Brandon Johnson, Chicago's Democratic mayor, this week kicked off the Unity Initiative, a program that's partnering with churches to help migrants — many of whom have been forced to sleep on streets outside Chicago police stations — find housing and access social services. 

And he denounced conservative pundits and politicians trying to sow division between the arriving migrants and Chicago residents. Right-wing extremists have “targeted Democratically ran cities” — many, like Chicago, run by people of color — to sow “disruption and chaos,” Johnson said.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said he "inherited" the Windy City’s migrant crisis from his predecessor, former Mayor Lori Lightfoot, during a press conference touting construction of the city’s first government-run migrant tent encampment. 

"Look, the international crisis that I inherited six months ago, I’ve made it very clear that we are going to make sure that we remove people out of police districts: women, children who are living on floors and sleeping outside, that we’re going to create spaces that provide more dignity," Johnson said Tuesday. 

When Mayor Brandon Johnson introduced his 2024 budget, he noted the city had for too long balanced such spending plans on the backs of working people and vowed to end the practice.

A “$95 city sticker or a $100 parking ticket weighs more heavily on the family that earns $30,000 a year versus a family that earns $150,000 a year,” he said, and the city had “relied too long on a tax structure that heavily burdens our lowest income residents, and is too reliant on property taxes, fees and fines and rates.”

Brandon Johnson’s first budget was highly anticipated. The mayor’s supporters and skeptics alike hoped to glean the most revealing signs to date of how he will govern over the coming four years.

As Chicago sports fans say all too often, wait until next year.

Days before he was sworn in as Chicago’s mayor in 2011, Rahm Emanuel unveiled a series of goals from his transition team, including plans for the first 100 days.

Lori Lightfoot similarly held a pre-inaugural news conference in 2019 detailing her transition committee’s recommendations and her aspirations for the administration to come.

Since winning the April 4 election to become mayor, Brandon Johnson has taken a much different approach to the change from candidate to mayor.

After hundreds of teenagers and young adults descended on the Loop in downtown Chicago over the weekend, destroying cars and brawling in the streets, mayor-elect Brandon Johnson cautioned against “demonizing” the vandals.

It “is not constructive to demonize youth who have otherwise been starved of opportunities in their own communities,” Johnson said in a statement released on Sunday.