The US defence headquarters, Pentagon, is planning to deploy military in Democratic-run Chicago as President Donald Trump prepares to crackdown on crime, homelessness and undocumented immigration, a model which the federal government could use later on in other major cities, officials said, reported Washington Post on Saturday. The preparation, which has been in the works for a few weeks, involves several options, including mobilizing at least a few thousand members of the National Guard as soon as September in America’s third most populous city, the report added. If the plan, which is still under consideration, gets approved by the Defence department then Chicago would see a parallel of what happened in June in Los Angeles when the Trump administration deployed 4,000 members of the California National Guard and 700 active-duty Marines despite repeated objections from the state and local leaders. Responding to the development, the Pentagon in a statement on Saturday said, “We won’t speculate on further operations. The department is a planning organization and is continuously working with other agency partners on plans to protect federal assets and personnel,” Reuters reported. Trump, on Friday, indicated his plans for Chicago as he defended the move to deploy 2,200 National Guards in Washington DC as an overdue effort to crack down on crime. While naming the cities he wanted to “clean up”, Trump said “Chicago’s a mess. You have an incompetent mayor. Grossly incompetent. And we’ll straighten that one out probably next. That’ll be our next one after this. And it won’t even be tough.” Officials aware of the matter reportedly said that a military intervention in Chicago has been long in planning, and the plan could have been in parallel with the expanded crackdown by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to search for undocumented migrants. The Democratic governor of Illinois, which includes Chicago, JB Pritzker has said in a statement the state has received no outreach from the Trump administration on whether it needed assistance. The governor added that there wasn’t any emergency warranting a National Guard or other military deployment. "Donald Trump is attempting to manufacture a crisis, politicize Americans who serve in uniform and continue abusing his power to distract from the pain he is causing working families," Pritzker said. (with inputs from Washington Post, Reuters)
