Why did Lion Electric fail? Democrats, Canada and Lion itself all played a role.

The windshields still haunted Tom Olson as he walked through the Lion Electric school bus factory in Joliet for the final time last month.
During nearly three years as the factory's manufacturing engineer, he'd never been able to get the windshield to fit properly onto the fiberglass shell that covers the bus's metal frame. The company's top brass, swimming against a tide of red ink back home in Quebec, never fixed the design.
Starting with the very first bus, he said, workers had to anchor the sides of the windshields with extra-thick helpings of a sticky gray sealant that they called goop.
'The sealant will be fine for the first year. But what really scares me is, what's it going to do after three or four Midwest winters?' Olson said. 'I don't think they'll lose a window. But I know it's going to leak.'
Olson worked at Lion Electric until Thanksgiving. On the Sunday after the holiday, he received an email saying the factory had closed.
His return to the place where, at age 60, he'd been hoping to finish his career came during a liquidation sale. He said his silent goodbyes amid a steady stream of industrial scavengers from around the Midwest. And he kept replaying in his head all the mistakes, all the missed opportunities.
Figuring out what went wrong at Lion Electric is crucial not just for former employees, but also for politicians, corporate leaders and environmentalists who want Illinois to build more battery-powered vehicles and protect future generations from increasingly toxic air.
Gov. JB Pritzker has touted Illinois as a clean energy leader since the 2021 passage of his Climate and Equitable Jobs Act, which will ban the burning of coal and gas to make electricity by 2045.
But with energy shortages looming, the state is reconsidering its moratorium on new nuclear plants and reducing its electric vehicle rebates. The administration of President Donald Trump is now targeting CEJA itself.
In 2023, the governor told hundreds of people gathered for a ribbon-cutting ceremony that Lion Electric 'delivers a tremendous boost for Illinois' clean energy economy and our environmental leadership, too.'
​After the applause died down, Olson remembers wondering why faceless bureaucrats in the U.S. and Canada were taking years to release school bus subsidies intended to fight climate change. He recalled starry-eyed executives who raced to have the capacity to build 50 buses a week at the plant by 2024 but who never, he said, built more than four or five.
'Lion had the right idea. But they tried to do it too fast, too big and with not enough money,' Olson said. 'If we had the kind of money Tesla did, we'd still be making buses in Joliet.'Analyzing Lion Electric's miscues is also important for Quebec, which last month launched still more electric school bus subsidies to support new owners who'll restart one of the company's factories north of Montreal.
The move follows a court-supervised reorganization and sale that erased most of Lion Electric's $244 million debt to its creditors. The new owners don't plan to restart the plant in Joliet.
Last year, Pritzker blamed the closure on then-President-elect Trump's frequent promises, in the governor's words, 'to kind of tear down the electric vehicle industry development.'
In January, citing Trump's opposition, California withdrew its requirement for fleet operators to begin replacing diesel trucks with battery-powered models starting this year. This decision shut down one of the first electric truck markets Lion Electric had hoped to tap once its bus production was up and running.
However, Pritzker failed to identify the significant problems that arose when Joe Biden still sat in the White House, when Democrats still ran the U.S. Congress and when Democrats still controlled Springfield — as they do today — from top to bottom.
The governor's spokesperson, Alex Gough, didn't respond to emailed inquiries for this story.
In 2021, Biden's bipartisan infrastructure law allocated $5 billion for electric school bus subsidies. But under Biden, the Environmental Protection Agency's approval processes were slow and cumbersome. To this day, the agency has released only $3 billion for specific bus purchases, according to World Resources Institute, a nonprofit advocacy group.
This $3 billion in EPA subsidies, plus state and utility assistance, including from ComEd, were enough to pay for 13,931 buses from Lion Electric and other manufacturers. However, according to the institute, only 5,193 have been delivered.
Journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson make a related argument in their new book 'Abundance.' They say Biden included $7.5 billion in the 2021 infrastructure bill to build half a million electric vehicle charging stations. By March 2024, only seven charging stations were up and running.
