What a year it’s been.
Oak Park faced a bevy of political challenges in 2025, as national and regional crises played out time and again inside village limits. Oak Park’s ethos as a progressive, welcoming village has been put to the test, as have the ambitions of the village’s leaders.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of memorable moments in this memorable year for Oak Park news. But it should serve as a moment for reflection, to examine the trials of this year in preparation for what looks certain to be a busy 2026.
ICE in the village
Federal immigration agents’ presence in Oak Park and its neighboring communities presented the greatest challenge to community leaders this year.
For weeks at a time, Oak Park residents found themselves glued to cellphone videos showing masked federal agents making arrests in the shadows of the old growth trees that line Oak Park’s quiet, residential streets. But those Oak Park scenes represented just a fraction of the impact that ramped-up immigration operations had on the Chicagoland region this year, as the dockets of federal district courts were quickly enveloped by challenges to the legality of immigration agency actions.
President Donald Trump’s ongoing “Operation Midway Blitz” has promised to rid Chicagoland of dangerous criminals in the country illegally. But it’s been wildly unpopular among Oak Park’s overwhelmingly liberal citizenry, some of whom readily took to carrying plastic warning whistles and tailing immigration enforcement vans as they drove through town.
The village’s elected leaders also didn’t flinch while calling the operation a “fascist” power grab spreading fear and violating constitutional rights.
“I’m here to unequivocally state that ICE is the aggressor,” said Oak Park Village President Vicki Scaman at a press conference in October. “There is no emergency here, we do not need ICE or the National Guard. What I need from our federal government as a municipal village president is dollars for housing, mental health, physical health, support for transgender individuals, school programs and food.”
The Oak Park village board voted to abruptly cancel its contract with license plate reader provider Flock Safety over ICE and Border Patrol’s access to surveillance data.
In the fall, ICE and Border Patrol agents were regularly spotted throughout the Oak Park area. Wednesday Journal reported on ICE questioning a caregiver outside of the Wonder Works children’s museum, ICE’s arrest of a laborer near Whittier Elementary during the school’s morning drop off, a blitz of ICE activity throughout the village on Saturday, Nov. 8, and many other instances.
ICE and Border Patrol’s Chicago detainees were usually brought to a detention facility in nearby Broadview, which became the site of near constant protests and allegations of poor treatment. Those protests have resulted in arrests for a growing number of Oak Parkers, including a few elected leaders.
Oak Park Township Trustee Juan Muñoz was arrested at a protest at the detention facility on Oct. 4. Oak Park Village Trustee Brian Straw was charged alongside several other progressive area politicians in an ongoing federal conspiracy case tied to a protest at the facility in September.
At another protest, federal agents arrested Oak Parker Paul Ivery, an OPRF cafeteria worker who lives with a serious intellectual disability, on assault charges. The government dropped the charges against Ivery after reviewing records related to his disability, but not before keeping him in custody for several days at the Federal Bureau of Prison’s Metropolitan Correctional Center and seeking to impose parole conditions that would have banned him from interacting with students at his job.
Ivery had walked from his Oak Park home to the Broadview protest to show support for local law enforcement officers he felt had been disrespected by ICE agents.
Judge Gabriel A. Fuentes read a letter of support Scaman penned for Ivery into the record. It included comments from Oak Park Police Chief Shatonya Johnson that painted Ivery as one of the OPPD’s most loyal supporters.
“Our officers know him as the kid who stops and salutes when he sees them on the street,” the letter said. “Paul contributes to all that makes Oak Park special. He’s a beloved member of our community.”
This story is sure to continue its relevance in 2026, with Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino making an appearance on Harlem Avenue just last week.
Police station plays
Village leaders spent much of 2025 gearing up for a generational facilities project: building the OPPD a new police station and renovating Oak Park Village Hall.
The village has recognized that its police force has needed a new space for over a decade at this point, as the OPPD has continued to operate out of Village Hall’s basement. The out-of-step facility is regularly cited as a hinderance to the department’s officer recruiting efforts.
Over the years, the police station conversations gave way to an acknowledgment that Village Hall itself, a terminally funky architectural tribute to “open government,” also needed an overhaul to function as a modern municipal office building.
The idea was that the OPPD would get a new standalone building on the village-owned green space just south of Village Hall, while Village Hall would undergo significant renovations aimed at improving accessibility and functionality.
The municipal campus project became one of the most obvious points of contention in Oak Park’s 2025 Village President’s election between Incumbent Vicki Scaman and Trustee Ravi Parakkat.
While the two agreed on the need for a new police station, Parakkat slammed the Village Hall renovations as expensive and unnecessary.
