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* Click here for some background. Reuters…
The Pentagon is working on plans to deploy the U.S. military to Chicago as President Donald Trump says he is cracking down on crime, homelessness and undocumented immigration, the Washington Post reported on Saturday.
The Defense Department planning, in the works for weeks, involves several options, including mobilizing at least a few thousand members of the National Guard as soon as September, the Post reported, citing officials familiar with the matter.
“Chicago is a mess,” Trump, a Republican, told reporters on Friday, deriding its mayor as he continued his attacks on cities run by Democratic politicians. “And we’ll straighten that one out probably next.”
The Pentagon said in a statement late on Saturday: “We won’t speculate on further operations. The department is a planning organization and is continuously working with other agency partners on plans to protect federal assets and personnel.”
A state’s governor generally oversees his own National Guard, but the president can federalize and deploy troops over objections under Title 10 of federal law. It permits the president to issue orders to National Guard members if there is a “rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the government.”
A president also can invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy active-duty troops to perform law enforcement duties in the U.S., but such an act would be politically polarizing and trigger alarm in the Pentagon. Trump flirted with the idea in 2020, during unrest following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Trump deployed both the National Guard members and a battalion of Marines in California in June while citing “incidents of violence and disorder” that had occurred during ICE operations to round up undocumented immigrants. Under the law Trump used, Title 10, the troops are generally prevented from being involved in law enforcement.
The California deployment was contested in court, with Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and other officials questioning whether Trump had violated the Posse Comitatus Act, a federal law that prohibits U.S. troops from carrying out civilian law enforcement actions. U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer ruled that Trump’s orders violated the law, but his decision was halted by a three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco.
This month, Breyer oversaw a case in which California officials again contested the legality of the deployment there. Administration officials said the troops involved were not enforcing the law, but rather protecting federal buildings and law enforcement personnel. No final ruling has been issued. A couple hundred members of the California National Guard remain involved in the mission in Los Angeles.
Trump has faced fewer legal challenges with his deployment of the National Guard in D.C. because the city is subject to federal oversight. As of Friday, more than 2,200 troops from the D.C. Guard and six other states were involved in the mission under orders detailed by Title 32, a federal law that governors can use to deploy National Guard members in other states.
* Gov. JB Pritzker…
“The State of Illinois at this time has received no requests or outreach from the federal government asking if we need assistance, and we have made no requests for federal intervention.
“The safety of the people of Illinois is always my top priority. There is no emergency that warrants the President of the United States federalizing the Illinois National Guard, deploying the National Guard from other states, or sending active activity duty military within our own borders.
“Donald Trump is attempting to manufacture a crisis, politicize Americans who serve in uniform, and continue abusing his power to distract from the pain he is causing working families.
“We will continue to follow the law, stand up for the sovereignty of our state, and protect the people of Illinois.”
* CBS Chicago…
The ACLU of Illinois argued public safety involves more than just policing, and the National Guard is not the answer.
“National Guard are not trained in order to be police officers, in order to collaborate and cooperate with communities. They’re trained to do militaristic operations, and so the idea that that’s the substitute is really a poor one,” ACLU Illinois spokesman Ed Yohnka said.
* Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson…
“We take President Trump’s statements seriously, but to be clear the City has not received any formal communication from the Trump administration regarding additional federal law enforcement or military deployments to Chicago. Certainly, we have grave concerns about the impact of any unlawful deployment of National Guard troops to the City of Chicago. The problem with the President’s approach is that it is uncoordinated, uncalled for, and unsound. Unlawfully deploying the National Guard to Chicago has the potential to inflame tensions between residents and law enforcement when we know that trust between police and residents is foundational to building safer communities. An unlawful deployment would be unsustainable and would threaten to undermine the historic progress we have made. In the past year alone, we have reduced homicides by more than 30%, robberies by 35%, and shootings by almost 40%. We need to continue to invest in what is working.
“We know that our communities are safest when we fully invest in housing, community safety, and education. The National Guard will not alleviate the housing crisis. It will not put food in the stomachs of the 1 in 4 children that go to bed hungry every night in Chicago. The National Guard will not fully-fund our public schools or provide mental healthcare or substance abuse treatment to Chicagoans in need. The National Guard is no substitute for dedicated local law enforcement and community violence interrupters who know and serve our communities every day. There are many things the federal government could do to help us reduce crime and violence in Chicago, but sending in the military is not one of them.”
* Related…
* CNN | Officials have been planning for weeks to send National Guard to Chicago as Trump seeks to expand crime crackdown: When asked for comment, the White House on Saturday referred CNN to Trump’s remarks in the Oval Office a day earlier. The president said Friday he hadn’t spoken to the Chicago mayor when asked by a reporter whether he had taken any “concrete steps” toward a crackdown in the city. CNN has reached out to the Pentagon for comment on the potential deployment of troops to Chicago, first reported by The Washington Post.
* Tribune | Judge blocks President Trump from cutting funding from Chicago and other cities over ‘sanctuary’ policies: U.S. District Judge William Orrick in San Francisco extended a preliminary injunction blocking the administration from cutting off or conditioning the use of federal funds for so-called “sanctuary” jurisdictions. His earlier order protected more than a dozen other cities and counties, including San Francisco, Portland and Seattle. An email to the White House late Friday was not immediately returned. In his ruling, Orrick said the administration had offered no opposition to an extended injunction except to say the first injunction was wrong. It has appealed the first order.
* AP | National Guard troops on DC streets for Trump’s crackdown will start carrying guns: The Defense Department didn’t offer any other details about the new development or why it was needed. Hegseth referred to it as “common sense” on social media. No troops have been spotted yet with firearms around the city in the hours after the announcement. But the decision is an escalation in the Republican administration’s intervention in the nation’s capital and comes as nearly 2,000 National Guard members have been stationed in the heavily Democratic city.
* Reuters | Trump crime crackdown deploys troops in Washington’s safest sites: By contrast with central Washington, residents of Ward 8 in the city’s southeast - the area with the highest crime rate - said there was not a guardsman in sight. With the ward’s murder rate dwarfing that of most other neighborhoods, many locals said they would welcome troops on their streets.
* NYT | See Trump’s Use of Federal Law Enforcement in D.C.: Those agents have roamed the district on patrol, set up checkpoints to stop and search vehicles and have occasionally evicted homeless people from city streets in a highly visible effort to make arrests and project the administration’s show of force. The White House has lauded their efforts in daily news releases, tallying more than 600 arrests over a two-week period — many of them for immigration violations. In the last two weeks before Mr. Trump commandeered the city’s police, 1,182 arrests were made.
* Democracy Docket | The States Sending Troops to DC Have Way Worse Crime Problems. Most Didn’t Want to Talk About It: According to a Democracy Docket analysis of the FBI’s Crime in the United States Annual Report, using Offenses Known to Law Enforcement, by State by City in 2024, 53 cities across Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee and West Virginia had higher murder rates than D.C. in 2024. Some of the cities have violent crime rates significantly worse than D.C. Memphis saw 2,501 violent crimes per 100,000 residents in 2024, more than double Washington’s 926. The murder rate in Memphis was 41 per 100,000 residents, compared to 26 for D.C.
posted by Isabel Miller
Sunday, Aug 24, 25 @ 8:08 am
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