Pentagon official confirms plan as House minority leader Jeffries says president is ‘playing’ with Americans’ lives
www.theguardian.com
Trump has argued that a military crackdown was necessary in the nation’s capital, and elsewhere, to quell what he said were out of control levels of crime, even though statistics show that serious and violent crime in Washington, and many other American cities,
has actually plummeted.
Talking to reporters in the Oval Office on Friday the president insisted that “the people in Chicago are screaming for us to come” as he laid out his plan to send troops there, and that they would later “help with New York”.
“When ready, we will start in Chicago … Chicago is a mess,” Trump said. The city’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, meanwhile, has claimed shootings have dropped by 40% in the last year alone and he and Pritzker said any plan by the White House to override local authority and deploy troops
would be illegal. California
sued the federal government when it deployed national guard and US marines to parts of Los Angeles in June over
protests against
Ice raids, but a court refused to block the troops.
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The plans for Chicago. So wrong. Our country is not a dystopian hellhole. Is he going to have occupying troops in every large Democratic city? So wrong. Tearing his own country apart.
He calls our country a dystopian hellhole, and he is determined to prove it, by creating a dystopian hellhole out of our nation.
The Pentagon has for weeks been planning a military deployment to Chicago as President Donald Trump says he wants to crack down on crime, homelessness and undocumented immigration, in a model that could later be used in other major cities, officials familiar with the matter said.
The planning, which has not been previously disclosed, involves several options, including mobilizing at least a few thousand members of the National Guard as soon as September to what is the third most populous city in the United States.
The mission, if approved, would have parallels to the polarizing and legally contested operation that Trump
ordered in Los Angeles in June, when he deployed 4,000 members of the California National Guard and 700 active-duty Marines despite the protests of state and local leaders. The use of thousands of active-duty troops in Chicago also has been discussed but is considered less likely at this time, said two officials who, like others interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
The Chicago effort would further expand Trump’s use of military force domestically, even when state and local authorities call the idea unwelcome and unwarranted. Administration officials have defended such deployments, arguing that they are taking necessary steps to bring back law and order.