Klein and Thompson say these bureaucratic quagmires left Democrats with few positive counterexamples to offer when Trump attacked the whole idea of fighting climate change as a hoax.
Democrats will have to learn to 'get stuff built'' much faster, the authors say, if they're ever to reclaim power in Washington, D.C.
Then there are Lion Electric's own choices and errors. Lion Electric does resemble Tesla in two ways — it staked its future entirely on electric vehicles and built its own battery packs. The company took this path because Lion Electric was the cornerstone of Quebec's bid to become a green manufacturing hub, the Chicago Tribune reported in June 2023.
Longtime manufacturers like Blue Bird, Thomas Built and I.C. Bus took the safer route of converting their diesel models to run on batteries and electric motors.
Roger D'Hollander is the chief operating officer of Ontario-based Damera Corp., which announced last month it will create at least 90 jobs at a new factory in Peoria for 19-passenger electric transit buses. Pritzker bragged in a news release that Damera's arrival is the latest step in his six-year quest to 'solidify our status as a hub of the EV future.'
D'Hollander says Lion Electric wasn't properly managed.
'They went through a public offering and got a fairly sizable amount of capital, and they sort of blew through that capital,' he said. 'We're a privately held company. Everything we do is done very conservatively. We're not going over the top, in terms of putting the facility in, until we see demand pick up.'Marc Bedard, the former Lion Electric chief executive officer, didn't respond to messages seeking comment. Spokesman Loïc Philibert said the new owners had no comment.
Before leaving in January, Nate Baguio served as Lion Electric's senior vice president for U.S. commercial development. He said the closure of the company's plant in Joliet wasn't a verdict on all-electric vehicles but rather, 'an indicator that scale alone isn't enough.'
Baguio said startup companies can't just look at aggregate numbers, like the total of 500,000 school buses that operate in the United States today, and say, 'We're going to convert all of those.'
Rather, these companies need a multifaceted strategy that coordinates manufacturing, infrastructure, training, private investment and public incentives during the startup.
Baguio said he's helping develop such coordinated strategies in his new job at DCC Marketing. The firm is an affiliate of TCCI Manufacturing, which makes electric vehicle components in Decatur.
In April, TCCI executives, joined by Pritzker, dedicated an innovation center that includes a factory for electric compressors, which are crucial for battery-powered vehicles, plus a college-affiliated training center and a test lab that simulates real-world driving.
'The fossil fuel industry has had 120 years to build up its infrastructure and develop its technology,' Baguio said. 'We're still, reasonably, in the first 10 years of electrification.'
When Olson returned to Lion Electric in May, the quarter-mile-long factory with a 45-foot-high ceiling was silent except for whirring ventilation fans off in the distance. Now and then, electronic chimes would go off to remind long-gone workers to begin and end their coffee breaks.
After helping arrange every square inch for maximum efficiency, Olson said he was appalled by how chaotic the factory looked.
He saw seats, tires, windshields, wiring harnesses, electric motors and long steel body frames stacked up next to each other in no particular order. Here and there was a fender, or a hood, or the gloomy shell of a half-assembled bus body.
Lion Electric had shipped as many usable parts as possible to Canada before seeking protection from its creditors. The auctioneers came in and rearranged everything again.
Olson saw pallets of parts still wrapped in black plastic. These were for a small bus similar to Damera's that Lion Electric dropped after concluding it could never be profitable.
Seventeen 4-ton chain hoists, which lift heavy objects up and down, were still in their original packing cases. These were for electric trucks the company never built at the plant in Joliet.
Dozens of undelivered buses were parked at the back end of the plant, some painted on the side with the names of customers like Kickert School Bus Line.
John Benish, president of Lynwood-based Kickert, said government money paid for the buses, not his, and that he has no idea when they may get delivered.
