* The leading Democratic candidates in the U.S. Senate primary debated on WCPT today. During the debate, Raja Krishnamoorthi’s campaign sent out a “fact check” responding to a comment from Juliana Stratton…

On the WCPT debate stage just now, Juliana Stratton flat-out lied about her previous calls to transfer ICE capabilities to Customs and Border Patrol.

STRATTON’S LIE: “The Congressman is lying about that. I’ve never said transfer duties [of ICE to Border Patrol].”

CHECK THE FACTS:

Chicago Tribune: “Stratton, however, pointed to Border Patrol in response to a post-debate question about who would take on immigration enforcement responsibilities if ICE were eliminated. ‘There is Border Patrol…’” [Jan 26, 2026]

Rick Pearson of the Chicago Tribune:

Our story from tonight’s debate. Tho later she tells reporters CBP could handle ICE immigration duties. CBP agents were involved in the fatal shootings in Minneapolis. https://t.co/I0wcXUD4Js

— Rick Pearson (@rap30) January 27, 2026

Click here to watch the full debate.

* Click here for some background. Reps. Lisa Hernandez and Bob Rita…

State Representatives Lisa Hernandez and Bob Rita today filed House Bill 5469 to provide parity in the Illinois horse racing industry and support horsemen and their families, following the closure of several Chicagoland area racetracks in the past few years.

House Bill 5469 was filed today by Reps. Hernandez and Rita to provide parity in the horse racing industry as south suburban Hawthorne Race Course has been left to shoulder the vast majority of costs to continue operating the sport in Illinois, provide jobs to horsemen and the industry, and support horsemen and their families living in the backstretch.

Since 1891, Hawthorne Race Course has operated in Stickney as the oldest sporting venue in Illinois for the oldest sport in America. Following the closures of Maywood Park and Balmoral Park in 2016, Hawthorne took the reins to resume harness racing at significant cost and saved hundreds of horsemen businesses and thousands of horsemen jobs in the process.

In 2022, when Churchill Downs shocked the Illinois racing industry by announcing the unprecedented closure of Arlington Park, Hawthorne undertook the sole responsibility of underwriting the industry in northern Illinois. To this day, the industry requires the continued operation of Hawthorne, which is one of the only starting gates left in Illinois and the only track in the country that offers both thoroughbred and harness racing.

HB 5469 would put in place several key changes, including:

- Reduce the initial per position cost for a Cook County racetrack casino to be equal to the per-position cost of Illinois’ only other operating racetrack, Fairmount Park.
Provide parity by extending the time period for racetracks to pay full gaming licensing fees.
- Require the state to fund horsemen purses, as already required by law, as well as fund a one-time, three-year purse payment to retroactively compensate Hawthorne for purse payments already made.
- Extend the time period that racetracks can continue to receive certain benefits in Illinois law after a casino begins operation, and importantly, require tracks to improve backstretch conditions through capital improvements during this time.
- Equalize contribution requirements for racetracks to fund medical, dental and social services programs for horsemen employees working and living in racetrack backstretches.

*** Statewide ***

* Sun-Times | Walmart, Amazon and CPS top list of employers where Illinois workers still need SNAP benefits: An analysis by the Chicago Sun-Times identified the top ten employers statewide with workers who receive SNAP food assistance. Chicago Public Schools, which employs about 60,000 workers, stands out as the lone public body among the list of large, profitable and mostly publicly traded corporations like Walmart, Amazon, McDonald’s and FedEx whose chief executive officers get paid as much as tens of millions of dollars each year. The school district is among the state’s largest single employers.

*** Statehouse News ***

* 25News Now | Upstate Illinoisan for GOP gubernatorial slot remains off ballot after appellate court decision: An appellate court denied a stay of a circuit court’s decision, which means Joseph Severino and Rantch Isquith, candidates for Governor and Lt. Governor, will not be printed on the ballot, according to an email from McLean County Clerk Kathy Michael. Severino appealed the decision of the Illinois State Board of Elections to not certify his candidacy over a lack of valid petition signatures, according to documents previously obtained by 25News.

