The Briefing
- UIC's Great Cities Institute traces $1.26 billion in retail and restaurant spending, plus $107 million in local sales-tax revenue, that disappeared from Cook County's economy over roughly a year of heightened enforcement.
- Trips that once carried immigrant households to stores and restaurants outside their own neighborhoods fell by about 9% for retail and 10% for restaurants — a slide that began within weeks and never reversed.
- The effect hit hardest outside city limits: suburban cross-community retail visits fell 12.8%, more than double the 6.2% drop recorded inside Chicago.
- Little Village and Pilsen business owners report losses as steep as 60% to 70% — well above the county-wide figures — a gap the study's own authors say their data can't fully explain.
A new dollar figure has landed on something Cook County shopkeepers have argued for nearly two years: federal immigration enforcement doesn't just frighten immigrant families, it empties cash registers across the county, whether or not the business owner is Latino. Researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago's Great Cities Institute calculate that $1.26 billion in retail and restaurant spending simply never happened over the past year, as households in neighborhoods with large Latin American-born populations stopped making the routine trips that once carried them into stores and restaurants elsewhere in the county. On 26th Street in Little Village, merchants say the number still doesn't capture what they've watched happen to their own sales.
How Researchers Arrived at $1.26 Billion
The report, titled "Hunkering Down," leans on weekly, anonymized cellphone location data rather than sales figures or surveys. Researchers didn't simply measure how busy Little Village or Pilsen looked on a given afternoon — they tracked something more specific: how often residents of neighborhoods with large Latin American-born populations left those neighborhoods to shop or eat elsewhere in Cook County. Those "cross-community" errands, as the authors call them, had long been routine — a family driving out to a suburban mall, a Saturday dinner across town. The Great Cities Institute presented its findings at a Tuesday news conference, where Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle and Chicago CRED's Arne Duncan argued the losses reach well beyond the immigrant communities most directly targeted by enforcement.
A Pattern That Set In Within Weeks — and Never Let Up
The decline traces back almost exactly to President Trump's second inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025, months before the federal enforcement campaign known as "Operation Midway Blitz" formally began in Chicago that September. Report co-author Matthew Wilson told NPR the drop-off never bounced back the way an ordinary dip in consumer spending might. "It's not that it recovered after a year," Wilson said. Notably, the researchers found that visits to businesses inside high-immigrant neighborhoods held essentially steady — the missing spending didn't resurface closer to home. It simply stopped happening.
Little Village's Storefronts Tell a Steeper Story
That distinction is cold comfort on 26th Street, where the countywide averages look nothing like what shop owners describe. Michelle Macias, whose family has run Carniceria y Taqueria Aguascalientes for half a century, told ABC7 Chicago that the corridor lost the out-of-town weekend crowd that once anchored her sales, leaving revenue down 60% to 70% over the past year. "People tell us all the time it's because they're scared," Macias said. Jennifer Aguilar, who leads the Little Village Chamber of Commerce, has said the retailers, restaurants and barbershops most dependent on that foot traffic have had to cut hours or lay off staff to stay open.
Pilsen and the Corridor-Wide Squeeze
The slowdown wasn't confined to Little Village, or to the months after Midway Blitz formally launched on Sept. 8, 2025. A year earlier — before that operation even had a name — Crain's Chicago Business had already found business owners across several of the city's Latino commercial corridors reporting revenue down 20% to 50%, even as the Illinois Hispanic Chamber of Commerce pointed to Latino consumers' outsized role in the region's economy. That chamber's foundation has since opened a recovery fund of its own: 52 grants of $5,000 apiece for small businesses in neighborhoods including Pilsen, Little Village, Brighton Park and Back of the Yards, meant to help owners cover the gap enforcement fear has left in their books.
What a Foot-Traffic Study Can't See
UIC's authors are candid about the limits of their own numbers. The mobility data behind the $1.26 billion figure doesn't capture cash-based or home-based businesses, including the street vendors who line 26th Street and Pilsen's commercial blocks and who, by many accounts, have been hit even harder than the storefronts the study measured. That gap may help explain why Little Village's and Pilsen's own estimates run so far above the county-wide numbers. Report co-author José Miguel Acosta-Córdova told reporters the dollar totals leave out costs that never generate a receipt at all — a delayed doctor's visit, medicine put off, a family's daily routine rebuilt around avoiding the street. "Those costs do not show up on a sales receipt," Acosta-Córdova said.
A County-Wide Bill, Not Just a Neighborhood One
Wilson's larger point is that the missing spending isn't confined to the neighborhoods being watched most closely. The falloff was sharpest not on 26th Street but in Cook County's suburbs, where cross-community retail visits fell 12.8%, more than double the 6.2% decline recorded within Chicago itself, according to the report's own breakdown. Preckwinkle framed that suburban gap as evidence that immigration enforcement carries a cost for the entire county's tax base, not only for the households living in fear of it — a point Duncan echoed at Tuesday's release.
