[MUSIC] >> Welcome to Capital View on Siu.

I'm Brian Sapp.

Illinois is continuing to push back on the Trump administration and their immigration enforcement.

The state filed suit against the Department of Homeland Security to place limits on their tactics this week.

And we're nearly a month away from the beginning of or we're just about a month away from the beginning of early voting in Illinois for the March primary.

We'll take a look at how the race is shaping up.

Actually, quite a few races.

Our guests today are John Jackson.

He's the visiting professor for the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute, and we're joined by Peter Hancock of Capitol News Illinois, their state House reporter.

John and Peter, welcome to the program.

>> Glad to be here.

>> Good to be here.

>> Well, let's get to it.

The lots of lots of things going on this week.

Um, was kind of hard to pick where we want to start.

But, um, the nations watch for a year as President Trump has tried to meet his campaign promises of immigration enforcement.

And it's been a lot of chaos as we look at the news and watch the news.

And that chaos hit the streets of Chicago this last fall.

Um, and then last week, we our eyes turned to Minnesota and the death of Rene.

Good.

Um, John, the state has filed suit against the DHS.

Um, Kristi Noem and, um, Mr.

Bovino, where are you know, is Illinois got do they have any opportunity to kind of put a check on what the federal government is doing?

>> Well, Brian, as you know, if you watch any kind of news on television or if you pay attention to social media or if you just are alive last week, you know that the week was just absolutely dominated by this case out of Minneapolis, where an Ice agent shot and killed a demonstrator, and the runs and reruns of that have been all over.

I've looked at it from every angle, and one of those angles was provided by the ice demonstrator and the Secretary of Homeland Security, uh, the head of Ice, and even the president of the United States.

Very quickly, within an hour, starting with Secretary, had rendered judgment that the woman was a number of adjectives and charges have been made a domestic terrorist, or that she posed a very serious, life threatening, uh, kind of force there that, uh, made the agent do what he did and that he was totally justified in doing that.

Other demonstrators and other critics and people just looking at that video drew exactly the opposite and said that Miss Goode was clearly not a threat, that she was just acting on her right to demonstrate.

And the irony is, the last recording of the guy who shot her was she was saying to him, quote unquote, I'm not mad at you, unquote.

And that has kicked off a national debate that was already well underway.

Mass demonstrations in Minneapolis up through last night, demonstrations in Chicago, New York and all across the big cities, particularly, and the state and local officials in Minnesota, as well as in Illinois.

And they say that this is what happens when you send in ice with the kind of tactics, the kind of training they have, uh, and with no clear rules of engagement.

And, uh, the critics would say not nearly enough, uh, controls on how, uh, ice handles demonstrators.

And this parallels what's happened earlier in Chicago and in Illinois.

We were just simply ahead of that in the sense that we had the battle, mostly the one in the courts, mostly focused originally on the role for the National Guard.

The National Guard was this, uh, the, uh, subject of the case that went to the United States Supreme Court?

Uh, and interestingly enough, Supreme Court sided ultimately with Illinois and said that Illinois was right in saying that the application of the National Guard was not really warranted under these conditions that faced, uh, the federal government as they tried to do the roundups and as they were doing what Ice does in the case of Chicago.

Uh, so, uh, we were much further along legally, I think, uh, than, uh, Minnesota was up until last week as a result of last week.

Illinois has filed a case, and Minnesota has filed a case where they're basically saying, uh, you've simply got to have some rules of engagement.

You've got to have the rules of the game.

Both sides have got to understand them, uh, and that we're way too far into this now, uh, without some kind of, I'd say, pullback, uh, from the kinds of things that ISIS doing because the studies that have been shown have been done, shown, have shown that, uh, this is not the worst of the worst by any stretch of the imagination and by most of the studies that have been done have found a handful of hardened criminals and certainly ordinary people otherwise.

And I think the media certainly have spread that word, and people with their lived experiences have said, these are just plain folks.

A guy that got killed in Chicago was taking his daughter to to elementary school that morning.

So that debate goes on.

We'll see the outcome slowly but surely, in the court system for either the Minnesota or the Illinois cases.

>> Um, Peter, I wanted to kind of talk about things that Illinois has been trying to do, some other things.

They created the accountability Committee, and they passed some laws in the session.

Um, have we seen any impacts from those yet?

