Donald Trump says his DHS blitz fixed Chicago. But the math and the neighborhoods choking on pepper spray tell a different story. It wasn’t a victory; it was a victory-themed propaganda dressed in tactical gear.
Trump’s latest Truth Social post boasts dramatic drops in crime in Chicago “since the launch” of Operation Midway Blitz. He claimed that shootings are down 35%, robberies 41%, and carjackings almost 50%, with more “assets” coming. The claims do cross-check, but mostly in friendly write-ups repeating his figures. There’s no proof of the statistics in independently published city dashboards tied to the operation’s start date in Sept. 2025.
“I am proud to announce that Chicago, Illinois, despite all of the radical opposition and obstruction we have from the Mayor and the Governor, has seen Car Theft, Shootings, Robberies, Violent Crime, and everything else drop dramatically.”
Trump also claimed that he achieved all this with “just a small initial Federal Force, not the full surge.” He announced that he’d “ramp up more assets” to further drop these numbers. What it signals is an even larger federal footprint. On the ground, it’d mean more agents, more street encounters, more room for “collateral” arrests. And all this while, credit for the declining crime rate will flow upward to Washington.
Unsurprisingly, what Chicago published weeks before the Midway Blitz in August already showed declines that undercut Trump’s credit grab. The Mayor’s Office touted year-over-year drops for shootings and carjackings earlier in 2025. So, what did Midway Blitz actually do? DHS says arrests and deportations of over 800 “illegal aliens,” framed as the “worst of the worst.”
Independent reporting puts nearly 550 arrests in the first 12 days around Chicago alone. Half were targeted, the rest collateral. In late October and early November, multiple reports documented chemical agents used around immigrant areas. One incident allegedly left a 1-year-old struggling to breathe (via The Washington Post). DHS disputes parts of these accounts, but a federal judge has since constrained agents’ use of these tactics.
Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker took a sharp aim at Trump’s exaggerated claims and credit-stealing. He poked fun at his “Miracle Mile” flub and called him “demented.” The insult landed because you can’t misname Chicago’s most famous street and then claim intimate knowledge of its crime patterns.
“He doesn’t even know the name of Michigan Avenue as Magnificent Mile, not Miracle Mile. All I can say is Donald Trump doesn’t know anything about Chicago. He still thinks Chicago is someplace that’s on fire, like he says about Portland. The man is demented.”
The truth is, the decline in local crime preceded the Midway Blitz. And Trump’s federal tactics escalated fear after. On that sequence, the Governor has the better case.
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