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\n The potential for a showdown over crime in Chicago \u2013 not just between law enforcement and crooks but between the federal government and city leaders<\/a> \u2013 is escalating.\n <\/p>\n \n With US troops patrolling<\/a> Washington, DC, after a similar National Guard deployment in June to Los Angeles, President Donald Trump is ramping up his rhetoric<\/a> against predominantly Democratic cities, with a direct target on the nation\u2019s third-most populous.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cChicago is the worst and most dangerous city in the World, by far,\u201d Trump said<\/a> with typical hyperbole Tuesday morning on Truth Social. \u201c(Gov. JB) Pritzker needs help badly, he just doesn\u2019t know it yet. I will solve the crime problem fast, just like I did in DC.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Asked by a reporter at the White House Tuesday if he had made up his mind about sending the National Guard into Chicago, Trump responded: \u201cWell we\u2019re going. I didn\u2019t say when. We\u2019re going in.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Pritzker<\/a> later accused the Trump administration of refusing to coordinate with local law enforcement, which he said is necessary for fighting crime.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cIn the coming days, we expect to see what has played out in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, to happen here in Chicago \u2013 first Donald Trump positioning federal agents and staging military vehicles on federal property, such as the Great Lakes Naval base,\u201d said Pritzker, a Democrat, at a news conference Monday afternoon.\n <\/p>\n \n The governor said the state is ready to fight any troop deployment in court, adding: \u201cWe will do everything possible to ensure that agents operating inside the confines of this state, do so in a legal and ethical manner.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n One of Chicago\u2019s local leaders argues the city would benefit from federal involvement on crime. Alderman Raymond Lopez, a Democrat, said deploying the National Guard would alleviate stress on the police department and insisted that public safety \u201cshouldn\u2019t be this paritsan.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cChicago is not the murder capital of the world, we all know that,\u201d Lopez told CNN\u2019s Laura Coates. \u201cBut we are a city that needs help.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n While there are no specific announced plans to send the US military to Chicago, here\u2019s what we know about violent crime in Chicago and what Trump could do in the coming days:\n <\/p>\n \n Trump administration officials have been working for weeks to draw up plans<\/a> for a federal troop deployment to Chicago the moment the president gives the green light, they told CNN on condition of anonymity.\n <\/p>\n \n And the mayor is taking it seriously.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cWe have received credible reports that we have days, not weeks, before our city sees some type of militarized activity by the federal government,\u201d Democratic Mayor Brandon Johnson said<\/a> Saturday.\n <\/p>\n \n Pritzker said the head of the Illinois State Police received a phone call from the CBP on Saturday indicating ICE officers would be deployed to Chicago \u2013 the first communication Illinois received from the Trump administration on the issue.\n <\/p>\n \n State officials have gathered information about Trump\u2019s plan from \u201cunauthorized patriotic officials inside the government and from well-sourced reporters,\u201d he said.\n <\/p>\n \n It\u2019s likely federal agents from the US Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Homeland Security will be stationed in the city, said Pritzker.\n <\/p>\n \n Pritzker told the community to expect \u201cunidentifiable\u201d agents in unmarked vehicles with masks planning to raid Latino communities in the name of targeting \u201cviolent criminals,\u201d despite a very small percentage of those targeted individuals being actually violent.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cInstead, you\u2019re to see videos of them hauling away mothers and fathers traveling to work or picking up their kids from school. Sometimes they will detain, handcuff and haul away children,\u201d Pritzker said.\n <\/p>\n \n For now, a ramped-up immigration operation<\/a> is the one thing the feds have confirmed: \u201cICE has informed our Illinois State Police Department that they are\u202fgoing to begin operations sometime later this week,\u201d Democratic Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton<\/a> told CNN\u2019s Kate Bolduan on Tuesday.\n <\/p>\n \n Although state law enforcement got a heads-up \u2013 with a local naval station to be used as an ICE command center, the Chicago Sun-Times<\/a> reported, citing two sources familiar with base operations \u2013 state political leaders have gotten no direct word from the White House, the lieutenant governor said.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cCommunication is not the same as coordination,\u201d Stratton said, echoing the governor.\n <\/p>\n \n Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul told CNN\u2019s Kaitlan Collins on Tuesday any National Guard troop deployment in Illinois to fight crime is \u201cnot sustainable.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cNational Guard troops are not trained to do local law enforcement,\u201d said Raoul. \u201cFBI agents, DEA agents, ATF agents are trained to fight crime, and they have collaborated with local law enforcement. I would prefer more resources on that end than sending the military illegally into the streets of American cities against American citizens.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Meanwhile, Chicago experienced a Labor Day weekend of deadly violence worse than in the previous two years, with seven people shot to death, according to preliminary Chicago Police Department reports. In all, 56 victims were hit by gunfire, according to police reports.\n <\/p>\n \n A 14-year-old boy wounded in the arm and hand was the youngest victim, while seven people were wounded in a drive-by attack only a block from Chicago Police headquarters. An eighth homicide victim was recovered over the weekend from Lake Michigan, though police have not yet said whether he was shot or when they believe he was killed.\n <\/p>\n \n Over the same holiday period a year ago, six people were killed by gunfire in Chicago, CNN affiliate WTTW reported<\/a>, though the figure did not count four people killed on a Chicago \u201cL\u201d train that was outside the city limits at the time of the shooting.\n <\/p>\n \n Before the holiday surge, city leaders had been pointing to a broader drop in violent crime in 2025.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cIn the first six months of this year, Chicago has seen a 33% reduction in homicides and a 38% reduction in shootings,\u201d said a news release<\/a> last week from Johnson\u2019s office. Overall violent crime is down 21.4% this year, city figures<\/a> show.\n <\/p>\n \n Trump has been floating the idea of deploying troops inside Chicago for more than a week.