Chicago City Wire

Brian McCann is breathing a sigh of relief after his brother’s alleged killer was in custody and extradited back to Chicago. 

Saul Chavez, the alleged killer of Will “Dennis” McCann, was originally arrested and held for the June 8, 2011 crime before being released due to Chicago’s sanctuary city policy after which he fled. Chavez’s arrest and deportation 11 years later are largely due to the efforts McCann engaged in to bring his brother’s killer to justice. McCann said Cook County State’s Attorney will be prosecuting Chavez but that the court system was responsible for his release instead of having him detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). He also said U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) did not embrace the cause. 

“I like to think my I letters and emails and phone calls and all the rest was helpful,” McCann told Chicago’s Morning Answer. “They probably won't agree, but I did what I did, including bothering the senior senator (Durbin) from Illinois who said he would look into it. I never got any feedback and I did get a call from a staff person and she was useless. He walked out of a hearing I gave in D.C. That's interested he was. But I don't know. We filed a lawsuit with Judicial Watch that didn't go anywhere because Cook County court system, it was a mandamus.” 

McCann said that they were after a just process during this long period of waiting for justice to be served.

“We weren't looking for any money," he said. "We were just looking for staff to comply with the ICE detainers. And Judicial Watch, to its credit, did their due diligence and through a FOIA request, got all the data. This is going back seven or eight years, and how many ICE detainers were denied in Cook County and it's in the hundreds. That was just over one year. I can only imagine it's in the tens of thousands in recent years. If I were a mayoral candidate, I would dig out those numbers and use them in this campaign because this is if Judicial Watch's numbers projected forward are accurate and I have no reason to believe they're not. There's probably a well over 10,000 detainers that have been denied by Cook County.” 

Chicago’s Morning Answer host Dan Proft did the math nothing that “that's 10,000 people in this country illegally, who've committed crimes. ICE wants them detained and Cook County won't acquiesce.” 

Chavez’s blood alcohol level was reported to have been around four times the legal limit when he struck and killed William “Dennis” McCann in 2011 at Kedzie Avenue in Logan Square. Chavez fled the scene on foot but was detained by an off-duty police officer, and at the time of the incident, Chavez had recently completed DUI, according to The Davis Law Group. He spent much of his time on the lam on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.

McCann long sought to bring Chavez to justice since his brother’s alleged killer was freed from Cook County. In fact, he became a member of Advocates for Victims of Illegal Alien Crimes (AVIAC) and has since helped many other families in similar situations. Over Thanksgiving day weekend he received the notice that Chavez had been arrested and was being deported, the Center for Immigration Studies reported.

In recent months a flood of immigrants has been pouring into the area as part of Texas's strategy to relieve some of the pressure of President Joe Biden’s “Open Borders” policy. Chicago Mayor Lightfoot had earlier declared that she would welcome the busloads of illegal immigrants arriving from Texas, which had also sent similar buses to New York and Washington, D.C., each of which had taken in about 8,000 people. However, given 15th Ward Democrat Chicago Alderman Raymond Lopez’s admission, it appears the next part of Lightfoot’s plan is non-existent. In recent months, buses operated by the Chicago Regional Transit authority have also dropped off groups of illegal immigrants in suburban municipalities where they are said to be staying “indefinitely.”