“I’m not talking about the police facility, that is absolutely required,” Parakkat said at a Wednesday Journal candidate forum in February. “The village hall is a facility where the average Oak Parker spends less than five minutes a year. To spend $150 million on that, and $150 million is just a conservative estimate. By the time you look at financing costs, interests, location or the logistical shifts required to move people to a new location and bring them back it is going to push close to $200 million and we don’t have a good handle on that. To sit here in 2025 and not have a handle on that and not know how it’s going to impact our residents, that’s poor governance.”
Scaman said that Parakkat was misleading the voters about the ultimate cost of the project, maintaining that the cost wouldn’t come anywhere near the $200 million that he referenced in speeches and campaign materials.
“Putting out this false information is truly not how you want your village president to operate,” Scaman said at the Wednesday Journal forum.
Scaman ultimately secured a comfortable reelection victory on April 1, but news on the future of the police station and Village Hall projects came slowly. Multiple dates for a Village Board discussion on the project appeared on agenda calendars, then never materialized.
It wasn’t until November when the board openly discussed the project again, in a conversation that represented a major shift in the potential shape of the project.
Rather than building a brand-new police station, the village was now angling to buy the U.S. Bank building that had been put up for sale a few blocks away from Village Hall on Madison Street with the plan to convert it into a police station. In that meeting, the board approved the potential use of eminent domain to acquire the building, if necessary.
At another meeting a few weeks later, the board voted to officially endorse the U.S. Bank plan as its preferred way forward for the police station project.
The village has not reached an agreement to put the branch under village ownership, and Oak Park leaders will spend much of 2026 looking to put these plans into action.
Funding threats
Federal budget cuts also presented significant challenges in Oak Park.
In May, Oak Park was included on a U.S. Department of Homeland Security list of immigration “sanctuary cities” that were said to be set to lose access to federal grant money due to having local policies against complying with federal immigration agents. The village’s inclusion on that list followed warnings by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy that cities with sanctuary policies would lose out on federal infrastructure funding.
Oak Park leaders responded to the funding threats in a statement.
“Every resident, regardless of immigration status, is entitled to access village services without fear of deportation or other immigration-related consequences,” local officials said. “The village will continue to uphold the principle of confidentiality for residents and ensure that any personal information shared with the village is not disclosed to federal immigration enforcement agencies, except in cases where disclosure is mandated by law.”
While those public sector funding threats have yet to materialize as was once feared by village leaders, the impact of federal spending cuts have been felt sharply by Oak Park’s nonprofits.
Housing Forward, the main homelessness services provider in Cook County’s western suburbs, felt the impact of the Trump presidency throughout the year as the new administrations brought ideological changes to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Those changes included billions in proposed cuts to national housing assistance programs, with the administration’s seeking a 43% decrease in funding for federal rent assistance that serves 9 million Americans. Shortly before the end of the year, HUD leaders told Housing Forward and its peer organizations that it would put a hard cap on how much grant money could be spent on long-term housing.
Long term housing is the organization’s main way of supporting people experiencing chronic homelessness, according to Housing Forward CEO Lynda Schueler.
“It’s not just a loss of funding. It’s also a loss of permanent supportive housing as our answer and as a demonstrated and proven solution to end homelessness,” Schueler said. “This is a really hard pill to swallow right now.”
The caps were ultimately not put in place following legal challenges and resistance from emergency housing providers.
Beyond Hunger, the area’s premier food service agency, said it served more clients than it had ever before amid panic caused by the administration’s plans to halt SNAP benefits during the government shutdown. The agency provided food to over 1,200 individuals during the first weekend in November, the most it had ever served in one weekend in its nearly 50 years of existence, according to Beyond Hunger CEO Jennie Hull.
“In my many years working in the food insecurity field, I have never been more concerned about families struggling with hunger,” she said. “Food is not something families can ‘wait out.’ Our neighbors who depend on SNAP to afford groceries each month will see their benefits disappear quickly and completely. For some, that will happen within days. Facing heightened food insecurity, especially during the holidays, is an unfathomable situation that will become a reality for many.”
In at least one case, the funding cuts put a wrench into work Oak Parkers were doing to help people on the other side of the globe. The blanket freeze that Trump and his then-ally Elon Musk put on USAID funding killed a contract that Oak Park-based nonprofit Women’s Global Education Project had signed to run a library and computer center in rural Kenya. The agency had just opened up the facility, before learning through a memo that the project would no longer receive funding support, according to agency leader Amy Maglio.
“Women’s Global does not want to have to close the doors of our newly built and equipped library and computer center — it provides access to books and technology to over 10,000 community members and is the only one of its kind in the whole county,” Maglio told Wednesday Journal. “Without WGEP’s USAID funded program a generation of students will be illiterate, are likely to drop out of school, girls will undergo FGM, become mothers in their early teens and the cycle of poverty continues.”
According to agency publications, the library has survived the impact of the USAID freeze through donations.
