Former Chicago Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot is now being sued by JPMorgan Chase Bank after letting her $11,000 credit card bill go unpaid for 17 months. Reports have popped up in the media saying that Lightfoot, who has the crown for being the only Democratic mayor in the city to not be reelected in four decades, was subpoenaed at her $900,000 home in Chicago in October 2025.
Chase decided in March of the same year to consider her $11,000 bill as a charge-off, however, her last payment of $5,000 was made on August 7, 2024, according to bank records. Lightfoot has had the card with the bank since 2005. Despite claiming she earned an income of $402,414 in 2021, the former mayor is having difficulty paying her bills.
Records indicate that Lightfoot took out $210,000 in early distributions from her retirement fund, along with the $216,000 yearly salary she made while serving in office. Since her first and only term as mayor ended, Lightfoot has been working as an academic and consultant. Her former roles as a federal attorney and high-powered lawyer helped her land work investigating alleged mismanagement and fraud in a south suburb of the city.
According to NewsNation, Lightfoot unveiled a plan last week to put together a list of allegations of wrongdoing supposedly carried out by federal immigration officials in Chicago. Another report from Breitbart revealed that the former mayor not only struggles with her own personal finances, but with those she was in charge of during her public service. As she was leaving office in 2024, the city was suffering from an $85 million budget shortfall.
Some of the jobs Lightfoot has held after her disastrous turn as Chicago mayor have included time at the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy, the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, and even Harvard. Lightfoot’s recent project, the “ICE Accountability Project,” is designed to be an online repository for folks to share and document the encounters they have had with immigration officers since the Trump administration launched “Operation Midway Blitz” to crack down on illegal immigration in September 2025.
The question on many conservatives’ mind about this pet project is where Lightfoot is getting the money to run it. She has revealed that it is funded through donations made by private donors, but has refused to disclose the names of those who have contributed. The site is hosted on servers located outside of the United States to allegedly avoid censorship.
Not only does financial data indicate that Lightfoot ran the city into the ground financially, but that her policies also helped usher in a massive crime wave, making Chicago an even greater danger to its residents. The “Miracle Mile” shopping center also experienced devastating consequences during her time in office, reaching a staggering 30% vacancy rate due to a long string of looting incidents.
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Lightfoot also found herself under heavy criticism for ripping into the “overwhelming whiteness” of Chicago’s media. She announced in 2021 that she would only be giving one-on-one interviews to minority journalists in an apparent attempt to correct the “racism” she saw as bias in local media outlets, according to the New York Post.
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