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Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot is getting savaged online after pictures of what appeared to be homeless encampments inside O’Hare Airport have gone viral, with many users outraged over safety in the city.
Lightfoot has claimed that she cares about the safety of Chicago residents.
"Everyone in our city deserves to be safe because they are safe," she said last Thursday.
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"Everyone in our city deserves to be safe because they are safe," Mayor Lightfoot said last week. (Jose M. Osorio/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
But journalists and political commentators called out the mayor of the Windy City for allowing O’Hare, one of the world's major airports, to reportedly become a homeless encampment.
Journalist Miranda Devine wrote that Chicago’s flagship airport is in shambles: "Chicago's O'Hare Airport is a squalid homeless encampment."
"But the Lightfoot regime won’t change a thing," Devine added, sharing the mayor's "trauma-informed" strategy.
"‘Outreach is not enforcement and [our department] will continue to respond to community needs through trauma-informed, strengths-based approaches,'" Lightfoot's office reportedly told The New York Post.
Republican congressional candidate Jack Lombardi II remembered better days in the city. "A once beautiful city, Chicago has become a boarded up, crime infested, and filthy city under Lightfoot's Progressivism."
"SMH," he wrote, sharing a link to a Daily Mail story about the "homeless encampments" in O'Hare Airport.
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Another user argued that the videos of homeless encampments inside the airport "perfectly sums up Joe Biden, Mayor Pete and Lori Lightfoot’s failed leadership. The United States of America is so much better than this."
NBC Bay Area reporter Scott McGrew replied that homelessness has been a problem for years, in an apparent attempt to defend the mayor.
"As a Chicago native with parents still there, I have been in and out of O'Hare monthly for decades. It's been an issue for many years."
Lightfoot’s administration has also faced criticism for pushing to house migrants in an abandoned Kmart building, with some residents expressing concerns about the "safety" of the local community.
The mayor is facing a tough re-election fight as support for her policies wanes, according to one recent poll from WBEZ, Chicago Sun-Times, NBC5, and Telemundo Chicago.
The mayor is facing a tough ren-election fight as support for her policies wanes, according to one recent poll from WBEZ, Chicago Sun-Times, NBC5, and Telemundo Chicago. (Terrence Antonio James/Chicago Tribune)
Seventy-one percent of respondents to the poll said they were concerned that the city was heading in the wrong direction.
Fox News Digital has reached out to the mayor’s office for additional comment but has yet to hear back.
Fox News’ Kyle Morris contributed to this report.