Just weeks after the Supreme Court largely reaffirmed the Obama administration’s immigration enforcement powers in its legal battle with Arizona, federal officials are facing a new, politically tricky clash with local authorities over immigration, this time in Chicago.
At a news conference on Tuesday, Mayor Rahm Emanuel said he would propose an ordinance that would bar police officers from turning over illegal immigrants to federal agents if the immigrants do not have serious criminal convictions or outstanding criminal warrants.
In contrast to the Obama administration’s long-running confrontation with officials in Arizona, who are mostly Republicans, the latest challenge to the president’s immigration policies comes from Mr. Emanuel, his former chief of staff, and from other Democratic allies in President Obama’s hometown.
“If you have no criminal record, being part of a community is not a problem for you,” Mr. Emanuel said, speaking at a high school library in Little Village, a Latino neighborhood. “We want to welcome you to the city of Chicago.”
The mayor said the proposal was part of his goal to make Chicago the “most immigrant-friendly city in the country…”
Chicago is governed separately from Cook County. The city’s ordinance would give its police department more power to decide which immigrants to turn over to federal agents, but it would not curtail most cooperation as Cook County has done…
Mr. Emanuel did not pose his initiative as a challenge to Mr. Obama. Rather he laid blame on Congress for inaction on immigration. The City Council will consider the ordinance this month.
All these chickens are coming home to roost to pay for decades of diminished responsibility by liberals – coupled with several flavors of activist bigotry from conservatives in both parties.
Over the decades of diminished access to the United States – especially aimed at barring Hispanic immigrants from Mexico and Central America – I wonder how many undocumentados would have arrived here legally? Seems to me that a significant majority of those now here would have had little problem passing through the system if standards were kept to the designs of those who originally formulated our nation’s immigration policy.
Eideard 
I am a huge Obama supporter and a lifetime Chicagoan, and I don’t agree with Rahm at all. I have absolutely nothing against foreignors, but illegal immigrants have to go. They broke the law and came here illegally and some have even put their children in this mess and crime as well. It’s not the kids’ fault, but it’s not the US citizens’ fault either. The adults have to go and the kids have to go as well and they can blame their parents, not our broken immigration policies. They should have never come here in the first place.
We already have US citizens draining our programs and we can’t affored to have illegals draining them as well. They are a huge burden on our budget. What really gets me is when people don’t speak english, we educate them for free, we treat the in our hospitals for free, we feed them for free, and we give them rights as if their citizens.
I’ve lived in Chicago my whole life and there are neighborhoods that I use to hang out in as a child and now because they’re heavily hispanic, or polish, or asian, I can’t walk through them because I am not one of them. That’s BS. I don’t say this to be mean, but illegals have to go; period!