Seven people were killed in Chicago over Labor Day weekend. A total of 46 people were shot. In 248 days this year, there have been 461 homicides in the city.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot presents herself as a Black Lives Matter supporter, as most Democrats do. But of those 461 homicide victims in her city, at least 355 were black. Part of the blame belongs to Lightfoot, who demonstrably cares more about making life easier for criminals than she does about keeping honest residents safe.
Now, Lightfoot is trying to distract from her failures by creating a political controversy by attacking Republicans.
Just as Texas had been busing illegal immigrants to New York City and Washington, D.C., the state has begun busing them to Chicago, another declared “sanctuary city,” as well. Lightfoot has used this opportunity to attack GOP Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, calling him “unpatriotic” and “a man without any morals, humanity, or shame.” She condemned the busing as “racist practices of expulsion” and declared Abbott to be a hypocrite for calling himself a Christian.
But as Eric Adams in New York City and Muriel Bowser in Washington, D.C., Lightfoot can’t explain what exactly it is that Abbott is doing wrong. After all, Chicago has invited illegal immigrants to the city with its ironically named “Welcoming City” ordinance. Lightfoot said that “Chicago has been a welcoming city and a city of immigrants since its very founding, and proudly so.”
But Texas’s small border towns are being overwhelmed, while Democratic mayors like Lightfoot are inviting illegal immigrants to their cities. Chicago claims to be welcoming them and has far more resources than, say, Eagle Pass or Del Rio. So why shouldn’t Abbott ease the strain on these border towns by helping, with their consent, to relocate a few of the illegal immigrants the Biden administration is dumping on them? Abbott is taking the most compassionate course of action, both for the illegal immigrants pouring across the border and for Texas’s strained border towns.
The real problem is that Chicago was never sincere in its offer to welcome illegal immigrants, just like New York City and Washington, D.C. before it. Lightfoot is complaining because her city cannot handle a tiny fraction of what Texas’s border towns are currently facing. More importantly, her attacks on Abbott help distract from the more than 2,000 homicides Chicago has seen in the last two and a half years. The only hypocrisy that has been highlighted here is Lightfoot’s.