And what are you seeing from the state House when it comes to immigration?

>> Well, I don't know that we've seen, uh, a great deal of impact yet.

Uh, I think basically what those laws are doing are, uh, they're publicly encouraging people to pull out their cell phones or whatever kind of recording devices they have, and to document what Ice and Customs and Border Patrol are doing on the streets.

Uh, and in the communities where they're carrying out this enforcement.

And then they've set up committees that will gather that evidence and somehow, uh, compile it and document it for whatever purpose, uh, you know, might come along later.

Uh, I think what you're seeing now and back to your original question was the state of Illinois, along with the city of Chicago, has filed a very broad based civil lawsuit, uh, to try and get the courts to, uh, put some guardrails around the Trump administration and the law enforcement as to how they carry out their functions in Chicago.

Uh, at the same time, the state of Minnesota has filed a similar lawsuit there.

Uh, so, you know, you're seeing, uh, multiple states now, uh, going to court to try and put some controls, uh, around, uh, the type of, uh, heavy handed and very aggressive enforcement actions that are going on in streets of American cities.

Uh, it's really, uh, kind of an extraordinary thing.

Uh, and it almost makes you think that, uh, the administration is taking this stance, uh, for the purpose of provoking strong reactions.

It's almost like they want melodrama in the streets.

Uh, they want, you know, uh, some sort of domestic crisis for whatever, uh, purpose.

But, uh, you know, it's really quite an extraordinary thing.

So I think for right now, the action, uh, at least the state government is taking is going to be playing out in federal courts through the attorney General's office.

>> Um, I wanted to move on, but, John, I wanted to, like, context wise, have we?

I mean, is there any precedent to any of this?

Like, has Illinois faced issues like this?

Um, it just seems so big.

>> I think the closest parallel would be 1967, 68, 69, the long, hot summers I lived through the civil rights era and, uh, the anti-war era, and they really merged into basically a lot of conflict.

And it was conflict that threatened and did get out of hand, uh, uh, 1967 Detroit, for example.

And then Los Angeles, every big city had a long, hot summer or 2 or 3.

And we were similarly divided.

And I think that's the closest we've come.

Uh, the federal government played quite a different role in all of that, though.

And, uh, at that point, it was the expansion of individual rights, women, uh, minorities, antiwar people.

In this case, it's the contraction of individual rights that is threatened by the federal government.

>> Okay.

Well, I guess, like we said, you're just going to have to watch it play out and see that these steps that Illinois has taken, if they're, you know, what bite they will have, um, going to more reaction on the behalf of state of Illinois to actions taken by the Trump administration.

Um, Peter, you had an article this week.

Um, the Department of Justice last month, in December filed suit against Illinois and several other states looking for more voter data.

You had an update on that story.

Can you kind of tell us what you found.

>> Yeah.

This is a story that goes back to last summer.

Uh, there were series of demand letters where the Justice Department was demanding that the state of Illinois hand over its entire unredacted statewide voter registration database.

That includes not just the names of all the voters, but their exact street addresses, uh, their dates of birth, their driver's license numbers, or partial Social Security numbers.

A lot of very sensitive, personally identifiable information.

Uh, they were demanding that the state just hand this over.

And it wasn't just Illinois.

They've been doing this, uh, up in upwards of 40, I think maybe 43 states.

They've, uh, the Brennan Center for justice at NYU has been keeping track of it, and they've documented at least that many states that have gotten demand letters, uh, some states, most states have handed over partially redacted uh, databases, including the state of Illinois, uh, that has the names, uh, of all the voters, it doesn't have their exact street address, but it'll tell you what street they live on.

Maybe what zip code they live in, uh, does not include their dates of birth, and it does not include, uh, driver's license or Social Security numbers.

Uh, which I talked to one national expert.

He referred to those as the holy trinity of identity theft.

Um, other people, you know, called it a hacker's a hacker's dream.

Um, there are a lot of, you know, just very basic privacy concerns about handing over, uh, that kind of data to the Justice Department, which, uh, according to a lot of, uh, national experts, has no statutory authority to be asking for it.

Uh, so some states have handed over partial information.

Some states have handed over everything the Justice Department has asked for.

Uh, but there are 23 states, including Illinois, that are now being sued, uh, trying to get, you know, a judicial order to hand over all of the information.

