The Siege of Chicago - Trump's War on an American City

These are sentences you usually only hear in dystopian films: "Chicago is about to find out why it's called the Department of WAR," writes the President of the United States on Truth Social, accompanied by an embarrassing AI-generated image showing him as Colonel Kilgore from "Apocalypse Now." Next to it, the phrase "I love the smell of deportations in the morning." It is not ironic exaggeration, it is a threat - and it comes from the Oval Office. In Washington, Donald Trump is openly talking about occupying the third largest city in the United States. "We're going in. I didn't say when, but we're going in," he tells reporters without smiling. Behind the scenes, the buildup has long been underway.

An internal operations order that we have shows that the Department of Homeland Security asked the Pentagon to house 250 federal agents and 140 vehicles at Naval Station Great Lakes - the largest naval base in Illinois, just 50 miles north of the city. Personnel and equipment are already on site, and the base is reserved for at least 30 days.

The operations order, marked UNCLASSIFIED // FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY, reveals that the Department of Homeland Security wants to use existing Navy infrastructure to ensure the efficient and safe handling of aliens in accordance with federal regulations. The document speaks of supporting detention, processing, and deportation throughout the Chicago metropolitan area. It states that the goal is the rapid implementation of the president's directives to protect the American people from invasion, foreign terrorists, and other national security and public safety threats. Legally, DHS cites four directives signed by Trump on January 20, 2025: Executive Order 14167, which redefines the role of the military in protecting the territorial integrity of the United States, Presidential Proclamation 10886, which declares a national emergency on the southern border of the United States, Presidential Proclamation 10888, which guarantees the protection of the states from invasion, and Executive Order 14165 titled Securing Our Borders. These legal foundations, originally created for border protection and national crisis scenarios, are now being used as justification to put a city in the interior of the country under massive federal pressure.

This means that Chicago is facing a prolonged, military-style operation. Activists, church groups, and schools are preparing for home raids and mass arrests, many are postponing festivals and events, including the major Mexican Independence Day celebration downtown. For thousands of people without valid papers, fear is constant. They know that a single traffic stop can destroy their lives. The political dimension is enormous. Governor JB Pritzker reacted with sharp words: "The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city. This is not a joke. This is not normal." Mayor Brandon Johnson spoke of an attack on democracy itself: "The reality is that he wants to occupy our city and break our Constitution." Both announced lawsuits against the federal government.

Legally, the situation is precarious. Just this week, a federal court in California ruled that the deployment of National Guard and US Marines in Los Angeles violated the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of the military for domestic law enforcement. That a naval base is now becoming the command center for ICE raids underscores how far the government is willing to go. Our research shows that the operation is not only about deporting convicted criminals but also about conducting area-wide checks in entire neighborhoods - Operation Community Sweep, as it is called in the operations order. The goal is maximum pressure to force people without papers into self-deportation. Civil rights organizations call it state-organized intimidation.

The social and economic effects are already being felt. Restaurants in Latino neighborhoods report declines of up to 40 percent because customers are staying home out of fear. Schools are reporting rising absenteeism, teachers tell of children not coming to class in the morning because their parents are afraid ICE is outside the door. Clinics are seeing fewer patients because people without insurance avoid the risk of registering. And small businesses that depend on undocumented workers are facing closure. In supermarkets, vegetables are left on the shelves because farmworkers are missing - an economic shock that will be felt far beyond Chicago.

The images from Chicago on Labor Day showed that resistance is growing: hundreds blocked an ICE processing center, unions and churches called for peaceful protests. But the fear remains that any escalation could give Trump a pretext to deploy the National Guard - a threat he has repeatedly made. For us as journalists, it is clear that this operation is a stress test for American democracy. This is not just about migration, this is about the relationship between government and citizens, about the question of whether a president may use military means to bring cities into line. The decision to use a naval base as an operations center is a symbolic step: the border no longer runs only along the Rio Grande, it runs through the middle of Chicago. That we can make this information public at all is the result of painstaking research, anonymous sources, and people willing to take a risk.

But that is exactly why independent journalism is so important, and it needs support. If we do not tell these stories, if we do not document how far a government is willing to go, then we are silent about a creeping state of emergency. Chicago will become the stage for an authoritarian experiment in the coming weeks, and at the same time there is a race against time to save Honduran children from Trump's deportations - see link: https://kaizen-blog.org/en/wettlauf-gegen-die-zeit-alle-kaempfen-um-honduranische-kinder-vor-trumps-abschiebungen-zu-retten/ It will be another very hard week, full of research, sorting documents, and late-night calls with lawyers and activists, but we face these battles because they are not only important for America but for the very idea of a free, humane society. Every hour gained can determine whether a child ends up on a plane to Tegucigalpa or remains safe. And that is precisely why we cannot look away, cannot fall silent, cannot grow numb. What is happening in Chicago, what is happening at the airports and in the courts, concerns us all - and whether democracy withstands this depends on how closely we watch and how loudly we speak out, everywhere in the world.