Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has signed an executive order to respond to President Trump’s potential deployment of the National Guard in Windy City. The order establishes the “Protecting Chicago Initiative” to protect the constitutional rights of Chicago residents amid the possibility of imminent militarized immigration or National Guard deployment. The order asks Trump to “stand down” from his threat to deploy the National Guard into Chicago and reaffirms the Chicago Police Department’s role as a locally controlled law enforcement agency.
The order comes as the president announced that the administration would focus on lowering the crime rate in Chicago next, after deploying the National Guard to Washington, D.C. Chicago has long struggled with gun violence, but fatal and nonfatal shootings have been on a downward trend in recent years. Both Johnson and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker oppose Trump’s potential deployment of the National Guard.
The administration is considering using a Navy base near Chicago to support its immigration crackdown efforts, which would reportedly involve deploying more than 200 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents and using the Naval Station Great Lakes as a staging area. White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said that if Democrats focused on fixing crime in their own cities instead of doing publicity stunts to criticize the President, their communities would be much safer.
