By Andy Rose

(CNN) — The potential for a showdown over crime in Chicago – not just between law enforcement and crooks but between the federal government and city leaders – is escalating.

With US troops patrolling Washington, DC, after a similar National Guard deployment in June to Los Angeles, President Donald Trump is ramping up his rhetoric against predominantly Democratic cities, with a direct target on the nation’s third-most populous.

“Chicago is the worst and most dangerous city in the World, by far,” Trump said with typical hyperbole Tuesday morning on Truth Social. “(Gov. JB) Pritzker needs help badly, he just doesn’t know it yet. I will solve the crime problem fast, just like I did in DC.”

“We’re going,” the president hours later told a reporter about sending in the National Guard. “I didn’t say when. We’re going in.”

Still, the White House refuses to coordinate with local law enforcement, Pritzker said this week, saying cooperation is a necessary step for fighting crime. And the state is ready to fight a troop deployment: “We will do everything possible to ensure that agents operating inside the confines of this state do so in a legal and ethical manner.”

Meanwhile, some residents – and at least one Democrat on the Chicago City Council – argue the National Guard could ease stress on police after a violent Labor Day weekend and say public safety “shouldn’t be this partisan.”

“Chicago is not the murder capital of the world; we all know that,” Alderman Raymond Lopez told CNN’s Laura Coates. “But we are a city that needs help.”

With no specific plans announced to send the US military to Chicago, here’s what we know about violent crime there and what Trump could do soon:

ICE operation expected in Chicago this week

Trump administration officials have been working for weeks to draw up plans for a federal troop deployment to Chicago the moment the president gives the green light, they told CNN on condition of anonymity.

“We have received credible reports that we have days, not weeks, before our city sees some type of militarized activity by the federal government,” Democratic Mayor Brandon Johnson said Saturday.

For now, a ramped-up immigration operation is the one thing the feds have confirmed: “ICE has informed our Illinois State Police Department that they are going to begin operations sometime later this week,” Democratic Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton told CNN’s Kate Bolduan on Tuesday.

Illinois State Police got a phone call Saturday from Customs and Border Protection indicating Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers would deploy to Chicago – the first communication Illinois got from the Trump administration on the issue, the governor said.

“First, Donald Trump is positioning federal agents and staging military vehicles on federal property, such as the Great Lakes naval base,” Pritzker said Tuesday. It’s also likely federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security and CBP will be stationed in the city, he added, citing “unauthorized patriotic officials inside the government and from well-sourced reporters.”

Residents should expect “unidentifiable” agents in unmarked vehicles with masks planning to raid Latino communities in the name of targeting “violent criminals,” despite a very small percentage of those targeted fitting that bill, Pritzker said.

“Instead, you’re to see videos of them hauling away mothers and fathers traveling to work or picking up their kids from school. Sometimes they will detain, handcuff and haul away children,” he said.

Any National Guard troop deployment in Illinois to fight crime is “not sustainable,” Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Tuesday.

“National Guard troops are not trained to do local law enforcement,” Raoul said. “FBI agents, DEA agents, ATF agents are trained to fight crime, and they have collaborated with local law enforcement. I would prefer more resources on that end than sending the military illegally into the streets of American cities against American citizens.”

Deadly holiday weekend mars broad crime drop

The back-and-forth followed a Labor Day weekend of deadly violence in Chicago worse than in the previous two years, with seven people shot to death, according to preliminary Chicago Police Department reports. In all, 56 victims were hit by gunfire, according to police reports.

A 14-year-old boy wounded in the arm and hand was the youngest victim, while seven people were wounded in a drive-by attack only a block from Chicago Police headquarters. An eighth homicide victim recovered over the weekend from Lake Michigan died by drowning, the Cook County Coroner’s Office told CNN; police have not said when they believe he was killed or why the case was classified as a homicide.

Over the same holiday period a year ago, six people were killed by gunfire in Chicago, CNN affiliate WTTW reported, though the figure did not count four people killed on a Chicago “L” train that was outside the city limits at the time of the shooting.

Before the holiday surge, city leaders had been pointing to a broader drop in violent crime in 2025.

“In the first six months of this year, Chicago has seen a 33% reduction in homicides and a 38% reduction in shootings,” said a news release last week from Johnson’s office. Overall, violent crime is down 21.4% this year, city figures show.

