CHICAGO _ Donovan Price bowed his head and prayed in the parking lot of the University of Chicago Medical Center.
"Please give her strength," he whispered.
Inside the emergency room, doctors scrambled to save the life of a 10-month-old girl with a bullet lodged in her shoulder _ a baby who while strapped into a car seat was shot last week by someone in a passing vehicle traveling along an expressway on the South Side of Chicago.
Price steeled himself for another vigil. The 53-year-old self-described street pastor has found a calling in consoling the families of victims of gun violence. He scans his phone _ waiting for texts, Twitter messages, phone calls _ and then drives to street corners or hospitals. He searches for grace, but it seems like every day word of another shooting finds him.
"We who live in this city," he said, "have to figure out how to end this now."
This troubled city cannot be fixed, Price said, unless the underlying causes of violence are addressed and locals, not outside federal forces, provide the answers.
He was talking about President Donald Trump.
In recent days, Trump delivered a speech about violence in American cities, singling out Chicago, saying, "perhaps no citizens have suffered more from the menace of violent crime" before vowing to "immediately surge federal law enforcement," including agents from the FBI, ATF, DEA and Homeland Security, to the city.
The proclamation concerned Price, as well as many other local activists and leaders, whose minds filled with images of militarized federal agents using batons, tear gas and rubber bullets against Black Lives Matter protesters in mostly white Portland, Oregon. What would happen here, with agents patrolling the predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods on Chicago's south and west sides?
They worry, some locals said, that Trump is using them as a pawn to bolster a tough-on-crime persona less than 100 days until the election.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump called for implementing stop-and-frisk policies in Chicago. (The tactic, which involves aggressively confronting people suspected of committing a crime, was widely used in New York and disproportionately affected Black and Latino men.) Then, in 2017, after Chicago recorded more than 700 homicides the year before, Trump tweeted about the violence.
"If Chicago doesn't fix the horrible 'carnage' going on," he wrote, "I will send in the Feds!"
While people disagree on the best way to solve Chicago's issues, no one denies that it is a city in crisis. Killings have spiraled upward with alarming velocity and murder, much of it gang-related, is a leading cause of death for young Black men here.
Gunmen recently opened fire outside a funeral home, injuring 15 people who had gathered to mourn a man who had himself died in a drive-by shooting. As of mid-July, more than 400 people have been murdered so far this year _ a 51% increase from the number of killings this time last year. And shooting incidents are up 47% compared to the same time period last year, spiking to more than 1,600.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot said in a TV interview that if the federal government wants to help stem violence in her city, they should focus on gun control reforms.
"We are being inundated," she said, "with guns from states that have virtually no gun control, no background checks, no ban on assault weapons."
Lightfoot has stressed that the roughly 150 agents coming to Chicago will not be clad in camouflage or guard federal buildings the way they were deployed in Portland, where they are now being withdrawn. Lightfoot said agents in Chicago will team up with local law enforcement as part of an urban crime-fighting strategy.
"These are not troops. Troops are people who come from the military. That's not what's coming to Chicago," she said at a news conference last week. "I've drawn a very firm line against that."
Still, many local politicians and community groups have reservations, including calls by some not to cooperate with federal authorities.
"Trump has repeatedly demonstrated both his callous disregard for Black, Indigenous and immigrant lives," read an open letter penned by Chicago leaders after Trump's announcement. "We grieve deeply the lives lost to gun violence in Chicago. ... Breaking the cycle of violence means that the city must invest in jobs, housing, schools, and healing, not prisons and police."
"We will be watching to see how these new forces will impact Black and brown communities that already are over-policed," said Colleen Connell, executive director of the ACLU of Illinois.
