ABOUT

On September 2, 2025, President Trump posted to Truth Social: "Chicago is the worst and most dangerous city in the World, by far." The statement was false. Chicago doesn't rank in the top 10 U.S. cities for violent crime rates. But that wasn't the point. The point was to stoke fear and manufacture consent for what followed: ICE raids, threatened National Guard deployment, and a campaign of intimidation against one of the most immigrant-rich cities in America.

As a designer and Chicagoan, I felt the weight of that moment. I also felt something else: the absurdity of it. The bluster. The cartoonish overreach. So I did what designers do. I went to work.

I took his exact words. I set them in Helvetica Neue, all caps, black and white, with by far in a fancy script to highlight the absurdity. Above it, a globe marked with the four stars of the Chicago flag. If you're going to be insulted, you might as well wear it with style. His exact words, stripped of its venom and handed back to the people it was meant to wound.

I posted it and people wanted one. I hadn't planned to sell anything, and I was not about to profit from a crisis that was devastating real families. So I asked for a donation instead. $25 gets you a shirt. All proceeds go to ICIRR, the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, one of the leading organizations in Chicago fighting for the full and equal participation of immigrants and refugees in civic life.

We sold 35 shirts, locally, nationally, and abroad and donated $400 to directly to ICIRR.