Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker didn’t mince words Tuesday responding to Donald Trump’s threat of needlessly sending troops to Chicago.
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In a chilling speech, Pritzker outlined what anonymous sources inside the federal government have told him about what Trump and his chief architect of cruelty, Stephen Miller, are preparing to do in Chicago. He alleged that they will send armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and even Texas National Guard troops into the city. And that the U.S. military will patrol the streets of Chicago.
For what reason? Not because crime is surging. As Pritzker pointed out, Chicago’s numbers are down across the board, but because Trump wants a show. A performance. A spectacle of fear. A reality show, which Pritzker said he refuses to be part of. And, Pritzker warned, Trump and Miller want it staged in September, just in time to target the city’s proud El Grito celebration of Mexican heritage.
“We have reason to believe that the Trump administration has already begun staging the Texas National Guard for deployment in Illinois,” Pritzker said. “First, Donald Trump is positioning armed federal agents and staging military vehicles on federal property, such as the Great Lakes Naval base. It is likely those agents will be with ICE, Customs and Border Patrol, the Department of Homeland Security' and other similarly situated federal agencies. Many of these individuals are being relocated from Los Angeles for deployment in Chicago.”
Pritzker said he expects agents are planning to “raid Latino communities and say they’re targeting violent criminals.” What they are really targeting, besides arbitrarily Black and brown people, is also headlines, designed to falsely “validate” Trump’s long-standing lies about Chicago.
“We’re going in,” Trump said Tuesday. Trump also called the city the “murder capital of the world,” the “most dangerous city,” even a “hellhole.” But if you live there, do you feel that way? Of course you don’t. These are grotesque caricatures meant to justify something far more sinister.
I texted a friend who has lived in Chicago all his life, and I asked him if Trump was right, if the city is a “hellhole.” And my friend sent an angry emoji with one line: “It’s heaven.” I’m sure that’s how all Chicagoans feel.
Pritzker specifically pointed to Gregory Bovino, the loathsome ICE official known for his false, fearmongering TikTok videos that wrongly portrayed Los Angeles as a war zone. Bovino’s theatrics, Pritzker said, are now being packed up from Los Angeles and shipped to Chicago. And what comes after Chicago? Other blue cities, undoubtedly, like New York, San Francisco, and Boston.
You might as well call it a road show of repression, thuggery, and repugnance.
“First, I want to address the president’s unhinged remarks a few minutes ago begging me to call him,” Pritzker remarked. “No, I will not call the president, asking him to send troops to Chicago. I’ve made that clear already.”
Pritzker also made clear that the crisis is manufactured, the deployment unlawful. If Trump moves forward, he will surely do so under the false guise of the Insurrection Act, illegally using the military to control American cities. If anyone should know about insurrection, it’s Trump, and this ain’t no insurrection, not in D.C., not in L.A., not in Chicago, only on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021, at Trump’s behest.
Is Pritzker the only one who is outspoken and mortified about what’s happening, not just in his state but in the United States of America? Where is the fury?
Pritzker is sending out a flare shot of warning that cuts straight to the heart of our democracy, and that is that we are on the verge of having the U.S. military on our streets in blue cities, not red cities where crime truly is.
We will have U.S. military monitoring, controlling American cities. That is martial law, and if that happens, we are no longer a democracy.
This is no time to shrug, no time to normalize what Pritzker called “extraordinary.” “Rumors have been swirling about what the White House has planned, and sifting fact from fiction is increasingly difficult because Donald Trump’s administration is not working in coordination with the city of Chicago, Cook County, or the state of Illinois,” he said.
“I want to take a moment at the top of my remarks to note how truly extraordinary it is for the federal government to refuse to coordinate with local law enforcement and government.”
The governor’s plea was not just to the people of his state but to the entire country. I’ve been saying all summer that essentially we are all sleepwalking through what Trump is doing. When are we going to wake up and see that while we were slumbering, our precious democracy was turned into an autocracy?
If we accept this use of the U.S. military on blue city streets, if we don’t push back, then we must ask, as Pritzker did, “What comes next?” That’s where he ended it, and he implored that the media also wake up and sound the alarm.
So I’m doing my part.
Because once the troops arrive, once military force is turned inward against our own cities, the unspoken reality will be unavoidable. Democracy as we know it will already be gone. That’s what comes next. Pritzker knows that. And that should wake us up and shake us to the core.
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