Trump has less legal authority in Chicago than in DC

Trump has been floating the idea of deploying troops inside Chicago for more than a week: “Chicago’s a mess. You have an incompetent mayor – grossly incompetent – and we’ll straighten that out probably next,” he said in the Oval Office in late August.

But if the president were to federalize the National Guard in Chicago, it is not clear what authority he would cite or what troops would do in the Windy City.

While the president has direct power over the DC National Guard and some authority over that capital city’s police department because they are in a federally controlled district, he does not have the same power in states.

“There’s very little stopping this president from doing what he wants to do,” said Andrew McCabe, former FBI deputy director and CNN senior law enforcement analyst.

“But he’ll find the legal environment and trying to replicate the same sort of surge of federal agents and the presence of National Guard troops very, very different in every city in this country that is not Washington, DC.”

Using federal troops in LA broke the law, judge rules

Trump last called up the National Guard against a governor’s will in June, sending 2,000 members of the California National Guard into the streets of Los Angeles to push back against protests opposing aggressive immigration raids in the area.

The National Guard played a limited security role, providing security to federal buildings and agents in a square-mile section of downtown where protests had become unruly. Local police, not guard members, responded when people violated a curfew declared by the mayor.

Still, California Gov. Gavin Newsom mounted a challenge in court, and a federal judge agreed Tuesday the situation in Los Angeles did not rise to the sort of emergency that would give Trump power to federalize the National Guard. The administration announced Wednesday it is appealing Breyer’s decision.

“President Trump and (Defense) Secretary (Pete) Hegseth have stated their intention to call National Guard troops into service in other cities across the country … thus creating a national police force with the President as its chief,” wrote US District Judge Charles Breyer, a nominee of then-President Bill Clinton.

“In short, Defendants violated the Posse Comitatus Act,” he added, a 19th-century law that generally prohibits the use of troops for domestic law enforcement purposes.

Although Breyer issued a court order preventing that sort of National Guard action from being repeated in California, it does not apply to other states, so there’s nothing in the decision that directly stops the president from activating it in Illinois.

Has a president ever called up the National Guard in Chicago?

The last time active-duty military was sent to Chicago against the wishes of local officials was on July 4, 1894, according to the archives of the Chicago Tribune, when a labor dispute at a Pullman factory crippled the nation’s rail industry and resulted in days of rioting.

“I protest against this, and ask the immediate withdrawal of the Federal troops from active duty in this State,” then-Gov. John Peter Altgeld wrote to President Grover Cleveland, according to the Tribune.

Since then, military deployments in Chicago have come at the direction of Illinois governors, including during the notoriously violent response to protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention and a precautionary call-up in preparation for the verdict against Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer found guilty in the murder of George Floyd.

“Let us be clear: there is no emergency in Chicago that warrants the President of the United States deploying the military,” 13 Democratic members of Illinois’ congressional delegation said in a Labor Day statement.

Federal intervention fuels debate

Despite the general drop in crime this year in Chicago, many residents still feel terrorized.

“My grandkids can’t sit outside. They can’t sit in the living room or at the kitchen table because a bullet may come through,” said Rochelle Sykes, who lives in a neighborhood with the city’s highest number of shooting victims per capita this year.

Sykes is not convinced the city’s crime stats are telling the whole story, she told CNN’s Omar Jimenez. Indeed, Chicago last year ended its contract with ShotSpotter, whose sound equipment is designed to detect shots fired even if police are never called.

“There’s a lot of things that go unreported,” Sykes said, “and these are things that us living in the neighborhood see every day.”

The city can “absolutely use federal resources from the National Guard,” Lopez, the alderman, said, raising the possibility of stationing troops in busy parts of the city, like on Michigan Avenue and at public bus and train stations.

“We are currently allowing officers to spend their eight-hour shift babysitting these locations when they could actually be in the neighborhoods, answering 911 calls,” Lopez told CNN.

Others, however, say calling in the National Guard could make things worse.

“The presence of military, for me, would put our communities in a situation where they feel like they are incarcerated,” said Cedric Hawkins, a resident of the southside Pullman neighborhood who has had nine relatives killed by gun violence.

And many state and local officials are warning that the idea of using the military to deal with crime in US cities is not a precedent they want to set.

“This president … wants to, quite frankly, make the military presence on American soil something that people normalize,” said Stratton, the lieutenant governor. “This is not normal. We cannot normalize it.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the day of Gov. JB Pritzker’s comments. He spoke Tuesday.

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