Not surprisingly, all of the states that have complied with the request, uh, tend to be Republican states and the states being sued, with the exception of Georgia.

And I think maybe New Hampshire, uh, are Democratic led states.

Uh, and this appears to be, uh, although the Justice Department and the Trump administration are being kind of opaque about what they're after, it appears to be a nationwide effort, uh, for the Justice Department and the Trump administration to take over the function of cleaning up voter registration rolls.

Uh, there there are federal laws that say states, uh, have to have a regular program cleaning up the rolls, taking off dead people, taking off people who've moved away from whatever address they're listed at.

Um, and the Trump administration seems to want to take that over at the federal level, uh, and tells, you know, so that they can do a massive purge of the voter registration lists ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

Uh, and, you know, it doesn't take a big stretch of the imagination to put two and two together.

Uh, we've got this going on with voter registration databases.

Uh, their efforts in many states, especially Republican led states, to engage in mid-decade gerrymandering, uh, to tip the scales in favor of Republican candidates.

Uh, the Trump administration appears to be very afraid of what could happen in the 2026 midterm elections.

And if they lose control of Congress, especially the House of Representatives.

Uh, and he said publicly that, you know, he's afraid of nonstop investigations and possibly another impeachment proceeding.

>> Um, John, when you hear this voter voter rights, do you think that there is this chance that we could see a loss of voter rights when it comes to the federal government looking for all this data?

>> Oh, absolutely.

And on the redistricting as well.

Uh, the president and his supporters are trying to shape the electorate, and they're trying to shape the electorate to their advantage, and they're working on the basic rules of the game to get that done.

And everything that Peter talked about is an effort in that direction.

Um, the president himself has said again and again that he wants only voting on Election Day and only those votes to be counted.

He's totally opposed to all those early voting things.

And that would undoubtedly give him some real advantages.

And the Republicans on the shaping of the district, which is unprecedented for it to be done halfway through the census year.

So all of that is the macro view about shaping turnout for next midterm elections.

>> You you talk about the the mail in ballots that start sooner.

We're going to talk about the elections here in a minute.

But there's a story.

I saw that the post office is going to change how they do postmarks.

That doesn't necessarily mean the day that it was dropped into the mailbox.

And I believe some Illinois state clerks are going to have to, um, they're having a press conference later this week, so we'll have to see what they say and how that affects things.

Um, again, just a lot of a lot of wait and see.

I wanted to move on to election.

Um, the elections are coming up.

The.

I believe mail in balloting starts early February.

John, we haven't talked a lot in the past few weeks about the election.

The candidates have been kind of quiet.

Um, you had some ideas that you wanted to share with us as we start looking at the the Republican field.

Let's start there.

>> Well, the the election is on us.

It's two months away, March the 17th, just around the corner.

And it's been quiet, uh, unusually quiet so far, I would say, uh, one of the reasons it's not been really the kind of governor's race you would expect at this point is a tragic thing that happened to Darren Bailey.

Uh, the loss of his son and his daughter in law and two of his children, not surprisingly, knocked his campaign for a loop.

He looked long and hard at whether or not he could continue.

Uh, and you have to have sympathy for that.

It's such an awful thing to have happen.

Uh, he did start coming out to a couple of weeks ago, where he started with a press conference talking about the fact that, uh, he was not a lackey for the president.

He said he had enthusiastically supported the president.

The president had enthusiastically entered in, uh, had endorsed him.

However, that ended with Mike Bost versus Darren Bailey, uh, where the president got in on the side of Mike boss, the incumbent.

And that could have been a factor, but he was trying to put a little distance between himself and Donald Trump, it seems to me.

And now I think that there are who knows, I've not looked it up three major other candidates and other minor candidates for the Republican Nomination, but I think, uh, the clear favorites got to be Darren Bailey.

He's run statewide.

He's running this congressional district here.

He won a state Senate seat and a state rep seat.

Uh, none of the others have any name recognition at all statewide.

The other extremely important and interesting one is the replacement for Dick Durbin.

Durbin's been a powerhouse second in command for the Democrats in the Senate.

And you can't really replace Dick Durbin.

It'll take a generation for anybody to build up that kind of clout.

Uh, but there are some very credible candidates.

Uh, Lieutenant Governor Stratton got out there first with the endorsement of the governor.

Uh, you have, uh, Congresswoman Robin Kelly, and then you have Raja, uh, Krishnamoorthy.

