This week, Texas National Guard troops arrived in Chicago.
The deployment was the latest turn in the Trump administration’s efforts to more aggressively marshal boots on the ground to abet its mass deportation efforts in some American cities.
The situation on the ground in Chicago before the arrival of the National Guard was already tense. The mission, which President Donald Trump has named “Operation Midway Blitz,” had US Customs and Border Protection officials hanging around high-visibility areas of Chicago and suburban neighborhoods, conducting at least one military-style raid on an apartment building.
Democratic Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker has been vocal in his opposition to Trump’s moves. In response, the president called for the governor and the mayor of Chicago to be jailed on Truth Social.
Dan Petrella of the Chicago Tribune spoke with Today, Explained host Noel King to break down what has happened in the last month in the city, and how the intense federal attention has affected Chicago’s residents. Below is an excerpt of their conversation that has been edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Chicago is a big city, but there have been some high-profile instances of violence in the streets in the last couple of days. What is the mood there like?
Things are very tense. There’s reports all over the city and the suburbs of confrontations with agents from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. We see videos posted all over social media and hear from sources of folks having encounters with them on the streets. And there’s a lot of worry about what might happen to escalate the situation if military troops are sent out under ostensible purposes of protecting these federal agents who’ve been operating at ramped-up level here in the city and surrounding area for the last month or so.
Have you seen what President Trump is saying about the mayor and the governor?
I did, and yes, he is saying that they should be sent to jail, which is not entirely surprising. I mean, I guess we shouldn’t excuse that kind of language coming from the president, but it is not unusual from what we’ve heard from this president.
All right, let’s go back to where this all starts, and it begins with President Trump and something called “Operation Midway Blitz.” What is this?
This is a title that they have given to this sort of stepped-up immigration enforcement activity that they began toward the beginning of September. This came after a couple weeks of the president talking about violent crime in Chicago and the possibility of calling up National Guard troops to deal with violent crime.
That sort of shifted to stepping up immigration enforcement, which is something we’ve seen from the president before. They did a round of sweeps and things like that in the early days of his administration — even brought Dr. Phil and a camera crew to follow around ICE agents as they arrested people. They have done what I would characterize as a military-style operation at an apartment building in the South Shore neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago where there have been reports of them detaining and zip-tying young children who were there.
And then, the administration sort of produces these highly produced, almost Hollywood-style, videos that they post on social media to promote their cause and gather support for this operation. And they’ve said that they’ve detained about a thousand people. It’s really hard to get them to release actual, full information on who they’ve arrested. There have been several instances where there have been people who weren’t the supposed “worst of the worst,” but just people who got sort of caught up as collateral detentions. We saw a family in Millennium Park a couple weekends ago that was taken into custody. So, it’s been very sort of scattershot and chaotic from the point of view of folks out on the street.
The National Guard is not supposed to be deployed without the permission of a state’s governor. Gov. Pritzker is giving a lot of main character energy the past couple of weeks. How has he been making his case, and how have you seen the tenor change in the last couple of days?
I think the way you characterize it is very fair. He has tried to state — forcefully, and frequently, and on seemingly every national media outlet — that there’s not a crisis situation here in Chicago or in Illinois that warrants the use of National Guard, there is no wide-scale unrest really going on anywhere in the Chicago area right now that would warrant that sort of thing. He’s really been outspoken about that from the moment that the president started bringing this idea up again.
Last summer, Dan, I was in Chicago for the Democratic National Convention, and I spent a couple of days reporting from the South Side. And I talked to a lot of people who were very angry about illegal immigration. They said the South Side has been disinvested for years, people are coming in from Venezuela and they’re getting money, they’re getting schooling, they’re getting city services, and we never got that. Many of those people were voting for Donald Trump because of immigration.
So I wonder, you said these raids, some of them have been taking place on the South Side — are there people in Chicago who will say, “This is what I voted for, this is what we wanted?”
I would say that there is a very loud minority of voices that will say that, and I think the administration has been very active in highlighting some of those voices on social media, calling attention to folks who are sort of known quantities at City Hall, for example, where they show up and speak during public comment at city council meetings and things like that regularly.
That is not to say that those voices don’t exist. I don’t believe that they represent sort of a large swath of the public here in Chicago. I would note that, overall, President Trump only improved his vote total statewide in Illinois by about 2,000 votes from 2020 to 2024. So regardless of how it affects voting, there are the people who feel disaffected. And there’s been long tensions in Chicago between the Black community and the Latino community, and I think politicians over the years have sort of stoked those divisions.
There is still, at the end of the day, a question here about what the point of this is — of sending the Guard into Chicago against the governor’s wishes. Some people say it’s about optics. President Trump is enjoying the memes. And some people say it looks like the administration is hoping for a confrontation. Now, I am asking you to speculate here, but I wonder, you’ve done deep reporting on this — what do you think the administration is after right now?
That is a very good question, and I wish I had a better answer. I think that’s part of the problem, is that their real aim is unclear. I do think that there is a shock-and-awe approach to this, trying to project this image of power. And I do think they’ve obviously been told in federal court in California that they shouldn’t be doing what they’ve been trying to do with these Guard troops. They’ve been told in federal court in Oregon; we’re waiting for a federal judge here in Chicago later this week to rule on the state’s request for a temporary restraining order.
So it’s really, really hard to say what the end game is here. And that’s honestly one of the questions that the federal judge here in Chicago has tried to get the Trump administration to answer in court: where these troops will be sent, what their activities are going to be once they’re here. And those answers haven’t been provided.