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cChicago\u2019s a mess. You have an incompetent mayor \u2013 grossly incompetent \u2013 and we\u2019ll straighten that out probably next,\u201d Trump said<\/a> in the Oval Office in late August.\n <\/p>\n \n But if Trump were to nationalize the National Guard in Chicago, it is not clear what authority he would cite or what troops would do in the Windy City.\n <\/p>\n \n While the president has direct power over the DC National Guard and some authority over that capital city\u2019s police department because they are in a federally controlled district, he does not have the same power in states.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThere\u2019s very little stopping this president from doing what he wants to do,\u201d said Andrew McCabe, former FBI deputy director and CNN senior law enforcement analyst.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cBut he\u2019ll find the legal environment and trying to replicate the same sort of surge of federal agents and the presence of National Guard troops very, very different in every city in this country that is not Washington, DC.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Trump last called up the National Guard against a governor\u2019s will in June, sending 2,000 members<\/a> of the California National Guard into the streets of Los Angeles to push back<\/a> against protests opposing aggressive immigration raids in the area.\n <\/p>\n \n The National Guard played a limited security role, providing security to federal buildings and agents in a square-mile section of downtown where protests had become unruly. Local police, not guard members, responded when people violated a curfew declared<\/a> by the mayor.\n <\/p>\n \n Still, California Gov. Gavin Newsom mounted a challenge in court, and a federal judge agreed<\/a> Tuesday the situation in Los Angeles did not rise to the sort of emergency that would give Trump power to federalize the National Guard.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cPresident Trump and (Defense) Secretary (Pete) Hegseth have stated their intention to call National Guard troops into service in other cities across the country \u2026 thus creating a national police force with the President as its chief,\u201d wrote<\/a> US District Judge Charles Breyer, a nominee<\/a> of then-President Bill Clinton.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cIn short, Defendants violated the Posse Comitatus Act,\u201d he added, a 19th-century law that generally prohibits<\/a> the use of troops for domestic law enforcement purposes.\n <\/p>\n \n Although Breyer issued a court order preventing that sort of National Guard action from being repeated in California, it does not apply to other states, so there\u2019s nothing in the decision that directly stops the president from activating it in Illinois.\n <\/p>\n \n The last time active-duty military was sent to Chicago against the wishes of local officials was on July 4, 1894, according to the archives of the Chicago Tribune<\/a>, when a labor dispute<\/a> at a Pullman factory crippled the nation\u2019s rail industry and resulted in days of rioting.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cI protest against this, and ask the immediate withdrawal of the Federal troops from active duty in this State,\u201d then-Gov. John Peter Altgeld wrote<\/a> to President Grover Cleveland, according to the Tribune.\n <\/p>\n \n Since then, military deployments in Chicago have come at the direction of Illinois governors, including during the notoriously violent response to protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention<\/a> and a precautionary call-up<\/a> in preparation for the verdict against Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer found guilty<\/a> of in the murder of George Floyd.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cLet us be clear: there is no emergency in Chicago that warrants the President of the United States deploying the military,\u201d 13 Democratic members of Illinois\u2019 congressional delegation said in a Labor Day statement<\/a>.\n <\/p>\n \n Despite the general drop in crime this year in Chicago, many residents still feel terrorized.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cMy grandkids can\u2019t sit outside. They can\u2019t sit in the living room or at the kitchen table because a bullet may come through,\u201d said Rochelle Sykes, who lives in a neighborhood with the city\u2019s highest number of shooting victims per capita this year.\n <\/p>\n \n Sykes is not convinced the city\u2019s crime stats are telling the whole story, she told CNN\u2019s Omar Jimenez<\/a>. Indeed, Chicago last year ended its contract<\/a> with ShotSpotter<\/a>, whose sound equipment is designed to detect shots fired even if police are never called.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of things that go unreported,\u201d Sykes said, \u201cand these are things that us living in the neighborhood see every day.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n The city can \u201cabsolutely use federal resources from the National Guard,\u201d Alderman Raymond Lopez told CNN, raising the possibility of stationing troops in busy parts of the city, like on Michigan Avenue and at public bus and train stations.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cWe are currently allowing officers to spend their eight-hour shift babysitting these locations when they could actually be in the neighborhoods, answering 911 calls,\u201d Lopez said.\n <\/p>\n \n Some, however, say calling in the National Guard could make things worse.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThe presence of military, for me, would put our communities in a situation where they feel like they are incarcerated,\u201d said Cedric Hawkins, a resident of the southside Pullman neighborhood who has had nine relatives killed by gun violence.\n <\/p>\n \n And many state and local officials are warning that the idea of using the military to deal with crime in US cities is not a precedent they want to set.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThis president \u2026 wants to, quite frankly, make the military presence on American soil something that people normalize,\u201d said Stratton, the lieutenant governor. \u201cThis is not normal. We cannot normalize it.\u201d\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Facebook Tweet Email Link The potential for a showdown over crime in Chicago \u2013 not just between law…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":196417,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5124],"tags":[960,77144,5386,1818],"class_list":{"0":"post-196416","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-chicago","8":"tag-chicago","9":"tag-hnk","10":"tag-il","11":"tag-illinois"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115139559066548428","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196416","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=196416"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196416\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/196417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Chicago](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/gettyimages-2231378097.jpg\")
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