Olson knelt down under one of the buses to look at the safety cage around a small diesel fuel tank. The fuel powers a boiler that provides heat for the passenger compartment. From the beginning, the holes for the bolts that attach the safety cage to the bus were too small. Instead of fixing the design, Olson's bosses had him spend an hour for each bus drilling out bigger holes in the thick black metal.
At one point, the factory ran short of the diesel boilers, since the Russian invasion had disrupted shipments from the Ukrainian factory that made them. Lion Electric also struggled with supply chain disruptions in the aftermath of COVID-19 and, Olson said, parts shortages caused by late payments to suppliers.
'We could never get into a good rhythm, you know, to actually run the assembly line the way it's supposed to be run,' he said.
Olson's journey to the shattered factory began on the farm where he grew up near La Crosse, Wisconsin.
He decided early on that he liked fixing farm equipment a lot better than milking cows. This led to an engineering degree and eventually to Navistar, where, among other things, he tested pollution control equipment for diesel engines.
This turned out to be a punishing job because, at one point, Navistar bet on a pollution control approach that Olson believed hadn't been fully proven, and that wound up with so many defects it tanked the company's sales.
But the buyers roaming Lion Electric that day weren't much interested in Olson and his memories.
Jordan Rhodes had driven 400 miles from Somerset, Ohio, to look at two 70-foot, ventilated paint booths at the back end of the plant.
Rhodes, his father and his uncle run a company that makes metal tanks for the natural gas industry and others. This means he has to paint the tanks, and he said the booths at Lion Electric would be ideal for this purpose.
Wally Williams spent the day looking up at overhead cranes. That's because he works for American Rigging and Millwright Service in Rockford. After the auction, his job will be to pull down the cranes, transport them to the buyers' factories and reassemble them.
James Reid came hoping to buy a Toyota forklift and maybe a double-wide refrigerator for his cafeteria. He runs the machine shop at Tempco Electric Heater Corp. in Wood Dale.The closing bids on May 29 showed that Lion Electric creditors did pretty well when auctioning off equipment that can be transferred to any factory. But when it came to customized machinery for making buses, they got hammered.The big losers included the custom-made, 38-foot automated guided vehicles that hauled buses around the factory instead of traditional chain- or cable-driven assembly lines.
Lion Electric paid $150,000 apiece for 25 of them, Olson said. Two arrived a month before the factory closed, joining five others the company had never used.On May 29, the closing bid for these bus-size automated guided vehicles was $1,500, or one penny on the dollar.
And with the factory's collapse, Lion Electric customers face significant risk.
Rich Decman, superintendent of the Herscher public schools district 65 miles southwest of Chicago, said he's had no contact with the company for months, even though he owns 25 of its buses. That's half his fleet, and he's planning to keep them going for seven more years.
Electric school buses take off in Illinois, with over 200 on the road: A 'phenomenal climb'Decman said his students love the buses because they're quiet and air-conditioned. That's a big deal for a district that covers 250 square miles and where the average bus ride lasts an hour. He's also saving $6,000 per bus per year in fuel.
He said all the buses are operating regularly except one, and his mechanics can't figure out what's wrong with it. He's purchased several extra electric motors that operate the front door and the stop signs on the sides of the buses, since these break down frequently.
Decman paid for the buses and the chargers with an EPA grant of almost $10 million, so he still believes the district can't help but win financially. But he confirms he's had to fix some leaky windshields.
When asked about the longevity of the seals around the windshields, he said, 'That's why it's good news that Lion will recover to some degree,' referring to the court-supervised reorganization in Quebec. 'We are hopeful they'll be able to provide some level of service for our issues.'
Even with Lion Electric's misery and Trump's effort to eviscerate pollution controls on cars, trucks and power plants, the electric school bus is not dead.
At a March conference of state environmental officials, U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito said she expects Trump to release the other $2 billion Biden had allocated to electric school buses.
Capito, a West Virginia Republican who chairs the Senate environment committee, said she expects the president to do so before the statutory deadline of October 2026. This is partly because of court orders forcing Trump to release committed Biden-era grants.
