giving people a guarantee that their lives have meaning," Johnson said. About 3,200 families are receiving direct payments in the first-ever Cook County Promise Guaranteed Income pilot program for low-earning households.