Months ago, Donald Trump claimed that Los Angeles “would be burning” if not for the federal troops he was sending there. On Sunday, in a similarly pathetic attempt to justify his demand to send in the National Guard, he told reporters that Portland was “burning to the ground.” On Monday, he declared that Chicago was “like a war zone.” Is this city burning? There is a definite answer to the question. In all these cities, the answer is no. No American city is currently on fire, and if Chicago is a war zone, it’s because it’s being invaded by the president.
There is no clever plan behind Trump’s lies. The administration does not even bother to lie well. Trump need only count on others who will help him distribute distrust. In the case of Portland, rather than state facts it could easily verify, Axios called Trump’s lie “a claim local officials reject,” while Reuters has referred to “Democratic mayors and governors, who say Trump’s claims of lawlessness and violence do not reflect reality”—as if the existence of a mass conflagration or armed conflict were merely a matter of opinion, with two sides deserving equal consideration.
The actual threat to people in cities like Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago comes from the Trump administration, as it attempts to turn the military and federal law enforcement into the president’s personal enforcers. Trump’s lies about this project—and his broader project of mass deportation—are not meant to sound convincing; they are tools for getting other people to cast doubt on reality. Now, with his brutal immigration crackdown in Chicago, Trump is using lies and propaganda as tools alongside the masked officers and the midnight round-ups. All this is meant to cover up the obvious reality that may still be too much for many people to accept: The president is trying to wage war on an American city.
The Texas National Guard arrived outside Chicago on Tuesday—after a judge declined the city and state’s request to immediately block them—and on Wednesday, Trump threatened to arrest Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson. As federal troops arrive in the city, a federal court is considering a case brought by Chicago journalists, among others, who together have sued the Department of Homeland Security; Immigration and Customs Enforcement; Customs and Border Protection; the Department of Homeland Security; the Federal Bureau of Prisons; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF; and other agencies, along with Trump, for impeding the public’s First Amendment rights to protest and for obstructing their work as press. (Among the plaintiffs are Chicago News Guild, it should be noted; The New Republic is a NewsGuild of New York shop.) “Plaintiffs endeavor to protect their basic constitutional rights to express their views opposing the lawlessness unleashed on the Chicagoland area, and to safely report on that public outcry, without fear of again being shot, gassed, and beaten by federal agents,” their complaint stated. The “lawlessness” is coming from federal agents, directed by the federal government.
These events in Chicago kicked off one month ago, when Trump launched “Operation Midway Blitz,” a campaign predicated on more lies about the city that are not worth repeating, except to say that the Department of Homeland Security has described its anti-immigration raids there as being carried out in “honor” of a dead young woman. According to one Chicago alderperson, among the first people taken by anti-immigrant enforcement was a flower vendor. In response to the operation, activists called for daily protests at an ICE “processing” facility in nearby Broadview. Then, in mid-September, Border Patrol arrived in Chicago to launch “Operation At Large,” modeled on raids in Los Angeles in which courts have found agents to have engaged in racial profiling (though the Supreme Court allowed them to continue making what have since been dubbed “Kavanaugh stops,” for the justice who claimed such stops were lawful). A Border Patrol commander has since admitted that in Chicago, too, people are being detained based in part on “how they look.” Immigrants’ rights groups have said for weeks that the ongoing arrests are terrorizing whole communities. In some neighborhoods, people have stopped going to work, kids are not going to school, and streets are “dead.” Faith leaders have encouraged their communities to carry identification documents when they go anywhere, and tell people where they’ve gone, in case they disappear.
Over the last week, ICE and Border Patrol have considerably escalated the violence. Hundreds of agents stormed an apartment building on Chicago’s South Side. DHS said that in addition to ICE and Border Patrol, the FBI and ATF also took part in the raid. “My building is shaking,” one witness told ABC7 Chicago. “Then I look out the window, it’s a Blackhawk helicopter.” Another witness, who captured the raid and its aftermath live on her phone, told local independent media South Side Weekly and the Invisible Institute that she spotted vans parked in an adjacent school parking lot. Inside, she saw “Black U.S. citizens, women, and children” who had been “grabbed from their beds” and then “zip-tied and brought down to the waiting vans” without having been allowed to dress. “They are snatching up anybody,” she said—immigrants and citizens alike. (DHS even admitted they took four children who were United States citizens away from their parents.) One resident said that agents had tried to break down his door but were stopped by his double locks. When he headed to work hours later, his neighbors had disappeared.
