Federal troops are coming to Chicago, President Donald Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday.
“We’re going in,” Trump said, without specifying a timeline for when he intended to send the National Guard to the city.
In a news conference shortly after Trump’s announcement, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson warned the president against sending National Guard troops to his city and said Chicago has a gun problem, not an immigrant problem.
“We do not want or need military occupation in our city. We do not want or need militarized immigration enforcement in our city,” Johnson said.
Johnson added: “There are measures that the federal government can take right now to help continue to drive down violence and crime in our city. We need the federal government to stop the endless flow of guns into our state and into our city.”
On Saturday, Johnson signed an executive order to require federal law enforcement to abide by local rules about masking and identification and to limit local police’s participation in immigration enforcement.
Johnson was joined Tuesday by Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who said the Trump administration is not working in coordination with him and called Trump’s threats “a political drama to cover up for his corruption.”
Pritzker said he has reason to believe the Trump administration has sent the Texas National Guard to Great Lakes naval base outside Chicago and that they are awaiting orders to deploy to the city on Sept. 16 to target Mexican Independence Day celebrations.
“Unidentifiable agents in unmarked vehicles with masks are planning to raid Latino communities and say they’re targeting violent criminals,” Pritzker said. A spokesperson for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s office told MSNBC that Pritzker’s information about the Texas National Guard is not accurate. Trump has already sent National Guard troops and U.S. Marines into Los Angeles and federalized local law enforcement in Washington, D.C., this summer, and he is threatening to do the same in several other cities, including Baltimore and New York, all of which are run by Black mayors. (By contrast, Trump has not threatened to send the National Guard into cities in red states with higher crime rates than Washington, D.C.) Trump’s latest threats to deploy the National Guard to Chicago came on the same day a federal judge ruled that the move violated the Posse Comitatus Act. California Gov. Gavin Newsom brought the lawsuit in June against the Trump administration and the Defense Department after 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines were deployed to Los Angeles.
Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter and producer for MS NOW. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.
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