As President Donald Trump calls on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to ramp up arrests and deportations in America’s biggest cities, because they are the “Democrat Power Center,” he and his administration are eyeing Illinois for the next militarized crackdown.
“Chicago is next, if they go too far,” a senior Trump administration official tells Rolling Stone. “The second they do, the president is prepared to prove that nobody is above the law.”
Senior administration officials are “closely monitoring” the anti-Trump and anti-ICE protest movement in Chicago, according to two Trump officials and another source familiar with the matter. The administration is reviewing federal intelligence memos and informal law enforcement reports about activities on the ground. Officials say they are also focused on developments since the city’s progressive mayor, Brandon Johnson, told citizens to “rise up” against the president’s immigration crackdowns.
Trump and administration officials maintain that his recent deployment of Marines and National Guard troops to Los Angeles is a test run that the president wants to replicate in other cities and areas in different parts of the country in service of his anti-immigration and mass deportation agenda.
The militarized response — which is likely illegal and being carried out against the wishes of Democratic leaders in the state — also functions as payback against liberal strongholds that routinely anger the president and his cronies. Both publicly and behind closed doors, the highest levels of Team Trump want progressives to know that their city or county could face a MAGAfied troop deployment, if too many residents take to the streets to resist the ramped-up ICE raids.
In a Truth Social post Sunday night, Trump called on ICE to “expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside,” based on the following lies: “These, and other such Cities, are the core of the Democrat Power Center, where they use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base, cheat in Elections, and grow the Welfare State, robbing good paying Jobs and Benefits from Hardworking American Citizens.”
Trump has long had a bone to pick with Chicago, which he has likened to a “war zone.” And the president has already been singling out the Windy City for harsh treatment. Last week, the city’s officials confirmed that Chicago is one of the places where Trump is sending in the ICE tactical teams. The same kind of order that inflamed the Los Angeles protests, which Trump then used as a pretext to send in the military.
“Violent rioters in Los Angeles, enabled by Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom, attacked American law enforcement, threw rocks at law enforcement vehicles, and put federal buildings at risk. President Trump rightfully stepped in to protect federal law enforcement officers,” says Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson. “If Democrat leaders in other cities allow the same violence to occur against federal law enforcement, President Trump will always step in.”
Officials in Chicago are bracing for conflict with federal policing. “There will be tactical teams, mini-tanks, other tools they use in which they plan to do raids, as we saw in Los Angeles,” the mayor’s chief of staff, Cristina Pacione-Zayas, told the media. “With arms, with also chemical agents — we have seen them in full riot gear. We have seen them fully concealed.”
How far will this Trump administration — which is somehow even more corrupt and lawless than the first — will push this across the nation? Top Trump officials are sending chilling signals, including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem who described the federal intervention in L.A. as a military occupation and “liberation” aimed at defeating their “socialist” political enemies.
All Americans, regardless of political affiliation, will be picking up the tab for Trump’s militaristic tactics. As Rolling Stone has reported, the Trump spending bill working its way through the Republican-led Congress would shower ICE with tens of billions of dollars — and give the agency the resources necessary to conduct aggressive campaigns of immigration raids and arrests in dozens of cities nationwide.
If Trump applies this same L.A. playbook to Chicago, it would be fulfilling a fantasy he left unrealized from his first term in the White House.
In the chaotic summer of 2020, President Trump demanded that his lieutenants launch a grisly, loud crackdown on the streets of Chicago, purportedly to wage war on gang members.
Officials in his first administration soon enough bargained him down to a much smaller federal “surge,” calculating that Trump’s idea would backfire and also not solve the city’s problems with violent crime.
In July 2020, one senior administration official said: “The president takes law and order as seriously as he does his promises on jobs and immigration. It’s fundamental to his presidency. And at the same time, there are constant bureaucratic elements we have to weigh to make sure our response is both effective and legally sound.”
In Trump’s second administration, those considerations don’t matter much, because the guiding legal principle, as one conservative lawyer close to Trump put it, is: “What are you gonna do about it?”
