Residents said they have witnessed drug use, drinking, loitering and other illegal activity outside the Gage Park Field House migrant shelter and near their homes, in Lopez’s ward. “I understand that everyone deserves a chance, but this chance was given. Now they are abusing the chance, and now the people that live here that pay taxes here and take care of the block are the ones being ignored,” resident Julio Ocampo said.

Officials last week said the district has enrolled nearly 1,200 students from migrant shelters in July and August. That total includes 146 students who came directly from police districts housing migrants and 263 students who joined through a new welcoming center at Clemente High School. CPS officials expect to add another 1,000 new students during the first weeks of the school year.

Comment: Fred Hampton advocated for a violent, Marxist overthrow of U.S. government. He invoked the worst of history’s communists in the name of that cause, including Mao, Lennin, Marx, Che Guevara and Kim Il Sung. He chaired the Chicago chapter of the communist Black Panther Party. See our earlier column here on Fred Hampton in his own words.

Wearing a T-shirt from the Solorio DREAM Team, a club for undocumented students advocating for immigrant rights, Shi was asked how he will grapple with the declining number of students enrolled in CPS – the 4th largest school district in the country. He replied, “I want us to shift from looking at lagging indicators, and move toward how we invest in communities. If we provide well-resourced neighborhood schools, if there’s abundant social services and affordable housing in Chicago, those communities will grow back, right?”

“Evanston could double the number of trees it plants each year for $115,000. But City Council voted Monday night to hire a tree cop for about that much money instead. The new city inspector would police private property, seeking to prevent homeowners from cutting down healthy trees — despite city staff conceding they have no data about how often that happens and that they haven’t bothered to ask local arborists for information that might provide the answers.”

“Here in the dog days of August, the Labor Day holiday beckoning, most of us are looking for a break from divisive controversies. But bureaucrats and bureaucracies always need to justify their own existence, and pastimes as seemingly benign as swimming and gardening have come under attack.”

The increase in Chicago was higher than the rest of the 10 largest U.S. cities by population. In Chicago, the most commonly targeted groups are Black and Jewish people, followed by gay people, white people and Hispanic or Latino people, according to the report.

Five years almost to the day since bondholders sued Harvey, Illinois, over a payment default, the litigation concluded Tuesday with court approval of a settlement that features fresh, unrated debt with extra protections for investors and a friendlier debt payment schedule for the long-struggling Chicago suburb.

“Last year, Chicagoans made more than 50,000 rat complaints…(T)he city is ill-prepared to handle the surge of complaints. The city bureau tapped to combat rodents is short staffed and often days or weeks late in responding to complaints; its yard inspection service is limited in hours and excludes more than a third of Chicago homes.”

The rat-related tickets tied to hundreds of properties, many of them vacant lots, throughout the South and West sides of Chicago, an analysis of city and state records show. The companies tied to Suzie B. Wilson obtained many of these lots in the early 2000s after acquiring them with her husband through Cook County’s tax and scavenger sales.

Mayor Brandon Johnson swiftly exited the press conference following questions regarding the migrant situation in Chicago, leaving questions unanswered.

The lawsuit, filed in Cook County Circuit Court Tuesday on behalf of resident Maura Madden, alleges Amazon’s planned delivery facility was improperly classified under the city’s zoning code and should have gone through a special use and approval process before the city’s Zoning Board of Appeals. Madden is suing under a state law that gives people who live within 1,200 feet of a property the ability to sue in order to “restrain, correct, or abate the violation (of an ordinance or ordinances).”

“You all are just tragically tone deaf to everything you’re saying,” one resident told Deputy Chicago police chief

“While we are not completely saying [it was a] slam dunk, we did really well,” Deputy Mayor Cristina Pacione-Zayas said. “In the last 100 days, we’ve done quite a bit of work to meet the moment.” She and the head of the newly-created City Office of Immigrant, Migrant and Refugee Rights, Beatriz Ponce De Leon, estimate it’s costing $30 million a month to house the nearly 7,000 migrants still relying on shelters, and that’s not counting the hundreds sleeping on the floor of police districts across Chicago.

Police found the 61-year-old woman lying in the street with life-threatening injuries right in front of her own home. One neighbor said, “The area is getting worse. I mean, it seems like it gets closer and closer and closer.”