Speaking Wednesday to reporters flanked by National Guard troops and Washington, D.C., police that had been commandeered by the Trump administration, Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller had a clear message for Chicago and other major cities.<\/p>\n
Prepare yourselves for the kind of \u201cprotection\u201d the nation\u2019s capital has been provided over the past 10 days or so.<\/p>\n
On Thursday, Attorney General Pam Bondi disclosed that she gave Gov. JB Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson until Aug. 19 \u2014 a deadline that has passed \u2014 to revoke so-called sanctuary state and city laws. Bondi told Fox Business that Illinois and other so-called sanctuary states had been told \u201cyou better comply or you\u2019re next.\u201d<\/p>\n
To which we reiterate, no thank you. We\u2019ve written before<\/a> in opposition to the prospect of National Guard troops patrolling Chicago streets on the pretext of crime or some other \u201cemergency,\u201d and what we\u2019re seeing in Washington convinces us all the more that we want no part of that.<\/p>\n President Donald Trump last week declared a \u201ccrime emergency\u201d in the District of Columbia, which gave his administration power to direct the use of local police resources and to call in the National Guard. A number of Republican governors subsequently have announced they\u2019re sending hundreds of Guard troops under their jurisdiction to D.C.<\/p>\n What residents and workers in Washington have experienced since then is the dystopian presence of uniformed military personnel armed with lethal weaponry patrolling mainly parts of the city that aren\u2019t anyone\u2019s definition of crime-riddled. Georgetown and the heavily touristed National Mall were doing just fine before all this Trumpian nonsense.<\/p>\n Granted, like virtually every American city, Washington has neighborhoods that truly aren\u2019t safe \u2014 where street crime and gun violence are unacceptably prevalent. But those neighborhoods aren\u2019t where Trump\u2019s forces are located, which naturally leads to the conclusion that this \u201ccrime emergency\u201d is little more than a pretext for Trump to display his vision of a muscular executive branch intervening in the affairs of urban America. Not coincidentally, these are parts of the country that generally didn\u2019t vote for him and continue to oppose his priorities.<\/p>\n In addition to the disturbing images flowing out of Washington, of significant concern is that owners of bars and restaurants in what ordinarily is a thriving and youthfully active city are reporting significant declines in business. Many D.C. residents don\u2019t seem to vibe on going out for a drink or a meal in a city teeming with soldiers and federal agents of various bureaus, some of whom appear to be engaged in aggressive immigration enforcement, despite not working for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. We don\u2019t blame those residents. We\u2019d head outside the District too.<\/p>\n Which brings us to our own city. The last thing needed in Chicago, which isn\u2019t as economically healthy as Washington was prior to Trump\u2019s strongman maneuvers, is discouraging more people from patronizing bars, clubs and restaurants, as well as other attractions.<\/p>\n Downtown Chicago continues to be distressingly light on foot traffic, explained less by worries about crime than the paucity of workers returning to the office compared with other major U.S. cities. Add the militarized scene afflicting D.C. to our current reality and Chicago may well return to the post-apocalyptic feel we saw at the height of the pandemic rather than a city in recovery, albeit not nearly at a pace we\u2019d all prefer.<\/p>\n Another argument against federal intervention: Chicago, arguably unlike some of the other cities on Trump\u2019s naughty list, now has in place a capable and, we hear, cooperative slate of tough-on-crime officials in all of the most important public safety roles. They include Chicago police Superintendent Larry Snelling, Cook County State\u2019s Attorney Eileen O\u2019Neill Burke and, of course, Andrew Boutros, Trump\u2019s own recently confirmed U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois.<\/p>\n While all would agree there remains too much violent crime in Chicago, the latest numbers show that crimes against public safety are being prosecuted far more aggressively and most of what\u2019s now occurring is related to street gangs that have been a scourge in this city for generations. In terms of federal action, a revitalized U.S. attorney\u2019s office \u2014 Boutros is actively recruiting dozens of new prosecutors as we write \u2014 could and likely will do far more to improve the progress being made here than any destabilizing influx of outside federal forces.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s attempts to force America\u2019s more reluctant cities into full cooperation with his immigration-enforcement agenda likely plays well with his MAGA base. But polls have shown for weeks that the majority of Americans, while approving of Trump\u2019s securing the southern border, are sour on heavy-handed tactics such as staking out Home Depots and arresting delivery drivers while on the job.<\/p>\n The administration even has managed to lose the support of influential podcaster Joe Rogan, whose endorsement was eagerly sought last year by both Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris. \u201cWhen people thought about ICE, they thought, \u2018Great, you\u2019re going to get rid of the gang members.\u2019 They didn\u2019t think, \u2018Great, you\u2019re going to get rid of the landscaper,\u2019\u201d Rogan said on one of his recent podcasts.<\/p>\n Chicago is struggling to govern itself overall, it\u2019s true, and we\u2019ve been consistent critics of many progressive policies that we believe are holding the city back.<\/p>\n But the city is making headway on crime and the key players all have changed for the better. Our federal government is supposed to act as a support for local government.<\/p>\n Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here<\/a> or email letters@chicagotribune.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Speaking Wednesday to reporters flanked by National Guard troops and Washington, D.C., police that had been commandeered by…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":166217,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5124],"tags":[960,6083,5386,1818,1269],"class_list":{"0":"post-166216","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-chicago","8":"tag-chicago","9":"tag-editorials","10":"tag-il","11":"tag-illinois","12":"tag-opinion"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115071882719913835","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=166216"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166216\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/166217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=166216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=166216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=166216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}