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It’s finally Friday. End your week with these stories from WTTW News.
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Chicago Police Supt. Larry Snelling, far right, answers questions from the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability on Thursday, April 2, 2026. (Heather Cherone / WTTW News)
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Chicago’s police oversight board pressed Chicago Police Supt. Larry Snelling on Thursday about why Chicago police officers did not do more to stop federal agents from carrying out aggressive immigration raids across the city.
The special meeting of the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability at Kelly High School in Brighton Park came months after the oversight board asked Snelling to appear at a meeting to answer questions about his department’s response to the aggressive immigration raids launched by President Donald Trump as part of his effort to carry out the largest mass deportation campaign in U.S. history.
Not only did Chicago police officers comply with the Welcoming City ordinance, but they also kept Chicagoans safe during tense confrontations with heavily armed federal agents that nearly spiraled out of control, Snelling told the commission and a nearly full auditorium.
“Our officers showed up to keep down violence,” Snelling said.
But Snelling also acknowledged CPD struggled to respond to the Trump administration’s decision to send hundreds of agents to Chicago and ordered them to aggressively detain anyone they suspected of being undocumented.
“No one wrote the ordinance and the law with this type of immigration enforcement in mind,” Snelling said. “I do not believe, under any circumstances, that anyone writing those policies, those orders, those laws, believe that we would see, what we saw this past fall.”
What else happened:
Snelling was repeatedly jeered by the crowd, some of whom held signs calling on CPD to “end ICE and CPD collaboration,” referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
As the meeting ended, approximately two dozen people started a chant of “CPD, KKK, ICE, they are all the same.”
The leaders of the protest were forcibly removed from the auditorium before officials ended the meeting.
Commission President Remel Terry apologized for holding the meeting during Passover and just days before Easter, saying they had unsuccessfully tried to reschedule it but felt it “urgently” needed to take place.
Snelling said he was very busy keeping “the entire city safe” and could not easily rearrange his schedule.
“I can’t drop things and just show up when I’m called with a week’s notice,” Snelling said.
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Sponsor Message
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Make your plans to celebrate this April with the Poetry Foundation, offering a full roster of FREE public programs, including:
- a poetry reading with Chicago’s own National Book Award winner Patricia Smith;
- a live performance by chamber music collective D+Composed;
- a library packed with more than 40,000 books of poetry for readers of all ages.
Visiting Hours: Wednesday, Friday, Saturday 11 AM–5 PM; Thursday 11 AM–6 PM
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A converted firearm. (Photo courtesy Everytown for Gun Safety)
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Illinois legislators are pushing a bill they say would close a “loophole” by outlawing the sale of certain handguns that can be turned into fully-automatic firearms through the use of a 3D-printed switch.
The Responsible Gun Manufacturers Act, versions of which have been introduced into both the Illinois House and Senate, would prohibit the manufacturing and sale of pistols that can be easily converted into illegal “machine guns.”
“They may belong on our battlefields,” Illinois state Rep. Justin Slaughter, one of the bill sponsors, said on a press call Thursday, “but they certainly do not belong in our neighborhoods, in our communities.”
More context:
The bill doesn’t specifically name gun manufacturer Glock, but its firearms — as well as other brands with similar models — are among the most susceptible to being converted through the use of an auto sear, a cheap, small device commonly known as a “Glock switch.”
Greg Lickenbrock, a firearms expert with the violence prevention nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety, said those switches can be created using a 3-D printer and easily snap onto the back of certain handguns, allowing them to fire up to 20 rounds per second.
That violates the Firearms Industry Responsibility Act, which Gov. JB Pritzker signed into law in 2023 to hold gun companies accountable for conduct that endangers the public, according to a previous lawsuit brought against Glock by the city of Chicago in 2024.
According to Everytown, Chicago has seen a 15-fold increase in machine gun conversion device recoveries since 2019, with more than 1,100 modified Glocks recovered between 2021 and 2023 alone.
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Poh Si Teng’s “American Doctor,” featuring Chicago emergency medicine physician Dr. Thaer Ahmad, will be the closing night film at the 25th annual Chicago Palestine Film Festival. (Courtesy of Poh Si Teng)
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Dr. Thaer Ahmad, a Palestinian American who spent about three weeks in 2024 volunteering at Nasser Hospital and Al-Aqsa Hospital in Gaza, is among the three doctors featured Poh Si Teng’s documentary “American Doctor.” The film will be screened during the 25th annual Chicago Palestine Film Festival later this month.
