The Guardline
The Trump administration said on Monday that it was launching an operation targeting “criminal illegal aliens” in Chicago, dubbed Operation Midway Blitz.
The announcement came two days after President Donald Trump posted an AI-generated image on Truth Social depicting himself as Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore from Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now. In the film, Kilgore – an Air Cavalry Regiment commander who refers to Vietnamese people with a number of vile slurs – annihilates a village to secure a beach for surfing. Trump’s AI image was captioned with a riff on the character’s most famous line: “‘I love the smell of deportations in the morning…’”
“Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR,” the president’s post continued. It came a day after Trump signed an executive order changing the Defense Department’s name to the Department of War.
Following backlash to his threat to make war on America’s third largest city, Trump assured Chicagoans that “Only the Criminals will be hurt!” in another post.
That has not reassured Chicago’s elected officials.
“Trump swore an oath to protect the American people and defend the Constitution. Instead, he is declaring war on every American – including Chicagoans – who stands against his fascist agenda,” Congressmember Delia Ramirez, D-Ill, told The Intercept. “Attacking American cities and wasting billions of dollars on unlawful activities, while cutting essential services for working families are the tactics of wannabe dictators. Trump has betrayed his Constitutional duties and should be impeached.”
Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker shared a “Know Your Rights” pamphlet, which mentions that ICE officers can be asked to present a warrant, on X on Saturday. He encouraged those witnessing arrests to film them and share them with media organizations. “Once Donald Trump gets the citizens of this nation comfortable with the current atrocities committed under the color of law – what comes next?” he asked during a Sunday press conference.
Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill. – a former Blackhawk helicopter pilot for the Illinois Army National Guard who lost her legs and partial use of her right arm in combat in Iraq – also took exception to Trump’s Kilgore post but for different reasons. “Take off that Cavalry hat, you draft dodger. You didn’t earn the right to wear it. Stolen valor at its worst,” she wrote on X.
On Friday, Duckworth visited Naval Station Great Lakes, which local news outlets have reported the Trump administration is using as a base for federal troops in Chicago. Duckworth wrote on X that Navy personnel answered questions, but that “Trump’s DHS locked the doors and fled.” She continued: “That’s not how you act when you’re doing something legal.”
Experts, including a federal judge, say that the increasing use of military forces in the interior of the U.S. represents an extraordinary violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, a bedrock 19th-century law fundamental to the democratic tradition that makes it illegal to use American federal troops on domestic soil as a presidential police force.
U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer ruled last week that the Pentagon systematically used armed soldiers to perform police functions in California in violation of Posse Comitatus and planned to do so elsewhere. “President Trump and Secretary Hegseth,” he wrote, “have stated their intention to call National Guard troops into federal service in other cities across the country … thus creating a national police force with the President as its chief.”
Trump has also threatened to deploy National Guard troops to Baltimore, New York City, New Orleans, and Oakland. He thanked himself for turning Washington into a “SAFE ZONE” in a Truth Social post on Monday, adding: “Who’s Next???”
Members of Congress have called out Trump’s tyrannical tactics.
“The founders of this nation understood that an unchecked power to turn the military on the American people poses a grave threat to democracy and individual liberty,” said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill. “Trump’s decision to deploy the military in American cities is more fitting for an authoritarian regime than the democracy that our nation’s founding fathers fought for.”
Last week, The Intercept reported that a U.S. military occupation of Chicago could cost almost $1.6 million per day, according to an exclusive expert estimate.
Hanna Homestead of the National Priorities Project, a nonpartisan research group, found that if Trump deployed 3,000 National Guard troops to Chicago it would cost taxpayers around $1,590,000 per day. The figure exceeded the more than $1 million daily price tag of Trump’s troop deployment in Washington, D.C., which The Intercept reported last month. These runaway expenses connected to Trump’s efforts to turn the U.S. into a genuine police state are expected to climb into the hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars.
Pritzker’s office called out the costs. “Governor Pritzker has been loud and clear: sending military into a U.S. city without any local coordination is unconstitutional and un-American,” a spokesperson for the governor told The Intercept, noting that the funds would be better spent on community violence interventions, job training programs, or education. “Instead of undermining our existing public safety efforts with fear campaigns or military troops, the people of Illinois deserve real leadership that delivers real solutions.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom said last week that the deployment of federal troops to Los Angeles, which began June 7, peaked at around 5,500 personnel, and has since dwindled to about 300 National Guardsmen, has cost $118 million and amounts to “millions of taxpayer dollars down the drain.” A previous Pentagon estimate put the cost of the deployment at $134 million.
The White House did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the potential cost of domestic troop deployments running into the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars.
