President Donald Trump‘s deployment of the military in Chicago has resulted in clashes in court and on the streets as local leaders and activists fight to end what they say is an “invasion” of the majority Black and brown city.
On the heels of what Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker described as a “military-style” ICE raid of an apartment building in a majority-Black neighborhood in Chicago that resulted in women and children being zip-tied, the state and city of Chicago filed a federal lawsuit on Monday seeking to block Trump’s deployment of hundreds of troops.
Criticizing the White House’s immigration enforcement, Pritzker said the administration wants to “create the war zone so they can send in even more troops.”
“You cannot use our military on our soil. This is breaking the law, and Republicans ought to speak up to this, because we all look like…immigrants. Who looks like an immigrant? And why is this like, very curiously, only targeting the Black and brown communities?” said U.S. Congressman Jonathan L. Jackson, the son of civil rights icon Jesse Jackson Sr., who represents most of the south side of Chicago.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Monday defended the administration’s law enforcement activities in Chicago, including the pending deployment of military troops.
“I don’t think any American would disagree that Chicago needs more law enforcement reinforcement,” said Leavitt, who showed reporters in the briefing room a printed article about 30 people being shot this past weekend (one of those shootings included a female protester who was wounded by a U.S. Border and Customs Protection agent).
“Five of them were killed in one weekend. This is completely unacceptable, and the President wants to make American cities safer,” asserted Leavitt, who said Chicagoans and other city residents across the country “should be concerned about the fact that people in their cities right now are being gunned down every single night.”
She added, “The President…all he’s trying to do is fix it.”
On Monday, President Trump said he would consider invoking the Insurrection Act if federal courts continued to block his efforts to deploy the military to American cities like Chicago and Portland. The 1807 law allows the president to deploy the U.S. military or National Guard troops nationally to quell what the president considers to be an insurrection against the United States.
“We do not want these people in our city. These people are not necessary in our city,” Stacy Davis Gates, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, told theGrio.
The organizer and former history teacher said that Chicagoans need federal resources that the Trump administration has stripped away in the federal budget—like Medicaid, SNAP, public education, and infrastructure—to pay for a $3.8 trillion tax cut that economists say will largely benefit the country’s wealthiest Americans.
“Billionaires put Donald Trump into office. Billionaires are also his cabinet members. This is the richest cabinet in the history of our country. And then, the same billionaires gave themselves tax breaks at the expense of families,” said Davis Gates.
“This president wants to remake a country by the ultra-rich and for the ultra-rich, and he wants to use the military and his private militarized force to repress the rights of poor and working people. We prefer a government that is of by and for the people,” said Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, who said Trump had “declared war” on Chicago.
History of militarization and American racism
The threat of military force in Chicago recalls a history of America’s racial tension when the National Guard was used to police Black Americans, like in Tulsa, Oklahoma, during the race massacre and destruction of “Black Wall Street.” But troops have also been used to protect Black Americans under certain presidencies.
In 1957, President Dwight E. Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard, placing it under the control of the U.S. Army and away from Gov. Orval Faubus, who tried to block the Little Rock Nine from integrating Central High School. In the early 1960s, President John F. Kennedy deployed the Mississippi and Alabama National Guards to integrate universities in opposition to segregationist governors.
President Lyndon B. Johnson did the same in 1965, when he federalized Alabama’s National Guard troops to protect civil rights activists, including Martin Luther King Jr., during the Selma to Montgomery march, also known as Bloody Sunday.
Reflecting on that history and how the National Guard is currently being used under President Trump, Ed Anderson, a Black veteran who served in the U.S. Air Force, told theGrio that Trump’s politicization of the military on U.S. citizens “scares the hell out of me.”
Anderson, who is now a lead organizer for Common Defense, said military troops and the National Guard are “not trained for or allowed to do policing actions.” He lamented, “I’m just waiting for the first time when…a kid gets run over by an MRAP vehicle on a street in Chicago or just like the ICE officer pulled the gun on folks there in Chicago.”
“I think that Trump and his allies are looking to create a false flag that would allow him to put the Insurrection Act in place and become the tyrant that he wants to be,” said Anderson.
Davis Gates of the Chicago Teachers Union rejected the Trump administration’s arguments about crime, telling theGrio, “It’s always been white supremacy, it’s always been white nationalism. It’s always been that perspective that has led those erroneous and harmful depictions of Black people.”
Referring to the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement, she continued, “Now we don’t have a muscle of identifying these encroachments, which is why it’s easy for them to pick up brown people in the way that they’ve done, because they’ve stopped and frisked Black people since the black codes.”
The organizer said that in this moment of militarization in American cities, Black Americans must remember that it was the mass resistance of the enslaved that birthed the citizenship and freedom of all Americans. Now is the time for a similar resistance, she argued.
“I’m reminded of how W.E.B. Du Bois talks about the general strike that led to the toppling of the Confederacy,” said Davis Gates. She continued, “Enslaved Africans walked off of plantations and they were walking off of plantations in droves…[Du Bois] called it a ‘general strike’ and that strike then changed the course of [the Civil War].”
“You stop the means of production, you stop feeding the confederacy money and labor, then they topple. And then, in them being toppled, you have these enslaved Africans, not only saying that we’re leaving, but that this country owes them more,” Davis Gates explained.
From the resistance of enslaved Blacks came the Freedman’s Bureau, which Davis Gates described as the “precursor” for agencies that were instrumental to advancing the civil rights of Black Americans, including the Departments of Education, Justice, and Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
“Along with that, the 13th, the 14th, and the 15th Amendments. Birthright citizenship, which is up in the Supreme Court right now. All of those things come from organizing, allyship, coalition, solidarity, and action,” she proclaimed.
Whether or not the Trump administration is thwarted by the courts from deploying troops to Chicago, Davis Gates said, that isn’t enough.
“We have to beat it, and then we have to expand…the idea of a democracy in this country to include all of its people. Beating it means that we’re just waiting until the next election. Overcoming it means that those people and their ideas are no longer welcome,” she said. “Ideas of division, ideas of separation, ideas of demagoguery. Those things are detrimental to humanity, and we need to win the debate on that.”
“If people are waiting on the government, any form of government, to do its part, that’s never been the case in America,” Davis Gates told theGrio.
She continued, “It has always been the people leaving the plantation or marching across the bridge or making a spectacle of white supremacy for the world to see who have compelled the government to move. Because we know this history, how about we be smarter than our foreparents and provide a strategic plan that creates the opportunity for our collective liberation?”