He is by far leading now, in my estimation, simply because of the campaign he's run.

You haven't really heard that much out of the other two major candidates.

And by the way, I think those two candidates will probably divide up much of the same support base and probably take votes from one another.

So it's been all over the state.

He's been all over your television, even here at the remote end of the state where we get our television from Missouri and Kentucky as well as from southern Illinois.

His face and his commercials have been out there.

He got out with, what was it, $25 million raised very quickly.

There's some real advantages, and he's showing those advantages.

He's up with his fifth or sixth Flyte of different ads in this area.

So that one's one to watch.

I think, uh, uh, the congressman is the leading candidate, and it's going to be hard for those others to catch up, it seems to me.

>> He does seem to have name recognition, I think.

Gene WGN in Chicago recently had a poll that showed a lot of strong numbers supporting what you're talking about.

Peter.

From there covering the state House, what are are there any other races that we should be looking at?

We've got about five minutes, but are there any other races that are kind of on your radar, in addition to the governor and the Senate seats?

>> Well, the race for comptroller is drawing a lot of attention.

Uh, has candidates, uh, not only people in the state House, uh, but people, you know, outside of the state House.

Uh, it's the one statewide constitutional office that's, uh, an open seat this year.

Uh, because, uh, the incumbent, Susana Mendoza, has decided not to seek another term.

And we're all kind of anxiously awaiting to see what her next step is going to be.

A lot of speculation that, uh, she has her eyes on running for mayor of Chicago again.

Um, but, you know, beyond that, I think the interesting thing, uh, is what kind of just wholesale change we're going to see after this election in Illinois's congressional delegation, uh, as John was mentioning, you know, Dick Durbin is stepping down, so there will be a new US senator.

Uh, and that has just kind of created this chain reaction, uh, up and down the line.

We've got, uh, two incumbent US House members who are seeking that, uh, Senate seat.

So that opens up, uh, the two US House seats.

We've also got a couple of retirements.

So we've got two more US House seats, uh, that are opening up.

Uh, and, you know, everybody, uh, at lower levels in the state House and, uh, you know, city councils and all kinds of other levels of government, uh, wanting to move up the ladder.

And these things happen, you know, about once in a generation or so.

Uh, especially when you see a long time institutional powerhouse like Dick Durbin step aside.

Um, you know, it just it's like lifting a cap off of a soda bottle.

You know, it just everything starts bubbling up to the top.

Uh, as people start competing to rise to the next level.

So, um, it's going to be a it's going to be a fascinating year in Illinois, for sure.

>> Okay.

Well, we've got, like John said, just a little over two months.

And, um, Election day will be here before we know it.

Uh, we have about 2.5 minutes left.

Um, just really quickly.

Peter wanted to stick with you.

And what are we looking at?

The elevator pitch for what we're looking at when the General Assembly has started to meet this week.

What do you think we're going to see as the session happens this year?

>> Uh, a lot of talk about the budget.

This is not going to be an easy budget year.

Revenues have been flattening out.

And the big X factor out there is what's happening with federal revenues.

Uh, the one big beautiful bill, H.R.

one that Congress passed back uh, last, last summer is going to have a huge impact on state budgets.

Maybe not immediately.

Uh, maybe it might take a year, but there are going to be big changes in, uh, federal contributions to Medicaid, uh, big changes in, uh, other kinds of social service programs, food stamps, uh, other kinds of welfare programs.

Uh, there's going to be a big shift in the relationship between the states and federal government in terms of funding safety net programs like that.

And, uh, it's going to be very difficult.

Uh, and I, you know, I think right now we're seeing, uh, the Illinois State Board of Education as we're recording this, they are about to vote on their, uh, budget request for the upcoming year.

It's going to be a very lean, lean times.

There's just not a lot of new money to be thrown around.

And any, uh, additional money that is out there people are sitting on very tightly because they don't know what's going to happen with the federal government.

>> Okay.

Um, well, we've got about 50s left, and I think we'll just have to leave it there.

The Senate meets this week, and I'll wrap up by the time this airs.

And then next week we get the house and we'll just continue to cover these topics.

That's it for this week's edition of Capitol View.

Thank you for joining us.

On behalf of John Jackson and Peter Hancock, I'm Brian Sapp.

Thank you for joining us on Capitol View.

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