CHICAGO—National Guard troops have arrived just outside of the Chicago city limits this morning as President Trump threatens to order them into the city, which he described yesterday again as a “hellhole” ridden with crime. He said he will pay no attention to demands by the city’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, that the president not deploy military in the city where ICE agents are already terrorizing people and have kidnapped both citizens and non-citizens.
Troops are at an Army Reserve center outside the city, and demonstrators against the deployments are showing up at an ICE facility in Broadview, also just west of Chicago. Trump is calling for the jailing of Mayor Johnson for what he says is his failure to protect the ICE agents terrorizing Chicagoans.
Johnson has said that the ICE activity in the city is about much more than just deportations and immigration. He describes things like the ICE attack on an apartment building last week on the city’s South Side as an attempt to scare and terrorize people into not taking action against his harmful anti-working-class agenda.
Reflecting the truth of what Johnson has said is the fact that at the raided apartment building, most of the residents dragged out and detained by ICE are now back home, with ICE not having found any crimes of which they were guilty.
The racist nature of the ICE raid, which included Blackhawk helicopters dropping agents onto the roof of the raided apartment building, the use of flash bang grenades, and zip-tying of children as they cried out for their parents, was condemned by Johnson and is reflected in the fact that all the people rounded up and detained were Latino or African American. They were loaded into separate vans, African Americans in one set of vans and Latinos in another, after being hauled out of their apartments in the middle of the night.
The president doubled down on his string of false claims about Chicago again yesterday, repeating his description of the city as a “hellhole of crime,” although police statistics show significant drops in most crimes, including homicides.
Illinois is suing Trump to end what they see as his illegal invasion of Chicago. A hearing in court about the lawsuit is scheduled for Thursday.
It looks like the National Guard is planning to dig in west of Chicago, where they are now in the town of Elwood, which is 49 miles outside the city. The owner of a restaurant in the Ellwood area told People’s World that soldiers wearing Texas National Guard emblems were seen in town yesterday and that truckloads of supplies were being delivered to the Army Reserve center there. He complained that “business is way down.“
The law makes such deployment of troops illegal unless there is an insurrection happening. Trump said on national television this week that he would consider invoking the Insurrection Act if he found it necessary. “I have to keep our cities safe,” he declared.
Violent crime in Chicago has declined over the last year, according to numerous sources that track crime data. In Chicago, homicides alone were down 31% to 278 through August, police data shows.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson signed an executive order Monday barring federal immigration agents and others from using city-owned property as staging areas for immigration enforcement operations. His order followed instances where ICE agents have used public school yards as places in which to plan operations.
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