If a U.S. president was just itching to militarize the streets of a politically unfriendly American city like some blustery third-world despot, how would he go about it?
First, he might start with a pretense that verges on legitimate — say, immigration enforcement. But rather than the routine kind of enforcement that quietly happens all the time, he’d do better to arrange for big showy raids by uniformed troops, well aware that this approach would whip up local protests.
He’d know all it takes is a few violent protesters among the mostly peaceful ones to give him an excuse to ramp up military presence. The dark beauty of this scheme is that it becomes self-justifying: The more he militarizes a city, the more a few hothead protesters might give him the excuse he wants to militarize it more.
Conversely, the more local protesters refuse to take the bait toward violence, the more glaringly obvious that president’s abuse of power becomes. And that’s the most effective protest there is.
President Donald Trump’s militarization of Chicago began with increasingly brazen raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. This included a helicopter raid last week on a residential apartment building that resulted in children and U.S. citizens being zip-tied and building-wide property damage being inflicted.
As with most of the administration’s escalating ICE raids in Chicago and other cities lately, the targets weren’t the relatively small percentage of unauthorized immigrants who have committed violent crimes and were initially the excuse for Trump’s anti-immigrant crusade. They were primarily living there peacefully awaiting resolution of pending asylum cases.
Chicago, the epitome of Trump’s “Democrat cities” (someone needs a grammar lesson), reacted, predictably, with citizen protests. Most were peaceful — even after one ICE agent was caught on video casually lobbing teargas canisters out the window of an SUV near an elementary school where no apparent violence was taking place.
Unfortunately, some protesters did ultimately turn violent, including some who used their cars to surround and ram ICE vehicles on Saturday. Agents fired at them, injuring one woman (a U.S. citizen) who was herself armed with a semi-automatic weapon. She faces criminal charges.
Media reports indicate the confrontation took place during a “routine patrol” by the ICE agents.
Pause and consider how odd it would have sounded just a few short months ago to so nonchalantly describe the specter of armed federal troops on “routine patrol” of an American city nowhere near the southern border.
Trump now says he’s sending 300 National Guard troops into Chicago to deal with “out of control crime” — a serious issue but one that remains a local jurisdictional task, not a federal one. They’re justifying it in part on the claim that Chicago has become, in the words of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, a “war zone.”
Indeed, helicopters deploying rappelling masked agents onto buildings, lobbed teargas and roving gangs of armed federal troops does in fact conjure up that chilling phrase. But as Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker aptly retorted Sunday, Trump and his people “are the ones that are making it a war zone.”
What Trump has done in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and now Chicago is, in addition to being very likely unconstitutional, un-American and dangerous. The fact that he now routinely muses about which politically blue city will next see armed soldiers on their streets (potentially including St. Louis), with only passing reference to his concocted crime-and-immigration excuses for it, should be horrifying to every American regardless of party loyalty.
But citizens in Chicago and everywhere else must remember: Trump is counting on his provocative use of troops in U.S. cities to spur violence by protesters, making the next deployment that much easier for him to justify. It’s what he wants.
Don’t give it to him. Even in the face of this unprecedented bid to make America authoritarian, peaceful protest is, as always, the only legitimate kind. In this case, it’s also the strategically smart kind.
-The St. Louis Post-Dispatch