Kevin Matthews is head of electrification for First Student Inc., the largest North American school bus operator. He still plans to deploy 30,000 electric school buses by 2035, or two-thirds of his fleet.
He said the Lion Electric shutdown in Joliet won't slow this deployment because legacy manufacturers like Blue Bird are getting better at meeting his battery-only needs with converted diesel models.
Setting aside the unpredictable impact of Trump's tariff policies, Matthews expects the total lifecycle cost of an electric school bus to match that of its diesel counterpart by 2030. At that point, he said, electric school bus sales will increase rapidly and without needing government incentives.
Even now, he said, the environmental benefits of electric school buses are the main attraction.
'Our first and foremost commitment is to the safety of the 2.7 million children who ride our school buses every day,' Matthews said. 'With zero-emission buses, we can provide a safe environment for them to be in.''
Even so, Lion Electric's demise in Joliet provides plenty of lessons for how to improve.
Baguio, formerly of Lion Electric, warned that Biden's insistence on early deployment of electric school buses in rural and tribal areas nationwide, however well-intentioned and necessary politically, placed an enormous strain on the startup's ability to distribute and service its buses.
Josipa Petrunic, who runs a Toronto nonprofit that helps cities and provinces procure transit and school buses across Canada, warned anew of the familiar dangers of government incentives — that they can shelter weak companies and entice corporate executives to place bets they'd otherwise avoid.
'When it comes to electric school buses, nobody ran as far or as fast or clearly as risky as Lion Electric,' said Petrunic, president of the Canadian Urban Transit Research and Innovation Consortium.
Petrunic still credits Lion Electric with advancing the technology and helping show that students and school administrators will flock to electric buses if given the chance. The same will soon be true, she said, of electric trucks.
'It may take 10 years for this technology to get efficient and make profit sense even in low-margin operations,' Petrunic said. 'After that, there won't be a U-turn. Nobody will be going back to diesel.'
This shift won't come soon enough for Joliet, where the Lion Electric factory stands silent but where the warehouses and petrochemical plants all around it are booming.
It won't come soon enough for Olson and his wife, Sue.
They moved into a new house just a month before the Lion Electric plant closed, and Tom's unemployment benefits are running out. He's not old enough for Medicare, so they feel they have no choice but to pay $1,300 a month for health insurance.
As he looks for work, Olson's résumé shows a lifetime spent on the front lines of cleaning up diesel engines and building electric vehicles. So far, there have been no offers.
'Everybody's really interested in that 30 years of knowledge, but they don't want it in a 60-year-old body,' Olson said. 'They want it in a 25-year-old body so they don't have to pay him squat.'

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Clean energy job training offers hope to hundreds: ‘It's changed my life'

Jordan Foley ticks off what he didn't have when he started an intensive 13-week solar job training program on the West Side: money, a bed, clothes, food. The fear that the program wouldn't be able to help him was intense, but Foley, 31, pressed on, learning the math, science and construction skills needed to wire and install rooftop solar panels. He took tests, drew up blueprints and did daily physical training: pushups, jumping jacks and solar-panel carrying exercises. And in April, his hard work paid off. He landed a job as a project administrator for a clean energy company. 'It's changed my life,' Foley said of the training program. 'It's definitely changed my life for the better.' Foley is part of the first big wave of state residents to benefit from a long-awaited network of clean energy job training hubs established under Illinois' ambitious 2021 climate law, the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act. The inclusion of job training was a major demand of environmentalists and their allies, who were determined to see Black and Latino communities share in the benefits of the clean energy economy. Eleven of 16 major training hubs statewide are now up and running, training hundreds of people. 'This moment is massive,' said Juliana Pino, interim co-executive director at the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization. 