* Capitol News Illinois | Ted Dabrowski gets off sidelines with run for governor: Dabrowski also told Capitol News Illinois that he would seek to lower the state’s individual income tax rate from 4.95% to 3% — the rate from 1990 to 2010. It dropped to 3.75% from 2015 to 2017 when a temporary hike expired during the two-year budget impasse. In the two-year period the rate was reduced, the state drastically cut social services as its backlog of unpaid bills ballooned to over $16 billion. Lawmakers raised the rate back to 4.95% in 2017, and as of Friday, that number dropped to just over $2 billion, fitting into a standard 30-day billing cycle. He did not say specifically what cuts would offset lost tax revenue, instead suggesting that it reflects the need for “a cultural shift” in state government.

*** Chicago ***

* WTTW | Top Cop: COPA Should Probe Chicago Police Conduct During Immigration Raids Because No One Would ‘Trust’ Internal Affairs: Chicago Police Supt. Larry Snelling said he backed an effort to give the agency charged with probing police misconduct the authority to investigate whether CPD officers and leaders have violated city law by helping federal immigration agents because no one would “trust” probes conducted by internal affairs. That measure would give the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, known as COPA, the authority to investigate whether CPD officers helped federal agents carry out deportations. A final vote by the Chicago City Council is set for Feb. 18.

* Tribune | Judge agrees to lift protective order, allow release of evidence in Marimar Martinez shooting: Saying the federal government has shown “zero concern” about ruining the reputation of a Chicago woman shot by a Border Patrol agent, a federal judge on Friday agreed to lift a protective order and allow the release of body-camera footage and text messages from the agent who shot her. In her ruling, which stems from one of the highest profile incidents from Operation Midway Blitz, U.S. District Judge Georgia Alexakis said Marimar Martinez has the right to counterbalance the label of “domestic terrorist” put upon her by the Department of Homeland security — a narrative that the government has refused to retract even after assault charges against Martinez were dropped.

* Tribune | Jabs at Jesse Jackson Jr., Donna Miller as South Side Congress race heats up: As candidates met with the Tribune editorial board Thursday, Jackson was the elephant in the room, while Miller, who attended a later session, was the one outside it. “The American people are sick of seeing people in Washington because they’re famous, like Jesse Jackson Jr.,” state Sen. Willie Preston said. “Or because a bunch of wealthy people gave a candidate some money and bought them, like Donna Miller is being currently purchased.” Preston’s remark, consistent with his confrontational style on the trail, points to the foundations of the race.

* Crain’s | River North hotel owner hit with $57 million foreclosure lawsuit: In other recent hotel transactions near the Godfrey, local investors bought the Westin Michigan Avenue Chicago, the Hampton Inn/Homewood Suites Mag Mile and the former Tremont Chicago hotel for fractions of what they were worth before the pandemic. Quadrum likely had higher hopes for the Godfrey’s recovery when it helped orchestrate the refinancing in 2023. That $63 million loan replaced a $47.5 million senior loan that the firm and Oxford had taken out on the property in 2017.

* Block Club | Take A Virtual Tour Of Concourse D, O’Hare Airport’s Upcoming Addition: The Chicago Department of Aviation released an animated video depicting what O’Hare’s new Concourse D will look like when finished. The $1.3 billion project is slated to be completed in late 2028.

*** Cook County and Suburbs ***

* Sun-Times | Sky’s new practice facility will be ‘operational’ by ‘late spring,’ CEO Adam Fox says: For the Sky, the biggest timeline question belongs to the men in hard hats: When will their new practice facility in Bedford Park finally open? At an “enclosure ceremony” this fall, co-owner and operating chairman Nadia Rawlinson said she was confident the building would be ready before the 2026 season.