On Friday, amid international outcry over the operation, the Department of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem returned to Chicago and joined a raid on a Walmart, taking with her the with far-right content creator Benny Johnson. “Tons of cars just pulled up speeding and there was a ton of yelling and commotion,” a Walmart employee told the independent media outlet Block Club Chicago. “They just grabbed a random shopper.” That same day, Border Patrol’s go-to camera-ready tough guy Greg Bovino led federal agents marching on the ICE facility in Broadview, the site of regular demonstrations and vigils. Bovino himself yelled at protestors to leave, threatening a “final warning” before agents surged into them. As agents began physically forcing protestors from the site, a pastor reported, one grabbed at his nipple and placed his hands on his throat. For weeks, anti-immigration agents have tossed smoke bombs at people in cars, used so-called “less lethal” weapons like rubber bullets and pepper balls on protestors, and deployed a staggering amount of tear gas, sometimes unleashing it almost casually into streets crowded with passersby.
As forecasted, Trump’s anti-immigrant force lacks the resources to deport the promised millions of immigrants. But the administration’s goal is to spread fear and project power just as much as deport people. Violent raids in Chicago have been accompanied by puerile social media content of federal agents posing and driving and grabbing people, aerial night-vision shots of people fleeing, and footage styled as if it were filmed by bodycams showing agents outfitted for an invasion and aiming weapons at people in their homes. Sometimes the propaganda is absurdly direct: a handful of guys in khakis, fleece vests, and baseball hats, for example, standing outside an ICE facility, pumping their fists and chanting “USA! USA!” as agents watch from the roof. DHS’s caption: “America for Americans. We are asleep no longer.”
It does not dispel the fear to view this material alongside the many videos captured by residents and activists, those that record the federal agents they see stalking people in their cars and outside businesses, but it does lend some reality to what are supposed to be overwhelming displays of force and discipline. Sometimes, the agents are just running alone or in pairs, plastic flexicuffs dangling from their waist, or ducking into their own cars, followed by other people’s cameras and shouts of “La migra!” as they drive away.
There’s a kind of truth to the propaganda: Trump and his enforcers would like us to perceive them as warriors against his enemies, as saviors of his supporters. It is difficult to come away from such imagery without the message that this is a president at war. Ahead of the Chicago operations, Trump posted what looked like an AI-generated image of himself as the Army lieutenant colonel from Apocalypse Now—here, styled as “Chipocalypse Now”—who blasted “Ride of the Valkyries” from helicopters before burning villages and killing civilians. “Chicago is about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR,” Trump added, along with three helicopter emojis. The meme was cited this week in the lawsuit filed by the state of Illinois and the city of Chicago that sought to block Trump’s deployment of the National Guard. “The American people, regardless of where they reside, should not live under the threat of occupation by the United States military,” the complaint begins, “simply because their city or state leadership has fallen out of a president’s favor.” In their minds, however, the aggressors imagine themselves as the ones under attack. Stephen Miller, long the frontman for Trump’s anti-immigrant plans, has claimed that there is “an ongoing legal insurrection,” by which he means court rulings unfavorable to the administration. The language is meant to conjure up an enemy within. In this case, that enemy is the federal judiciary, but just as often it is protestors or any resident who does not meet them with enthusiastic compliance.
Federal agents have lashed out at people who have followed them to alert others and witness arrests. On Saturday, when a group of vehicles was following a group of federal agents, a Border Patrol agent pulled over to shoot one of the drivers, firing on her five times. Before he left his vehicle, a body camera captured him saying, “Do something, bitch.” The government claimed she fired at them, an assertion the video contradicts. When a part-time gas station worker heard the gunshots and saw masked officers outside, he rushed to the scene to help, passing out free cases of water and paper towels to the people who had gathered there, whom the officers had gassed and shot with pepper balls. The worker told Block Club Chicago that he is also an immigrant.
The safety and freedom of Chicagoans, right now, does not hinge only on whether Trump succeeds in deploying the National Guard. Its residents are already living under grave threats of violence from federal agents. But as long as ICE and other federal agents are in Chicago, people have committed to watch out for one another, to “make it as costly as possible for this administration to wage war on our neighbors and our communities,” as Eman Abdelhadi, a scholar who studies gender in Muslim communities in the US, told the Movement Memos podcast, after a protest outside the ICE facility in Broadview. Trump’s war will roll on, even if the Guard is turned away from Chicago; it is set to go next to Memphis. I don’t think it will stop there. Chicago may give us a glimpse of what fire Trump will declare next, and offer a model for how to refuse.