'It's really significant because before the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act, communities had to fight very hard to even have (access to job training) be respected and understood.' There were 541 students enrolled in the workforce hub training classes in mid-May, and 94 who had already graduated, according to the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity. The program is state-funded, so it's not directly affected by President Donald Trump's attacks on renewable energy, but if opportunities in the field diminish, that could hurt graduates' job prospects, advocates said. Republicans in the U.S. Senate are currently working on a tax bill that would slash clean energy tax credits for businesses, homeowners and consumers. The House passed a similar measure last month. Among those eligible for the free training, which comes with a stipend and support services, are energy workers who have lost their jobs, people who have been in the foster care system, people who live in communities disproportionately burdened by pollution, and those who live in communities with high crime and incarceration rates. 'You're bringing in hundreds — and thousands — of people into the middle class,' said A.J. Patton Sr., CEO and managing partner of 548 Enterprise, the parent group to the nonprofit 548 Foundation, which runs the workforce hub where Foley trained. 'This is not just a workforce program. This is a public safety program. If I can take somebody off the corner and hand them a solar panel, I've changed their life,' Patton said. Under a sky hazy with Canadian wildfire smoke, 30 men and women in hard hats and neon construction vests pored over solar panels mounted on mock roofs they had built themselves. The students were considering wiring configurations, screwing in cables and responding to questions from solar master trainer Sam Garrard. In about a week, when the course at the 548 Foundation's West Side workforce hub at St. Agatha Catholic Church will conclude, the students will be able to install a solar array for a house, a car or a shop, Garrard said. 'Now they're just (taking) all their book knowledge and their hands-on knowledge that they've acquired and using it,' he said. The atmosphere was intense but supportive, with trainees calling craft-instructor manager Keith Lightfoot 'coach' and responding instantly on the one occasion when he sternly uttered a single word — 'Language!' — in response to an expletive. Among the challenges: Students have to do the math for solar arrays and learn the details of electrical wiring, according to graduate Cortez Heard, now a solar installer for a local clean energy company. 'It definitely did get challenging, but as a young man, you've got to understand it's going to be tough, and if you are ready for what you want to do, it's game on,' said Heard, 27, of Chicago. Such job training opportunities are the product of a long, hard fight in Illinois — one that can be traced back to the state's previous climate law, the Future Energy Jobs Act of 2016. The 2016 law was, in many ways ahead of its time, but it delivered some tough lessons to community organizers trying to make sure that Black and brown residents got their fair share of new jobs. 'We got our tails kicked by labor,' with many jobs and opportunities going to the relatively white construction trades, said Tony Pierce, co-pastor of Heaven's View Christian Fellowship church in Peoria and board president of Illinois People's Action, a multi-issue faith and community organization in Bloomington. The next climate bill, environmentalists and organizers vowed, would be different. They partnered with churches and social service organizations to hold community meetings across the state and hammer out a vision for what the clean energy economy should look like. 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More than $30 million in climate-law funding has already been awarded to the workforce hubs, according to the state. Foley was basically homeless when a friend who works at the 548 Foundation told him about the solar job training program. He received a stipend for attending, and within a few weeks his caseworker was able to find him a small room to rent and even a brand-new bed to sleep in. 'That was a blessing,' he said. 'From there, I took full advantage of the program.' There were challenges: A relative died; not long after, another relative also died suddenly and prematurely. And then there was his fear of simply finishing the program. 'I didn't understand what could come from it,' Foley said. 'I was more afraid of, 'What happens when you have to go back to being hungry? What happens when you put in all of this energy, all of these days, and there is no (one) that wants to hire you?' I was very terrified of that.' Foley said he almost didn't take the final certification test, relenting only when Felicia Nixon-Gregory, the director of training and workforce development, sat down and talked with him. And then, when he graduated, it was into a dark December for clean energy. Winter, in general, isn't a good time to get hired for solar installer jobs in Illinois, and after President Donald Trump was elected in November, some clean energy employers took a wait-and-see approach to hiring. The 548 Foundation workforce hub solar training program initially had a job placement rate of 85%, which then dropped to about 50% and was inching back to 80% by mid-May, according to Patton. After he graduated, Foley found himself struggling to get paid what he was owed for short-term jobs. Still, he continued to work on issues he cared about, starting a youth ministry and volunteering at Prairie Guardians, an environmental nonprofit in Bloomington. And then, when he'd almost given up on a career in solar, he got a text from a case manager at his training program about a job at Atlanta's Dimension Energy with a $65,000 to $75,000 salary, a 10% sign-on bonus and unlimited PTO, or paid time off. 