* Sun-Times | Roundabouts are increasingly popping up in Chicago’s suburbs, seen as an answer to traffic problems: “Typical Chicago street widths are not conducive to roundabout designs,” a City Hall official says. It’s a different story, though, in the suburbs. The Illinois Department of Transportation’s district covering state routes in Cook, DuPage, Kane, Lake, McHenry and Will counties now includes eight roundabouts on those roads. Eleven more are planned in the next three to five years, and another dozen are being discussed, officials say.

*** Downstate ***

* Telegraph | Illinois opens WARN Act probe into Alton Steel closure: “The Illinois Department of Labor has opened an investigation into Alton Steel after learning on January 27 that workers at the Alton plant would begin losing their jobs on January 31,” it stated. “Under the state Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN), employers with 75 or more full-time employees are required to give workers and state and local government officials 60 days advance notice of a plant closing or mass layoff. The Department sent the company a subpoena as part of a broader effort to determine whether Alton Steel violated the WARN Act.”

* WGLT | New Pantagraph owner takes over: The new owner of the parent company of the Bloomington Pantagraph newspaper said the chain’s flagship paper is “a little too far left.” According to media reports, billionaire hedge fund owner David Hoffman made the remark about the St. Louis Post Dispatch. Hoffman now owns 53% of Lee stock. He took over as chair of Lee Enterprises this week after investing $50 million in the cash-strapped company. Lee also was hobbled a year ago by a cyberattack that disrupted delivery and online service. Lee had to defer interest payments to investor Berkshire Hathaway to recover from the attack.

* WGLT | Bloomington implements water restrictions as drought persists: City Manager Jeff Jurgens has signed a proclamation that mandates restrictions intended to reduce water use by 10% across all sectors, including residential, agricultural, commercial, industrial, institutional, wholesale and for electric power generation. Parts of Bloomington-Normal are under a severe drought, while much of western and northern McLean County is under a moderate drought. Southeastern McLean County is experiencing extreme drought.

* WCIA | Decatur receives $1.4 million for lead abatement efforts: City officials said on Facebook that, for the first time, the city received a Lead Hazard Reduction Grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The grant is $1 million with an additional $400,000 in Healthy Homes Supplemental funding. “This funding is intended to assist Decatur families with children under the age of 6 that are experiencing issues with lead in their homes,” city officials said. “We will use the funding to abate lead sources in the home by using Illinois Lead-licensed contractors.”

* Tri States Public Radio | Macomb buys downtown building where Lincoln stayed: The city council this week agreed to pay $150,000 to acquire the south half of the structure built in 1857 as the Randolph House Hotel. The city purchased the north half of the building late last year for $65,000. Mayor Mike Inman said the city would like to get the building into a developer’s hands so that the second and third floors can be redeveloped into an attraction for visitors and a place where they could stay.

*** National ***

* The Minnesota Star Tribune | Swapped, covered and removed: The license plate tactics ICE is using in Minnesota: Another 11% of the plates reviewed by the Star Tribune had some kind of irregularity, including expired tabs from different vehicles or plates registered to a nonexistent business. A quarter of the vehicles were rentals.

* HuffPost | This Little-Known iPhone Feature Safeguarded A Reporter’s Data From Feds — And It Could Save Yours, Too: This iOS feature, which is available in iOS 16 software or later, is known as Lockdown Mode and has been around since 2022, but this recent case highlights just how strong these cybersecurity protections are. As reported by tech outlet 404 media, a new court filing on Natanson’s case details how Lockdown Mode blocked the FBI’s go-to forensics analyst team called Computer Analysis Response Team (CART) from accessing her iPhone.

* AP | Milan Cortina Winter Olympics kicks off with a four-site, two-cauldron opening ceremony: This is the most spread-out Winter Olympics in history, with competition venues dotting an area of about 8,500 square miles (more than 22,000 square kilometers), roughly the size of the entire state of New Jersey. The main hub Friday is in Milan at San Siro soccer stadium. There also will be three other places where athletes can march, some carrying their country’s flag: Cortina d’Ampezzo in the heart of the Dolomite mountains; Livigno in the Alps; Predazzo in the autonomous province of Trento.