Chicago residents have failed to do the one thing necessary to avoid National Guard deployment — let federal officers do their jobs.
D onald Trump wanted an excuse to send National Guard troops to Chicago, and now he’s got it.
The Windy City in recent days has done its best imitation of Los Angeles, where resistance to ICE operations created the justification for a Guard deployment a couple of months ago.
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson hate the notion of the National Guard in the streets of the city, but have failed to rally Chicago residents to do the one thing necessary to avoid the deployment — let federal officers do their jobs.
The word should have gone out long ago: Don’t riot outside ICE facilities. Don’t ram cars into ICE vehicles. Don’t keep ICE officers from making arrests. Don’t follow ICE vehicles in an attempt to disrupt operations. Don’t act as though the Gestapo has descended on your city and that civil disobedience, or violence, is the only answer.
None of this should be a big ask. Instead, Pritzker and Johnson consider ICE operations inherently out of bounds and have played into the belief that something terrible is being done to Chicago.
According to Johnson, “the president of the United States has declared war on the people of Chicago,” as if detaining people who have no right to live or work here is a hostile act against U.S. citizens.
Pritzker says ICE needs “to get out of Chicago.”
The resistance to ICE shows that we have created enclaves that, as far as their political leaders and a significant element of the population is concerned, are supposed to be no-go zones for federal immigration enforcement. What should have been the exception — the defiance of federal immigration law — is now considered the norm, such that any disturbance of it is intolerable.
It’s bad enough that Chicago is a sanctuary jurisdiction, but Brandon Johnson just signed an executive order designating parts of the city “ICE free zones.” The order purports to put city-owned property off limits for use by ICE and encourages local organizations and businesses to do the same. Unless Johnson has found a way to suspend the supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution by mayoral fiat, this won’t stand.
Under the supremacy clause, federal law takes priority over conflicting state and local laws, and state and local property isn’t exempted. Otherwise, Governor Orval Faubus could have deemed Arkansas state property off limits to federal officials and troops when he fought to stop the integration of public schools by the feds in the 1950s.
Mayor Johnson says, “The right wing in this country wants a rematch of the Civil War.” He apparently doesn’t realize that if we are in the run-up to another Civil War, he’s in the role of Jefferson Davis as an opponent of federal authority.
Now, there’s no doubt that Trump was hoping that ICE operations would engender resistance, but once the resistance has happened, he’s on solid legal ground turning to the Guard. The president has what a 1971 Office of Legal Counsel memo called the “inherent authority to use troops for the protection of federal property and federal functions,” and 10 U.S.C. 12406 provides for the mobilization of the Guard when the president can’t enforce the law with regular federal forces.
While Trump loves the idea of troops in camouflage patrolling our big cities, and blue governors and mayors hate it, the role of the Guard is limited to protecting federal assets. The troops won’t, in and of themselves, move the needle on immigration enforcement or crime.
In a better world, there’d be broad agreement that federal immigration laws must be enforced, and cities with major crime problems would affirmatively seek federal assistance — offered, in turn, in a cooperative spirit by the feds — to take on gangs and get illegal guns off the streets.
This is not the world we live in. The legitimacy of federal immigration enforcement is under attack, and the federal government is acting to vindicate it.
© 2025 by King Features Syndicate