'I said, 'What is PTO?'' Foley recalled with a laugh. He had never heard of that. The company made him an offer, flew him to Atlanta to meet the team and put him up in a fancy hotel. He was worried that somehow the job, which is based in Chicago, wouldn't materialize, but then he got his company computer and corporate credit card. People told him, 'Don't mess this up,' he said. 'I was like, 'You're crazy if you think I'm going to mess any of this up,'' Foley recalled. There were high hopes for clean energy job training when the Illinois climate bill passed in 2021, and then there was frustration as year after year, the workforce hubs failed to materialize. 'This is one of the difficulties with having such nation-leading legislation,' said Francisco Lopez Zavala, an Illinois Environmental Council climate policy program associate. 'There was no other state in the U.S. to really model off in the efforts Illinois is leading in, with providing these trainings focused on the clean energy trade at such a scale, with the barrier reduction services that are offered,' he said. Among the issues, some state agencies didn't initially have enough staff, Lopez Zavala said, and even now, in some places 'it's still a struggle that we're continuing to work (on).' Pritzker's office did not respond to a written question about workforce hub delays but issued a statement saying in part, 'The idea for the CEJA workforce hubs originated with people from marginalized communities. The hubs are proof of the value of following environmental justice principles and ensuring impacted people have a seat at the table.' The services available to reduce barriers for workforce hub students can include child care, bus and gas cards, and assistance with housing and food. The idea is to give students the support they need to be productive and show up for class, said Crystal Overton, the 548 Foundation's director of student support services. A recent day found her buying clothes for the students' job interviews. 'I'm just thinking all the time, how are we preparing them for success?' Overton said. 'It needs to be a holistic approach, and not just education. It needs to be like Maslow's hierarchy of needs: Are they taken care of? Because if not, they're not going to come in open and receptive to the lesson.' The 11 regional workforce hubs that are already up and running include four in Chicago: the 548 Foundation hub with locations on the South and West sides, two Chicago Cook Workforce Partnership hubs on the South and West sides, and a Safer Foundation hub on the South Side. 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4 days ago

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Guest column/Josh McBroom: Naperville council shouldn't be gambling with city's energy future

Naperville is standing at a critical energy crossroads. In the coming weeks, the Naperville City Council must make decisions that will shape our electricity supply, costs and reliability for decades. The stakes couldn't be higher — and the cost of delay will be felt by every household and business in our city. Thanks to decades of foresight, Naperville owns its own electric utility and is part of the Illinois Municipal Electric Agency (IMEA), a nonprofit energy consortium of 32 communities. IMEA has delivered stable, affordable, and reliable electricity. Most cities would envy our position. But now our future with IMEA is at risk. Due to Illinois' new energy law — the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act, which mandates the full retirement of fossil fuel power generation — IMEA is asking member cities to recommit to a new long-term contract beginning when the current one expires in 2035. Nearly every member community has signed on. Naperville, despite holding the vice chair position on IMEA's board, has not. Some council members, and the public, have raised seemingly reasonable questions: Why sign a contract so far in advance? Why not ask for guarantees on future pricing or renewable energy options? Why not shop around? Here's the reality: no utility provider can guarantee rates or energy sources for 2035 and beyond. What IMEA is offering isn't certainty, it's influence. Signing now secures Naperville a seat at the table during a crucial planning period. Waiting too long could mean losing that seat — and our voice. And let's be clear: IMEA is not a bad actor in this story. It is a nonprofit governed by its member communities. IMEA employees work for us. Naperville doesn't have leverage because IMEA needs us — we have leverage because we're a partner. But IMEA must know now whether to plan for our future energy needs. For