JB Pritzker, ICE, and the Art of Selective Outrage

Written by Thomas Hampson

Governor JB Pritzker delivered his eighth consecutive budget address on February 18th. If you closed your eyes and listened, you might have thought you were hearing a man of the people, a defender of the powerless standing up to a tyrannical federal government. He invoked Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Reverend Jesse Jackson. He quoted the great reform governor, John Peter Altgeld.

He spoke of empathy, love, and the courage to resist authoritarianism. It was nothing but political theater.

It was also a lie.

Pritzker devoted a substantial portion of his State of the State to portraying federal immigration enforcement agents as little better than brownshirts. Without naming ICE directly — perhaps his lawyers counseled him on that — he said

“masked, unaccountable federal agents — with little training — occupied our streets, brutalized our people, tear gassed kids and cops, kidnapped parents in front of their children, detained and arrested and at times attempted to deport US citizens, and killed innocent Americans in the streets.”

He called it a deliberate “playbook” designed to “overwhelm communities, provoke fear, suggest that those tasked with enforcing the law are also above it, and drip authoritarianism bit by bit into our veins.”

He named Donald Trump and Stephen Miller as the architects of this creeping fascism.

He then praised Illinois residents who had frustrated immigration raids by quickly buying out street vendors’ supplies to minimize their exposure to potential ICE apprehension, forming human chains around churches, and trailing federal agents with cameras and whistles. The governor of Illinois, standing in the House chamber, was celebrating tactics designed to obstruct federal arrests.

Let’s start with the obvious: ICE and its associated DHS enforcement agencies are federal law enforcement officers. They are trained at federal academies, operate under published rules of engagement, are subject to internal discipline, inspector‑general oversight, and federal judicial review. Their core functions — serving administrative and criminal warrants, executing final orders of removal, apprehending fugitive aliens with prior criminal records — are explicitly authorized by statutes passed by the Congress of the United States, signed by both Democrat and Republican presidents, and routinely upheld by federal courts.

To describe that system as Gestapo tactics conducted by untrained thugs accountable to no one is not political hyperbole. It is a knowingly false characterization of federal law enforcement, delivered by a governor whose own state treasury would benefit from having fewer people in the state who pay no federal, state, or local taxes.

The “little training” slur is particularly rich. Federal immigration enforcement officers, including ICE and Customs and Border Patrol Emergency Response Officers, undergo weeks of academy training plus field certifications; many are former local police officers, military veterans, or both. Whatever one’s views on immigration policy, the idea that these are somehow less‑qualified or more reckless than local officers has no basis in fact.

What Pritzker is doing is classic demagoguery. Strip the badge from a class of officers you dislike, paint them as an uncontrolled mob, and hope the audience doesn’t look too closely at the underlying facts.

Now let’s examine his use of history, because it tells you something important about how far he is willing to stretch the truth to gain a political advantage.

Pritzker invoked Governor Altgeld and the Pullman Strike of 1894 as a direct historical parallel to Trump’s immigration enforcement in Illinois. The story he tells is accurate as far as it goes: in 1894, President Grover Cleveland deputized 5,000 U.S. marshals and sent federal Guard troops into Blue Island to break a national railroad boycott led by Eugene Debs and the American Railway Union.

Chicago’s own police superintendent, Michael Brennan, later described those marshals as “dangerous to the lives of the citizens on account of their careless use of pistols,” reporting that they “fired into the crowd of bystanders when there was no disturbance, and no reason for shooting.”

The Chicago Record noted that they “seemed to be hunting trouble all the time.”

When it was over, at least 20 to 25 people were dead, hundreds more wounded, and Altgeld devoted half his next State of the State address to warning that a president who can deploy troops “whenever and wherever he pleases, under pretense of enforcing some law” becomes, in practical terms, indistinguishable from “the Czar of Russia.”

That is a genuine and important episode in Illinois history. It is also nothing like Operation Midway Blitz.

The Pullman intervention was Army infantry and deputized marshals firing live rounds indiscriminately into crowds of striking workers and bystanders, killing dozens, over the explicit objection of the governor of Illinois, who had already said state forces could maintain order. It was the federal government using military force to break a private‑sector wage dispute in favor of the railroad barons. The U.S. attorney general, himself a former railroad lawyer, pushed for the deployment from inside the cabinet.

Operation Midway Blitz was a federal law‑enforcement surge aimed at arresting high-priority targets: convicted felons, gang members, drug traffickers, and fugitive aliens who had been ordered removed by immigration judges. DHS publicly identified some that they were seeking, including eleven specific cases — rapists, kidnappers, gang members with violent records who had been released by local jails that had refused to honor federal detainers.

Were there collateral arrests, people swept up who had no record beyond their immigration status? Yes. DOJ records confirmed that hundreds of those arrested in Chicago had no prior criminal history. But they still were illegally here. ICE should not and did not ignore the law and let them go. That would actually be a dereliction of duty.

It certainly is nowhere remotely equivalent to soldiers shooting unarmed workers in the street. It is not 25 people dead. And no serious person with access to both sets of facts should be allowed to conflate them without being called out for it.

So why were there so many collateral arrests? The answer is inconvenient for Pritzker, because it leads directly back to his own desk.

ICE prefers the most efficient method for removing high-priority criminal aliens: identify them while they are already in local custody, issue a detainer, and take custody inside the jail when they are released. That approach requires minimal street presence, minimal risk to civilians, and produces clean, targeted arrests of people already behind bars. It also dramatically reduces the risk that bystanders will be caught up in operations.

