Communities are on edge as the long-discussed arrival of federal law enforcement and Ice agents to Chicago is reportedly set to begin in the coming days, marking the potential start of a contentious period of federal policing in the Democratic-led midwestern city.
Donald Trump reaffirmed his commitment to send federal troops to the city as an effort to curb violence and homelessness on Tuesday, calling it a “hellhole” and saying that, though troops would be headed to Chicago regardless, the city’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, and the Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, should be calling him personally to ask for his help.
If that were to happen, Chicago would be the second US city to receive national guard troops after Trump declared a national crime emergency and deployed about 800 troops to Washington DC in August.
“We’re going in,” Trump said about Chicago. “I didn’t say when, [but] we’re going in.”
The statement came in the wake of Chicago’s Labor Day weekend, during which nearly 60 people were shot and at least eight killed, which some experts have said could be used by the Trump administration as further motivation for sending troops. Though the shootings marked the city’s deadliest weekend this summer, the overall number of violent crimes has continued to drop in recent years and has remained at its lowest levels in the last four decades. Murders committed from June to August totaled 123, the city’s lowest number in 60 years, according to a WBEZ-Chicago analysis.
Both Johnson and Pritzker have routinely rejected the popular rightwing political view of Chicago being overly crime-ridden and in need of federal help. And this week, local leadership began preparing the Chicago populace for federal troops, which are expected to descend upon the city as early as this weekend, according to the New York Times. At the end of August, Johnson passed the Protecting Chicago initiative, an executive order with sweeping measures aimed at limiting Trump’s influence on local law enforcement.
Though the president floated the idea of sending troops to states such as Louisiana first, reports suggest Chicago is still primed to be the next city to receive the national guard, whether local leaders agree with the actions or not.
An advance team of at least 30 agents is currently undergoing crowd control and flash grenade training at Naval Station Great Lakes north of Chicago, and 230 agents, most of whom work for Customs and Border Protection, are being sent to Chicago from Los Angeles, sources told the Chicago Sun-Times. During a news conference on Tuesday, Pritzker also expressed concern that Ice agents will target Mexican Independence Day events this month. The El Grito Chicago Mexican Independence Day festival, scheduled for this weekend in downtown Chicago’s Grant Park, was also postponed on Thursday due to concerns of Ice operations.
Among residents who are chafing at the prospect of federal troops coming to Chicago is Edwin Eisendrath, a former member of the Chicago city council who served in the Department of Housing and Urban Development under President Bill Clinton and was the CEO of the Chicago Sun-Times from 2017 to 2019. Eisendrath, who currently hosts a progressive political radio show from Chicago’s Lincoln Square neighborhood on the city’s North Side, believes if the goal is to lower crime in Chicago, deploying the national guard won’t work.
To him, there is a “historic lack of trust in the police” among Chicagoans that will make any actions taken in the name of Trump’s purported intent to lower crime ineffective, especially without taking steps to remove guns and other weapons brought over from neighboring red states with looser gun laws, or funding violence-prevention programming.
That, coupled with Chicago’s history in labor and organizing, may mean different results than from what Trump is expecting.
“If you think of the civic action you’ve seen over history, whether that’s the Pullman strikes a century ago, or Haymarket, or the early union movement, or what we did in the civil rights movement, or the organizing for the Women’s March, Chicagoans are organized. So we aren’t helpless,” Eisendrath said.
There’s also Sjonia Harper, who works in software sales and has lived in Bronzeville, a historically Black neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, since 2006. Despite the overwhelming outside perception of Chicago’s predominantly Black and brown neighborhoods such as Bronzeville being plagued by violence, Harper said that crime has largely not been a major concern for her.
“Am I scared to walk my dog? No. I walk my dog every day,” she said. “Even when I first moved to Bronzeville in 2006, when I would say crime was higher, I still walked my dog every day and wasn’t afraid to walk around in my neighborhood and make friends with people in my neighborhood.”