example, solar and wind farms can take up to a decade to develop and require 20-year contract commitments. Delays and indecision have already cost us valuable time. IMEA presented the new contract back in February 2024 with a deadline of April 2025. City staff recommended hiring an outside consultant — a prudent step — but the council initially declined. By the time we hired one, we were already racing the clock. But despite the costly and unnecessary delays, we have the information we need. That consultant, hired with taxpayer dollars, has recommended renewing our contract with IMEA. Our Public Utility Advisory Board, after more than 15 hours of review, did the same with a 4-3 vote. The facts are in. Expert advice has been delivered. The question now is whether the council will act. We've already missed the April deadline. IMEA is considering a final extension, possibly until Aug. 21, as a gesture of good faith to allow us to complete our due diligence. But at the May 20 council meeting, my request for a public workshop where council members could question the expert consultants directly was met with considerable resistance. The council did ultimately concede to a public discussion, but with the conditions that it be an undefined number of 'several' workshops abd a suggestion that begin in September. Pardon my skepticism, but this appears to be an intentional delay meant to blow well past the possible August deadline. But make no mistake — no decision is a decision. If Naperville tries to rejoin IMEA later, it will surely come at a steep cost. When we joined late in 2011, our 'late entry' fee was estimated at $50 million. That wasn't a penalty but to protect other communities from the financial risks of our delay. So what's really behind the hesitation? The truth is it's Naperville's historic investment in two clean coal plants through IMEA. Coal plants are already scheduled to close under the state's Climate and Equitable Jobs Act. But for some on the council, the optics are politically inconvenient. Walking away from IMEA doesn't stop the energy transition. What it does do is remove us from the room where the future is being planned. And let's not forget, Naperville is on the verge of paying off bonds related to our current power infrastructure, which still makes up 20% of our electric costs. Walking away now would be like paying off your mortgage and then handing over your house keys. Outside of IMEA, communities are already facing the reality of Illinois' energy transition: higher rates, shrinking supply and blackout threats. If we fail to act, Naperville could face the same — or worse. This is not about fossil fuels vs. renewables. That decision has already been made in Springfield. This is about whether Naperville will have a voice in how that transition happens or whether we'll gamble our energy future on wishful thinking. The risks of inaction are real. The costs of delay are growing. It's time to act based on facts — not politics — and secure the best possible future for Naperville.

Yahoo

5 days ago

• Yahoo

ICE field director defends agents after ramped-up enforcement, arrests of US citizens at Chicago immigration court protest

The head of Chicago's U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office Tuesday defended the conduct and decorum of federal agents who have ramped up arrests of undocumented immigrants, which has incited clashes with elected officials, immigration advocates and protesters. On Monday, three U.S. citizens were detained by ICE after allegedly assaulting an officer in Chicago, according to a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson. In an interview Tuesday with the Tribune, Samuel Olson, ICE's Chicago field office director, explained that 'the last thing (the agents) want to do is to have to arrest somebody who's assaulting them or impeding them from doing their jobs.' ICE released all three protesters Monday afternoon. Asked whether the protesters were charged, Olson said the arrests of the protesters are under investigation by the U.S. attorney's office for the Northern District of Illinois. 'It's a hard enough job that they have to worry about who the target is that they're arresting, whether that person might be assaultive or combative,' Olson said. The arrests of U.S. citizens caught immigration advocates by surprise, as pushback against increased immigration enforcement has only grown across the country. On Tuesday, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, a mayoral candidate, was arrested for allegedly 'assaulting law enforcement and impeding a federal officer' at immigration court, according to DHS. The arrest was captured on video that quickly went viral on social media. On Sunday, President Donald Trump sent out a directive to ramp up deportations further in Democrat-run cities. Immigration enforcement has increased at courts and offices in Chicago in recent weeks, with two immigrants from Colombia detained on Father's Day for showing up to their check-in appointments. At a City Hall news conference Tuesday, Mayor Brandon Johnson delivered an implicit warning against Trump's latest threat to crack down on Chicago demonstrators next. 