Chicago Resident Launches Effort to Recall Mayor Brandon Johnson

Union organizer and Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson speaks after being projected winner as mayor in Chicago on April 4, 2023. (Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images)

A Chicago resident cites a rampant crime wave and illegal immigration as just a few of his reasons for initiating an effort to recall Mayor Brandon Johnson.

“We have crime throughout all of our neighborhoods, but with armed thugs walking the streets,” Dan Boland, founder of the Recall This Fall initiative, told The Epoch Times. “Yet some of our aldermen are calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, but they’ve never called for a ceasefire in their own ward.”

He pointed to Alderman Bryon Sigcho-Lopez, an ally of Mr. Johnson—one of the six members of the Democratic Socialist Caucus block of the Chicago City Council—who appeared with pro-Palestinian protesters after they had burned an American flag.

These ideological pursuits—which include the recent Chicago City Council’s vote to approve the mayor’s request for $70 million to be doled out for illegal immigration—ignore Chicago residents who have lived in the city their whole lives, he said.

The city has already budgeted $150 million for noncitizens from multiple countries flocking to Chicago under the Biden administration’s open border policy for this fiscal year, according to CBS News Chicago. The state of Illinois and Cook County have also pledged $250 million for illegal immigration support in Chicago.

Fox 32 Chicago reported ahead of the vote that the city had spent over $295 million between August 2022 and December 2023 to address illegal immigration, $143 million of which came from federal grants, $80 million from state grants, and $72 million from the city.

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The local station also reported that by November 2023, the city was housing 5,000 illegal immigrants in decommissioned police stations and airports, with up to 12,000 migrant children enrolled in city schools since 2022.

According to a city press release, Chicago has taken in more than 39,000 illegal immigrants since August 2022 when Texas Gov. Greg Abbot began busing them to the city by the thousands.

At an April 19 meeting on the funding, some black residents questioned where the mayor and other city officials’ loyalty lies after seeing its eagerness to support illegal immigrants while it has failed to invest the same amount to help citizens who live and pay taxes in the city, they said.

‘Things Are Getting Out of Hand’

“There are a lot of people who have been waiting years and years for resources, including public safety resources to clean up their neighborhoods, and then these transient migrants come here and they’re given all kinds of benefits,” Mr. Boland said.

Chicago residents feel they’re being neglected, he said.

“There are a lot of people who are just trying to get by,” he said. “Now these migrants are being handed everything but they can’t work right now because they don’t have work permits,” he said.

They could pick up garbage on the streets, but they don’t, he added.

“They make more of a mess than they clean up,” he said.

In some instances, they are getting in fights “like it’s a WWE cage match,” he said. “Things are getting out of hand.”

And it was already bad enough, he added.

“Overall, there’s this lack of transparency, accountability, good government, and direct democracy that the mayor ran on,” Mr. Boland said. “Somewhere between his Cook County office and the mayor’s office, this must have gotten lost in one of the boxes because I haven’t seen one day of it. And although he’s done some good things for some people, he’s not the mayor for all of Chicago.”

‘A Wake-Up Call’

According to Mr. Boland, the Illinois Constitution sanctions any recall effort, which Mr. Boland said “allows us to have a binding referendum on the recall of public officials.”

“It’s a two-step process that we have to go through,” he said. “Number one: you have to have a petition drive. In this case, we have to get 56,464 signatures on the petition. If we get on the fall ballot after having enough signatures, we‘ll have a binding referendum vote. And then we’ll only have to win by 50 percent plus one vote. So, that’s what we’re trying to do: get the mechanism in place.”

If this mechanism is approved, Chicago residents would have a path by which they could recall Mr. Johnson and any future mayors, he said.

“They would need to have a petition with 123,000, and then the earliest we could recall him would be March of 2026, when we have the primaries for the governor and state and county representatives,” he said.

Mr. Boland, who said he doesn’t side with Republicans or Democrats, called it a “wake-up call” for all city officials.

“This isn’t about one political party or the other,” he said, adding that he hoped the effort would bring Chicago residents together to vote for the power to change leadership when it’s not working for them.

“Hopefully, it will make this mayor more accountable and more transparent,” he said.

According to Fox 32 Chicago, Mr. Johnson called Mr. Boland’s recall effort “disingenuous” and “motivated by right-wing extremism.”

The Epoch Times contacted the mayor’s office for comment.