Truss and other black residents told me that Chicago, which calls itself a “welcoming city,” has been very welcoming—just not to them. Since August 2022, Chicago has greeted nearly 35,000 new arrivals with resources like laundry services, mental health screenings, and $15,000 in rental support per person—all funds that Truss says could’ve gone a long way in Amundsen Park in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood, where nearly 28 percent of residents live below the poverty line.

So last October, a day before the field house was set to become a migrant shelter, Truss raced to the local courthouse, along with three of her neighbors—plus the head of the local NAACP chapter for moral support. For the next two and a half hours, she drafted a lawsuit in a notebook, then ripped out the pages and handed them to a clerk. Her argument, handwritten in pen, was that the field house was “designated for recreational use within the community,” not housing noncitizens. One of her co-plaintiffs, Gerald K. Harris, runs the football program at the field house that trained her five sons.

“I was like, ‘bring it on,’ ” she says. “Let’s fight.”

The city of Chicago is now facing seven lawsuits, at least three of them filed by people of color, all bound by a concern that their leaders would rather serve the migrants than their own vulnerable citizens.

[Say, remember when “sanctuary” status was a cheap method of virtue signaling? Good times, good times. I hope the plaintiffs succeed in their lawsuits, but they voted for the idiots who proclaimed Chicago a sanctuary from enforcement of immigration laws. Now they’re unhappy that they got precisely what they voted for. They have a good case in court, but not for my sympathies. — Ed]