'I think it's important that the president respects the Constitution. If you're asking me if this president is going to work with city leaders, it's clear that he's not interested in doing that,' Johnson told reporters when asked if he's heard from the federal government. Olson said the ICE agents were acting in their rights to arrest the protesters Monday because they are law enforcement officers who are sworn to uphold administrative immigration law, and who can also enforce federal criminal law. He emphasized that agents undergo quarterly training on defensive tactics and firearms operations. Many agents hail from Chicago or the surrounding area, and Olson noted they 'have deep ties to the community.' 'They're trying to ensure public safety of the same communities that they're living in,' he said. The American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois decried ICE's arrest of U.S. citizens. 'The presence of unidentified, federal officers conducting arrests and detentions — while heavily armed — undermines the public's ability to ensure that law enforcement is acting in a legal and constitutional fashion and runs the risk of further violence,' Ed Yonhka, ACLU's director of communications and public policy, said in a statement. On Monday around 9 a.m., about a dozen protesters stood outside immigration court at 55 E. Monroe St., according to Bianca Paiz, who was on her way to work. ICE agents entering the building, then started to take the three individuals into custody, Paiz recounted. The immigration agents wore masks and didn't identify themselves, she said. Paiz said the protesters did not resist arrest, and that the agents handcuffed them before forcing them into an unmarked vehicle. As someone who has participated in civil disobedience, she called the arrests 'alarming.' ICE transported the protesters to a different federal building on West Ida B. Wells Drive in the Loop. Two of the individuals were released about three hours later, according to protesters. The third protester was released from the building around 5 p.m. after worried family members alerted local officials about the detention. In a statement, Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said ICE officers 'are facing a 413% increase in assaults against them.' 'ICE and our federal law enforcement partners will continue to enforce the law,' she said. 'And if you lay a hand on a law enforcement officer, you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.' While the last protester was detained, family members waited outside the federal court building in the Loop for hours. Their calls weren't going through, and they weren't sure if ICE had provided legal assistance. They declined to share their names until they had spoken to an attorney. Later that afternoon, two members of Mayor Johnson's staff arrived to offer support. At one point, the protester's family attempted to speak with the security guards inside the building, but they were told to leave. As the day wore on, they stood on the sidewalk outside, waiting for news. After the protester came out of the building, they cried and hugged. The protester declined to comment further about the arrest. ICE's Chicago field office director, Olson, said Tuesday that agents do not intend to arrest U.S. citizens. He declined to speculate on future enforcement actions, such as sending the National Guard to Chicago to assist with immigration enforcement. Over the course of the 20-minute interview, he defended agents who wore masks during immigration enforcement actions, saying some fear for their safety and the safety of their families, and went over the enforcement removal operations he oversees in the Chicago region. The ICE field office covers Wisconsin, Kentucky, Indiana, Missouri and Kansas. 'There's a lot of hate being spewed at my officers,' Olson said. 'It's a little frustrating.' A 20-year ICE veteran, Olson said he's never seen so much public doubt about the agency's legitimacy. He emphasized that officers receive extensive training — including basic Spanish courses — and said certified interpreters are available to explain individuals' rights. Allegations of misconduct are handled by ICE's Office of Professional Responsibility and may be escalated to the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General, he said. Olson said his office oversees a 'multitude of targets' across several states, with a focus on detaining individuals who pose safety risks or have final deportation orders. He emphasized that immigration detention is not punitive but meant to ensure court appearances, noting that detention space is limited and costly. ICE also coordinates with the Department of Justice and Citizenship and Immigration Services. 'When we're out there, some of the stuff that we're doing is oversimplified, and there's a lot more nuance to it,' he said. 'And there's just a lot bigger things going on in the background.' Chicago Tribune's Alice Yin and Caroline Kubzansky contributed.