The Chicago Palestine Film Festival runs April 11-25 at the Gene Siskel Film Center, including several post-screening Q&As and additional encore screenings.
The volunteer-run festival, which started in 2001, aims to promote the work of Palestinian filmmakers and those making films about Palestine, push back against the negative stereotypes and images of Palestinians and Arabs in media, and provide a space for Palestinians to see themselves on screen, according to executive director Nina Shoman-Dajani.
More about the festival:
This year, the festival has more than 50 films in its lineup, including feature and short films.
“We want to show the diversity of Palestinian lived experiences, and not just those that are focused on the everyday military occupation of Israel, the ongoing genocide and the hardships of the Palestinian people,” Shoman-Dajani said. “We want to also share the stories of Palestinian love and joy, and cultural traditions and music and family.”
For the 25th anniversary, the festival will feature giveaways, a coffee cart, a workshop at 18th Street Casa de Cultura in Pilsen, and a tribute to the late Palestinian filmmaker and actor Mohammad Bakri at Haymarket House in Uptown, according to Shoman-Dajani.
The festival aims to showcase the work of emerging filmmakers as well as award-winning, internationally known filmmakers.
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More From WTTW News:
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Back in the Day: April 3, 1996 - Chicagoan Ted Kaczynski Arrested For 'Unabomber' Crimes
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On this day 30 years ago, federal authorities and FBI agents descended on a remote cabin in Lincoln, Montana, to arrest a man who had mailed 16 bombs and led law enforcement on a 17-year manhunt. The suspect turned out to be Chicago native Theodore Kaczynski, a mathematician who left academic life to send mail bombs in 1978 that targeted individuals associated with technology and academia. He eventually became known as “the Unabomber.” A graduate of Evergreen Park Community High School who was accepted to Harvard at age 15, Kaczynski was caught after his manifesto “Industrial Society and Its Future” was published in 1995 by several major newspapers. The writings raised the
suspicions of his brother, who sent a tip to the FBI. Kaczynski died in 2023.
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Other News From Around Town
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Every Friday, WTTW News compiles interesting and informative stories about Chicago from the local and national press.
Unmasking the Paramilitary Agents Behind Trump’s Violent Immigration Crackdown (WIRED)
“In the early morning last September 30, hundreds of federal agents swarmed the South Shore Apartments, a beige brick building on Chicago’s South Side. As feds in body armor rappelled down from a Black Hawk helicopter overhead, others crashed through the building’s doors with battering rams, rounding up residents at gunpoint.
A group of burly, masked agents wearing helmets and bulletproof vests, and toting suppressor-equipped M4 rifles, moved through the hallways in a rapid, tightly organized file. Padraic Daniel Berlin, a 34-year-old Michigan native and son of a Detroit firefighter, held Yoda, his Belgian Malinois, on a leash. David Dubar Jr., a 53-year-old onetime construction worker, followed closely behind him. Their team leader, Corey Myers, a Marine veteran from the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector, checked apartment doors. Paul Delgado Jr., a standout cross-country runner in high school, was the final member of the entry team.
The four men are members of the Border Patrol Tactical Unit, or BORTAC.”
From Steelworkers to Care Workers (Chicago Reader)
“While the new hospital [at the former U.S. Steel South Works plant] is undoubtedly the most immediate community benefit that has emerged as part of the quantum megadevelopment, the new state-of-the-art facility, along with Advocate’s larger south-side care plans, might also tell us something about how large-scale healthcare providers could transform the delivery of care in the years to come. It’s also worth considering whether a hospital rising from the South Works site might actually be a symptom of, rather than a treatment for, the economic decline that stems from the decades-long process of deindustrialization, the loss of unionized manufacturing jobs, and the transition to lower-paying, more economically insecure
service work.
To make sense of all this, I spoke with University of Chicago labor history professor Gabriel Winant, whose 2021 book, The Next Shift, examines how Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a city once synonymous with steel, saw the healthcare sector become a dominant industry in direct relationship to steel’s decline.”
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What's your favorite building in Chicago? Tell us why.
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Email DailyChicagoan@wttw.com with your responses and your answers might be published. Here's what you had to
say:
“The Carbide & Carbon Building” — @casagrown.bsky.social
“Monadnock Building. An absolute unit of a building.” — @themewl.bsky.social
“The Tribune Building and the Englewood Post Office” — Facebook user Pretty MonaLisa
"My favorite building is The Water Tower, a castle in our city." — Kathy P.
"The Rookery on LaSalle St of course is my favorite. Burbank and Root, Wright remodeling. Elegant. Historical." — Mary R.
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Newsletter Producer: Josh Terry
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