That was quite the Republican holiday bash in Portage Park on Monday night. Who needs seasonal cheer and glad tidings and goodwill to all when your featured speaker, an official from the incoming federal government, can come up with jolly lines such as, “your mayor sucks and your governor sucks”? We’d be the last people to suggest that any mayor or governor is above criticism and we’ve had our complaints, of course, not that “sucks” is our preferred term. Such critiques are the job of a newspaper editorial board. But when you are the incoming federal “border czar,” not to mention someone who appears to be preparing America for a series of massively disruptive deportation actions, it behooves you to use less offensive and abrasive language. You’d think someone charged with the enforcement of federal laws likely to cause human distress would see the benefit in not inflaming what already is a tense situation. We’re not only critiquing a lack of decorum here. All this sort of macho bluster will do is make Tom Homan’s agents’ jobs more difficult. So we’d like to remind Homan that while he is entitled to come to Chicago to offer his personal opinion about who does and does not suck, said governor and said mayor were duly elected by the people of Illinois and Chicago, respectively, just as Donald Trump, to whom Homan reports, also was duly elected and thus is able to empower Homan to do whatever he plans to do. If Homan had wanted to get Chicago’s collective dander up, here was a great way to start. In a editorial last month, we suggested that both Gov. JB Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson dial down the heated rhetoric that had stopped just short of saying they will put their bodies (or someone else’s bodies) physically in the way of federal agents enforcing immigration laws that are the responsibility of the federal government to enforce. Today, we ask Homan to do the same. We were sick and tired of being Trump’s civic punching bag long before Homan came to town to drink eggnog in Portage Park with the true believers and swagger at the podium. Outside that room, very little in the world of borders and immigration enjoys bipartisan consensus. But the aspect that comes closest is the deportation of convicted criminals who have enjoyed due process as it pertains to their status in this country and have been ordered by a court to leave. Homan said that is where the Trump administration plans to start when it comes to enforcing what it sees as an electoral mandate in this regard from the American people, which is reasonable. Past Democratic administrations have done much the same. It is what a majority of Americans want to happen. But we know that convicted criminals are only a tiny portion of the people in this country without legal permission. What will happen to the rest mostly is an unknown. And a source of fear. It emerged in Portage Park, decidedly not the place it should have emerged, that Homan’s current plan appears to be to start this new enforcement, guardrails unknown, in Chicago. We’d prefer he started some place less inflammatory. We’re sure the optics of roaring into Chicago like Eliot Ness appeals to Trump, and it was precisely what we were worrying about when Pritzker and Johnson came out soon after the election with the warrior language (they’ve more recently avoided rising to the bait, thank heavens). Trump will no doubt want to serve up some Day One red meat to his backers, and it’s likely that a picture or two of a person in the U.S. illegally being rounded up in front of some iconic Chicago location would play very well on Truth Social. Immigration is a federal responsibility as our mayor and governor well know. They won’t be able to stand in the way of immigration agents doing their job, and we don’t see any reason that Trump and Homan, should they wish, could not beef up the numbers of said agents to render it unnecessary to use officers under state and local control, although those details also remain to be seen. Homan is right, of course, when he says that local elected officials should talk to him and understand what he is planning to do and when. Nobody is served by one governmental hand not knowing what the other hand is doing and, if no conversations take place, it seems to us that pain and anxiety will only be increased. Homan implied Monday that such a talk has not yet happened. But insulting people never has been an effective way to start a conversation. Nobody wants dangerous people in their community and most Americans recognize that laws without consequences may as well not exist at all. Nonetheless, both Republicans and Democrats wrestle with the immigration issue, which has to be resolved with an understanding of the human consequences of decades of congressional bickering and inaction. Those likely to be eventually targeted by Homan, apparently the designated bad cop as his boss makes nicer in national media interviews, are among the most vulnerable people in our state. A Christmas party is the worst time and place imaginable to roar into town celebrating “arresting a hell of a lot more people.” Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email [email protected].