Harper also believes it’s important not to ignore the racial component to Trump’s focus on Chicago and other cities to which he has signaled that troops could also be deployed, many of which are led by Black leaders and have large Black populations.
“It’s not going to just end with [Chicago]. It’s going to expand. He’s already talking about New Orleans, and if you think about all the cities he’s talking about – LA, Black mayor; DC, Black mayor; Chicago, Black mayor; Baltimore, Black mayor; New Orleans, Black mayor. We have to be able to call it out for what it is,” she said.
Harper anticipates federal troops employing law enforcement practices with the potential to create violence, not prevent it, including racial profiling, stop-and-frisk and establishing checkpoints in wealthy neighborhoods. She’ll primarily be working from home to limit the chances of encountering troops, and plans to routinely check up on her neighbors to share information from the “Know Your Rights” campaigns she’s absorbed.
For 22 years, John Orleans has lived in North Austin, a predominantly Black neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side often evoked because its high crime rates have continued to fall in recent years. He believes increased investment and access to resources such as healthcare, grocery stores and infrastructure in neighborhoods like his could have a bigger impact on crime than deploying federal troops.
“[When] people have places to go, restaurants to eat at, places to shop, their neighborhood gets better. We’ve seen this in other neighborhoods in the city. When I was growing up, Wrigleyville wasn’t a great neighborhood, and now, just try to find an apartment there,” Orleans said.
The Indivisible Chicago Alliance, a progressive organization of activists and neighborhood chapters, is one of several local groups sharing “Know Your Rights” campaigns, trainings and planned actions from a collection of like-minded partner organizations, including the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, which itself partners with the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC), the center’s director of communications, Tara Tidwell Cullen, said..
The NIJC has been responding to threats from Ice in Chicago since the start of Trump’s second term in January, and has been working with its partners to expand the scope of its work as federal troops head to Chicago, Tidwell Cullen said.
Other groups, such as Personal PAC, which typically organizes around reproductive rights, are collaborating with similar organizations and distributing information through the Hands Off Chicago website to “stand up against the unconstitutional and racist regime of Donald Trump”, Personal Pac’s CEO, Sarah Garza Resnick, said. And the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) is preparing a team of more than 350 volunteers for legal observation during future protests and civil litigation that could arise from encounters between the public and troops, Matthew Coughlin, director of operations for NLG Chicago, said.
Currently, Trump is facing legal challenges that may halt his ability to deploy the national guard and Ice agents as he’d like. On Tuesday, a judge ruled that the president violated federal law when he deployed thousands of national guard troops to Los Angeles earlier this summer during protests against Ice, and on Thursday, the District of Columbia sued Trump in federal court over his deployment of troops there.
Matt Conroy, a Democratic candidate for Illinois’ fifth District, recognizes Chicago does have work to do to address crime, but he’s concerned federal troops will primarily “terrorize” predominantly Black and Hispanic communities while costing the local and federal government money.
“Rather than addressing the root cause of this, they’re just doing what they think looks good for the TV and pretending to be a strongman authoritarian, and that’s all that Donald Trump really wants to be,” Conroy said.
“What they’re doing is completely illegal,” Conroy said. “Honestly, invoke the Insurrection Act, but to stay together, have a plan, know your rights, and be respectful of law enforcement, to not escalate the situation further, and to provide them with additional resources.”
Members of the national guard should also defy unlawful orders that call for violence, Conroy said.
Denise Poloyac, a board member for the Indivisible Chicago Alliance, believes that if federal troops and Ice agents begin active law enforcement activities, community will become increasingly important. That means not going to protests alone or uninformed about their organizers, and engaging in de-escalation tactics.
“We can’t be effective if we don’t act together, and I think we draw our strength from each other. I think that is the strength of Chicago, and that’s what’s going to get us through this, and, you know, I think that’s the strength of a lot of places in this country,” Poloyac said.
“I think that’s what Trump’s administration doesn’t understand, that we are in a community.”
