According to city records, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson threw $639.6 million in tax dollars at illegal migrants between 2022 and 2024.
The city’s inspector general’s office reportedly found that Mayor Johnson dedicated the nearly $640 million to care for illegals between August of 2022 and the end of 2024, according to Chicago activist Corey Brooks, who revealed the price tag in an op ed about Chicago’s failing schools published by Fox News.
Brooks logically wondered why that $640 million was not dedicated to Chicago’s schools instead of going to the comfort and aid of illegal aliens who broke America’s immigration laws and flooded the Windy City. Especially since the Chicago schools had a $732 million budget deficit forcing wide-spread layoffs.
“I am a pastor. I believe in compassion. But it is morally wrong to assign so many of our taxpayer dollars to noncitizens who came to the United States and are now receiving taxpayer-funded services in Chicago,” Brooks wrote.
Forbes Magazine publisher Steve Forbes was also flabbergasted by the dichotomy over the spending priorities.
“Chicago politicians found $640 million for migrant services while their own public schools face a $732 million budget deficit. Kids are struggling to read and do basic math, teachers are being laid off, and special-needs students are losing support,” he wrote, adding, “There is always money for what politicians consider a priority. Apparently, educating Chicago’s children isn’t one of them.”
The absurdity of throwing hundreds of millions at illegal migrants while the city’s own children get sent to the back of the line are horrible optics, granted. But the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) are not all that virtuous, either.
Costs for Chicago’s schools continue to soar even as enrollment craters. In 2025, the CPS had 325,000 students enrolled, but that was a drop of more than 70,000 students from a decade prior, ProPublica reported. And officials expect that in a few more years, the enrollment numbers could dip down to 300,000.
Despite the cratering enrollment, CPS demanded a record $10.11 billion budget for 2026, the Illinois Policy Institute reported.
But even with these billions flowing into the district’s coffers, Chicago’s students are failing. Most kids aren’t proficient in reading or math. State numbers show that only 43 percent of kids in the third grade through the eighth were proficient in reading, and an even lower 27 percent were at grade level in math skills, according to Illinois Report Card.
And that’s only if the students bother to show up to class. In 2025 it was reported that 40.1 percent were chronically absent, and missed at least ten percent of the school year.
Still, even though the CPS is not optimal, the fact that Mayor Brandon Johnson threw nearly $640 million at illegal aliens instead of his schools is a crime.
Schools across the country have faced serious pressures thanks to immigration issues. Not only have they been inundated with illegal aliens speaking foreign languages in the classroom, many school districts have been using H-1B visas to import teachers, as well.
The H-1B visa program is draining the incentive for complacent politicians to fix the broken K-12 system used by millions of ordinary Americans, says Daron Acemoglu, a famous economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The educated elite have “given up on the education of Americans because they think that they can fill any skill gap with importing those skills [via the H-1B program], whether they are nurses, whether they’re doctors, whether they’re programmers. That’s the problem,” Acemoglu told Tyler Cowen, a zealously pro-migration economist at George Mason University.
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