Pritzker’s administration, Mayor Brandon Johnson’s Chicago, and Cook County have systematically refused to honor those detainers. The Welcoming City Ordinance bars CPD from holding people past their normal release time on an ICE detainer absent a judicial criminal warrant. Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle issued executive orders reinforcing that position. The Illinois TRUST Act limits state and local cooperation with federal civil immigration enforcement.

When you close the jail pipeline, ICE has two options: stand down and leave convicted felons and fugitives on the street, or deploy more agents on the ground in neighborhoods, homes, workplaces, and public places where illegals gather. The second option, by definition, produces more visible enforcement, more chaos, more bystander contact, and more collateral arrests of people who happen to be present when a target is located. Every serious analyst of immigration enforcement agrees on this basic tradeoff.

Pritzker and Johnson, and Preckwinkle made that choice. They chose to block the clean, targeted, jail-based system. They chose the outcome — street chaos, large-scale neighborhood sweeps, terrified communities — and then turned around and used that outcome as a campaign prop to brand ICE agents as Gestapo. You don’t get to manufacture the crisis and then campaign on the crisis you manufactured. Or rather, you can try, but someone ought to say out loud what you’ve done.

Now consider the two police chiefs.

In 1894, Superintendent Brennan said the federal marshals were dangerous to civilians, shooting without cause, hunting trouble for sport. That was a condemnation. The top local cop was saying the federal enforcers were the problem.

In 2025, Chicago Police Superintendent Larry Snelling said something very different. He warned residents not to box in federal vehicles because “it is reasonable for them to believe that they are being ambushed and that this could end in a deadly situation.” He made clear that ramming a vehicle with agents inside “is considered deadly force” and that agents “can use deadly force in response to stop you.” He emphasized that federal agents’ “rules of engagement are different from CPD’s,” and he urged citizens to understand that before they made a tragic mistake.

That is not a condemnation of ICE. That is a professional law enforcement officer acknowledging that federal agents are lawfully present, have the right to defend themselves, and that citizens who choose to interfere with federal arrests put themselves in danger and risk arrest for the crime of obstructing law enforcement.

Police departments have an obligation to protect officers from any jurisdiction operating in their city, just as they would intervene to protect state troopers or FBI agents working a case. No responsible police executive says otherwise. Snelling was doing his job.

The difference between the 1894 chief and the 2025 chief is the difference between federal officers who shot civilians without cause and federal officers doing their jobs lawfully enough that the local top cop’s message is directed at citizens, not agents.

Pritzker treats those two scenarios as the same. They are not remotely the same.

And here is the part that should be in every story written about this governor and his righteous indignation about federal accountability.

JB Pritzker’s family did not build the Hyatt fortune by playing by the rules. Investigative reporting by the Chicago Tribune and documents released in the Paradise Papers established that Pritzker is connected to at least 35 offshore and domestic trusts and shell companies, plus a dozen offshore investment funds, including Bahamian shell companies named Nikopol, Alushta, Izyum, and Sangdu, created between 2008 and 2011 — not by his grandfather, but on JB’s own watch, as a fully grown adult businessman.

His offshore law firm, Appleby, flagged him as a “politically exposed person” whose primary goal was “avoiding unwanted attention.” Federal investigators have described aspects of the broader Pritzker family’s offshore system as among the largest alleged tax-evasion schemes ever examined in a U.S. civil case. Those cases were resolved not in open court, where a judge or jury would determine the facts, but through large, confidential settlements and the convenient shield of Bahamian banking secrecy laws that made full evidence-gathering impossible.

That system did not shut down when Pritzker was inaugurated. It has grown. It runs in parallel to a political career built on demanding that other wealthy Illinoisans pay higher taxes — a push for a graduated income tax he personally bankrolled to the tune of $55 million while his own fortune remained partly tucked away in jurisdictions that don’t cooperate with the IRS.

The family’s early hotel development drew scrutiny documented in FBI intelligence files, LAPD surveillance reports, IRS investigations, and SEC inquiries, because of the organization’s relationships with Chicago Outfit figures and mob-controlled Teamster financing — connections assembled from those primary government records by investigative journalist Gus Russo in Supermob (Bloomsbury, 2006). Russo’s book was praised by former IRS Organized Crime Division special agents, the former executive director of the Chicago Crime Commission, and the former chief investigator of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Investigations.

Whether you call that “getting in bed with the mob” or “doing business in midcentury Chicago,” it is part of the same portrait: a family that has consistently found ways to work the edges of legal accountability when it served its financial interests, generation after generation.

So when JB Pritzker stands at a podium and accuses an entire federal law enforcement agency of Nazi-style lawlessness, of operating “above” the law they are supposed to enforce, of being unaccountable masked agents of authoritarianism — remember who is saying it.

This is a man whose family built its billions in an offshore shadow system specifically engineered to stay just beyond the reach of federal tax authorities.

The men and women in ICE windbreakers at least enforce laws enacted openly, under the supervision of courts and subject to oversight and appeal. The Pritzker heirs, who call them the Gestapo, have preserved and multiplied their wealth within a structure built precisely so that federal law could not get a clear view of it.

That is not the résumé of a man with standing to lecture anyone about respect for the rule of law, or about right and wrong. And it seems to me a man whose family has a history of deep ties to the Chicago mob is more acquainted with hate, brutality, and tyranny than with love, empathy, and courage.

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