Trump tightens military siege on Democratic cities with troops arriving in Chicago

WashingtonDonald Trump intensifies the militarization of Democratic cities with the deployment of the National Guard in Chicago. Against the will of Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, the Democrat, the first troops mobilized from Texas arrived on the outskirts of the city at the Elwood training center on Tuesday afternoon. In the coming hours, the soldiers are expected to be deployed on the city streets to protect federal buildings and immigration agents (ICE), who have been sowing terror among residents in recent weeks.

Trump claims that the city is practically a "war zone." But those causing this effect are not the protesters against the raids, but the ICE agents themselves. On September 9, the Department of Homeland Security activated Operation Midway Blitz and intensified raids against migrants and Latinos in the city. The operation has left unprecedented scenes, such as a raid in the middle of the night on an apartment building with Black Hawk helicopters that killed 130 people, including children, wives, and those taken off the street. There was also the case of a person who was shot and killed by immigration agents when he tried to flee a checkpoint in his car. "They do it because they want to create a pretext to bring troops into the city. They are the ones who create this war zone," Pritzker denounced in a television interview.

On Monday, Illinois filed a court appeal to try to stop the arrival of the 200 National Guard troops that have been mobilized from the same state and from Texas, but the judge denied the request. This means that there are now five Democratic cities in which Trump has imposed—or attempted to—a military occupation. The president is normalizing the use of the military to resolve internal affairs, after last week calling on the generals to convert cities into "training camps" for soldiers.

In Washington, the National Guard has been parading through the streets with machine guns for almost two months now, at risk of becoming just another element of the city. Memphis has also been militarized, and in Los Angeles—the first to be militarized with the largest deployment—Trump still maintains the federalization of some 300 National Guardsmen.

The Portland exception

The only place where his attempt has been thwarted so far is Portland. Trump ordered Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to mobilize troops and use "total force" against the anti-fascist movement. Portland is the birthplace of one of the main anti-fascist groups in the US, Rose City Antifa. At the end of September, he was elected president.t designated this movement as a terrorist group and ordered its members to be hunted down.

As he did with Chicago, Trump has said that the city is a "war zone" and that a heavy hand must be applied against "professional and anarchist agitators." These statements contrast with the reality on the streets of Portland, where more than twenty people gathered to peacefully protest against him at the ICE center.

The case in Portland was more extreme: initially, Trump wanted to send military personnel there and not the National Guard, which in practice is a reserve corps designed to be activated in the event of a natural disaster, although the president is turning it into his personal army. The move was a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus law., that It prohibits a president from authorizing the use of active-duty troops as internal security forces for domestic matters, except in very specific cases. Finally, Trump federalized the Oregon National Guard to deploy it to Portland, although Judge Karin Immergut blocked the emergency action.

"Are you trying to circumvent my order?"

In a clear defiance of judicial authority, Trump soon afterward mobilized the remaining federalized California National Guard to send them to Portland. Immersed in this, she had to issue a new emergency order, and she was outraged at the defiance of judicial authority. "How could the arrival of the federalized National Guard from California not be in direct contradiction to the temporary restraining order I issued yesterday?" the judge wrote. "Are you trying to circumvent my order?" she added.

After the courts blocked the militarization of Portland, Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act. "We have an Insurrection Act for a reason. If I were to enforce it, I would enforce it if people were being killed and the courts were blocking us, or if the governors or mayors were blocking us," she stated Monday afternoon from the Oval Office. This Tuesday, during a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, Trump again mentioned this idea and defended the mobilization of troops in Chicago, despite the refusal of the state governor: "If the governor can't do his job, we will."

The Insurrection Act is an emergency power that allows the president to call upon active-duty soldiers and reservists from the National Guard to restore law and order in exceptional cases. Although this law has typically been invoked after a state governor has requested assistance from the federal government, there are also some provisions that allow the president to use it even against the will of the state. The last time such an episode occurred was in the late 1950s, during the Civil Rights Movement, when some southern states resisted ending school segregation as ordered by the courts.