Illinois’ Democratic leaders promised a vigorous defense — and potential court action — against any moves by President-elect Donald Trump to try to erode personal liberties or withhold federal funds for the state during his coming four-year tenure.
But as Trump campaigned on plans for mass deportation of immigrants, a rolling back of transgender rights and climate change controls, a likely GOP Congress considering a federal abortion ban and elimination of the Affordable Care Act, Illinois Democrats acknowledged they could not predict what the unpredictable former president will do once he’s in office.
“Chaos, retribution and disarray radiated from the White House the last time Donald Trump occupied it,” said Gov. JB Pritzker, a vehement critic of Trump both while he was in office and out of it the past four years. “Perhaps this time may be different.”
But Pritzker vowed in the wake of Tuesday’s election results that he’d fight any federal efforts that conflict with Illinois’ policies or rights of its residents.
“To anyone who intends to come take away the freedom, and opportunity, and dignity of Illinoisans, I would remind you that a happy warrior is still a warrior,” the second term governor said. “You come for my people, you come through me.”
Illinois found itself a virtual political Midwest island in supporting Vice President Kamala Harris and running mate Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, whose electoral votes also went for the Democratic ticket. Illinois’ politicians braced for what impact a second Trump administration would bring, especially given his vows of retribution against political enemies amid his history of inflammatory rhetoric attacking Chicago.
“It’s immigrant rights. It’s reproductive rights. It’s basically everything I know and I love and I stand for. That’s what I’m afraid of,” said state Sen. Celina Villanueva, a Democrat from Chicago.
Villanueva said Trump’s win must lead to more organization among pro-immigrant groups and better education that “people still have rights in this country.” Beyond that, she said, “everything is up in the air.”
‘There’s going to be less restraint’
Attorney General Kwame Raoul said Democratic attorneys general across the nation had been coordinating over the last few months, preparing for the potential of a second Trump presidency and discussing when they might ask the courts to step in.
Raoul cited Trump’s history on immigration issues, the general uncertainty over the fate of the Affordable Care Act, and the potential weakening of worker classification protections benefiting employers and resulting in the loss of overtime or benefits as issues he’s keeping an eye on. Trump’s first term was also riddled with controversy in which he became the first president to be impeached twice, including on accusations he incited an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, when his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol as part of a deadly riot.
“There’s going to be less restraint and less respect for the boundaries that the American people and the rule of law have recognized for decades,” Raoul said, an acknowledgment of Trump’s pledge to surround himself with loyalists and a recent decision by a conservative U.S. Supreme Court that broadened presidential immunity for “official acts.”
Brandon Lee, a spokesman for the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, said the group wants to work with Raoul’s office to make sure that state laws such as the Trust Act, which generally prohibits local police from participating in federal immigration enforcement, is on solid ground even if Trump tries to supersede it.
“We know that they’re going to try to find unique ways to try and attack or destabilize our communities,” Lee said.
Brian Johnson, the chief executive officer of Equality Illinois, said he’s worried the Trump administration might try to pull federal funding from hospitals that practice gender-affirming care or from schools following Illinois’ law that requires teaching about the contributions of LGBTQ+ people.
And Sarah Garza Resnick, president of the abortion rights-supporting Personal PAC, questioned whether the new administration would seek to ban mifepristone, which when used with another drug, terminates early pregnancies.
But Pritzker sought to assuage concerns the new administration in Washington, D.C., would attack personal rights in Illinois, saying protections were placed in state law with a presidency like Trump’s in mind.
“Illinois will continue to be a refuge for those whose rights are being denied elsewhere, women seeking reproductive health care, immigrants searching to work hard for a better life, LGBTQ Americans looking for welcome and protection, and people with disabilities whose civil and human rights are under attack,” he said.
Still, Pritzker acknowledged he had met with his senior staff the day after the election and spoke with other governors and was gathering “a list of things that we may need to address” in state law.
“There are many people whose lives and livelihoods are at risk and there are many people who cried at the result because they know what impact it may have on their families,” the governor said.
“But I feel like a lot of that work has been done over the last five-and-a-half years to protect the people of Illinois from something, you know, terrible happening at the federal level or some attack on Illinois residents,” he said.
Fiscal questions
Along with the social concerns are questions of federal fiscal policy toward Illinois, primarily over transportation funding in Chicago, the nation’s crossroads.
One project of concern is the fate of the CTA’s longtime plans to extend the Red Line by 5.6 miles south to 130th Street.
The CTA is counting on a variety of federal funding for the project, including a large, nearly $2 billion grant that would make up almost 40% of the project’s expected cost. The grant has been promised but CTA has not yet signed the formal agreement guaranteeing the money. The agency has, however, already made plans to raise $950 million from a local transit tax financing district, commit state money to the project and issue $1.99 billion in bonds.
Trump’s election and the potential of a Republican-led House and Senate puts pressure on the CTA to lock in the formal agreement before a change in administration throws the commitment into jeopardy.
“With any change in administration, if you’re in the middle of negotiating something that’s taken months, years to get to resolving, you should try to wrap it up because you don’t want further delay,” said Stephen Schlickman, former executive director of the Regional Transportation Authority.
CTA spokeswoman Tammy Chase said the agency expects to have the agreement formalized by the end of the year or early 2025, which is before Trump is set to be inaugurated.
Once the agreement is signed, Congress must still regularly approve the money. It would be unusual for federal lawmakers to fail to approve agreed-on dollars, but Schlickman said if that were to happen there would be little recourse for the CTA to get the expected funding.
The CTA has relied on similar federal funding for a massive overhaul of the Red Line’s north end. The agency formalized the federal agreement in that case in early January 2017, shortly before Trump took office the first time. Throughout Trump’s first administration and the Biden administration, the CTA received all of the expected money on time, Chase said.
Ald. Anthony Beale, 9th, was not optimistic about the future of federal funding for Chicago.
It wasn’t easy to pull money out of Washington under Biden, he said. But he worried that federally funded projects like the CTA Red Line extension could be jeopardized by the administration change.
“I am deeply worried,” he said. “We have been spending money like drunken sailors in the city of Chicago anticipating that we were going to get bailed out from the federal government, and I don’t think that is going to happen.”
Funding for housing programs could be cut and inflation could grow with tariffs, said Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez, 25th.
“We will have a federal government that will be disconnected from the needs of Chicagoans,” he said.
During city budget hearings on Wednesday, Matthew Schmitz, deputy budget director, said that during Trump’s first term, the city “didn’t see significant drops in federal funding.”
“We’ll have to be cognizant this time around,” Schmitz said, “but as of now, because Congress has appropriated the funds and there’s a lot of bipartisan support” for infrastructure and formula spending, “we don’t anticipate any dramatic declines.”
Pritzker said most federal dollars are distributed without consideration for partisanship and are decided by independent groups within the various federal agencies.
“It would be illegal for the Trump administration to stop those grants from flowing. And so we would take action if we saw that happen,” he said.
EVs, energy and manufacturing
Pritzker has focused heavily in his second term on attracting business to Illinois, particularly in the realms of clean energy, electric vehicles and high-tech manufacturing. Those efforts have worked in concert with Biden policies such as the Inflation Reduction Act, which included incentives for clean energy and EVs, and the CHIPS and Science Act, which seeks to boost domestic semiconductor production.
Trump has vowed to pull back unspent funds from the Inflation Reduction Act, and U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson said the GOP would try to repeal the CHIPS Act if his party maintains control of the House, though he later walked back those remarks.
Illinois has benefited from those federal programs, said Mark Denzler, president and CEO of the Illinois Manufacturers’ Association, but the state also has similar programs of its own that don’t require support from Washington.
“Illinois’s been ahead of the curve by passing some of these incentives into state law to make sure that we’re attractive” to businesses, Denzler said.
Nevertheless, Pritzker chief of staff Anne Caprara said the administration is concerned about the potential for the Trump administration to roll back those policies.
“I hope they get in and realize these were big drivers of the flourishing economy that they’re about to inherit and that repealing them would be bad for business, it’d be bad for the country,” Caprara said Thursday after an election postmortem at the City Club of Chicago. “But I don’t think Trump makes a lot of decisions based on what’s good policy. I think he makes decisions based on how he feels that moment and who he’s mad at.”
Following the election results, Mayor Brandon Johnson also pledged he would “never back down in my duty to protect and advocate for the people of Chicago.” But he also said his administration would use the weeks before Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration to “ensure that Chicago strengthens and expands the strongest possible local protections for our residents.”
‘Trying to read the tea leaves’
Johnson senior adviser Jason Lee told the Tribune the Johnson administration is “trying to read the tea leaves” after Trump’s election.
“Trump has a habit of saying things and not doing them. He has a habit of doing things he never said,” Lee said. “It’s hard to predict, but we have to just stay vigilant and work with our allies.”
Lee shared faith in the “durability” of the federal government. But if Trump carries through on his plans to dismantle D.C. bureaucracy, he added, many of the Chicago projects that get federal money could still be deemed worthwhile by the Trump administration because they add jobs and make American trade more competitive.
Johnson’s team is trying to proactively assess how federal grants supporting public health services for the unhoused and major infrastructure projects could be affected, Lee said. The mayor is ready to do “whatever in the law to uphold the law” if Trump moves ahead on plans for mass deportations, he added.
“I think you really just got to wait and see,” Lee said.
Former Mayor Lori Lightfoot said from her dealings with the first Trump administration, she fears the second Trump presidency “will be way worse than it was because now he has made it clear he’s not going to play within any rules.”
“He’s going to feel like he has a huge mandate for a lot of (what) I think will be incredibly dangerous and damaging policies that he’s threatened to implement,” Lightfoot, who served as mayor from 2019 to 2023, said in an interview. “I hate to be so pessimistic, but having governed and lived under Trump and really seen a lot of the challenges up close and personal, I am not optimistic in the short term.”
Lightfoot’s predecessor, former Mayor Rahm Emanuel, chuckled when asked about how his job changed after the White House transitioned from President Barack Obama to Trump.
“You went from somebody that supported the city, I mean, given it was his hometown, to somebody that used it as a pinata,” Emanuel said in a phone interview Thursday. “When I met with them (the Trump administration) early on in the White House, they were very clear about how Chicago helped them if they beat up on Chicago — helped them in their vote.”
Throughout Trump’s 2016 campaign and his first term, he fixated on Chicago as “out of control” or a “disaster.” Emanuel said that raised the stakes for him to punch back. One such example was his successful court battle against Trump’s Justice Department, which threatened to withhold grant money to Chicago over its sanctuary city status for undocumented immigrants.
“You had to either speak up for the city of Chicago — you had to pick your fights — but you stood up and not just defended the city, but called out things,” Emanuel said.
But Ald. Nick Sposato, 38th, contended the fears of the incoming administration were overblown. He provided as an example that Trump’s vow for mass deportations was not for all but solely for immigrants with a criminal background.
The Northwest Side alderman, whose ward came close to backing Trump, rolled into a City Council hearing on Wednesday with a Trump flag affixed to his wheelchair and he punched a red and white button that played punchy clips of the president-elect. His council colleagues didn’t all appear to appreciate it.
But Sposato also said Trump needed to lighten up on his critical rhetoric.
“He’s got to tone it down. You won. They lost. Stop it. Stop it,” Sposato said. “Be presidential.”
Tribune reporters Dan Petrella, Alice Yin, Jeremy Gorner, Sarah Freishtat and Lizzie Kane contributed.
