Workers Must Defeat Trump's War on Chicago

Sept. 9, 2025

As Trump Declares War On The City, Chicago’s Best Hope Now Is Workers

The city’s best hope is the working class, not Mayor Johnson.

As ICE launches “Operation Midway Blitz” and Trump doubles down on his threats to send in the National Guard.

President Trump has said a lot of hateful and stupid things in his life, and he’s posted a lot of offensive and often half-intelligible statements and images on the White House’s official social media account. But Saturday’s unhinged AI-generated image of him as the infamous Colonel Kilgore (does no one in the White House communications department understand satire?) from Apocalypse Now really takes the cake.

The image shows Trump in the character’s iconic cavalry hat, in front of a burning Chicago skyline with the text: “‘I love the smell of deportations in the morning …’ Chicago is about to find out why it’s called the Department of War.” Needless to say, implying that the United States Department of Defense will unleash napalm on a major U.S. city is not normal behavior for the commander in chief, but here we are. Although Trump may have walked back the post’s message (that he was declaring war on Chicago), the administration is clearly signaling that it is tired of playing by the rules. The gloves are off, so to speak, and so is the false veil of liberal capitalist normalcy that the Democrats have been trying so hard to maintain since 2016.

In a response on X, Democratic Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker condemned the post, stating that “Donald Trump isn’t a strongman, he’s a scared man,” a phrase that echoes California governor Gavin Newsom’s oft-stated claims that Trump’s authoritarianism is a sign of weakness rather than strength. But is this true? Or are such claims just wishful thinking and political bravado meant to obscure the Democrats’ own obvious inability and unwillingness to stand up to Trump’s reactionary agenda?

While it’s easy (all too tempting, in fact) to mock Trump’s buffoonery or to dismiss such posts as merely performative saber-rattling or desperate attempts to assert influence or to appease a small handful of Trump loyalists, that would be a mistake. Yes, in a previous world, such an outlandish statement by a sitting U.S. president probably would have been seen as a massive gaffe, creating political blowback even from within his own party. But we are living in extraordinary times, and it’s been clear for several days now that the Trump administration is not joking. It is dead serious about following through on its threats to effectively invade Chicago and other U.S. cities in the name of law and order — threats that remain popular among many of Trump’s supporters and much of the GOP, which has enthusiastically supported the president’s expansive use of the military for political purposes.

Whether the president chooses to immediately send the National Guard or to first send an army of ICE agents and then send the guard to defend them, as he did in Los Angeles, all indications are that Chicago is going to see a significant influx of federal agents and massive immigration raids in the coming days. Already, ICE is preparing detention centers in the suburb of Broadview and at a naval station in north Chicago, capable of operating as a base for hundreds of ICE agents. Meanwhile, on Monday, ICE officially announced that it was launching operation “Midway Blitz” in Chicago, and Trump doubled down on threats to send in the National Guard.

Thankfully, many Chicagoans are organizing themselves to confront the invasion. There have already been several protests against Trump’s plans, including marches on Labor Day and then again last Friday and Saturday. On Saturday, thousands of protesters marched through the streets of downtown, chanting, “ICE out of Illinois, ICE out of everywhere.” Many of these protesters wore keffiyehs in solidarity with the people of Gaza, and speakers connected Trump’s threat to occupy the city with the occupation of the West Bank. This is not only a powerful sign of how all of our struggles are connected, but it also shows how the fight against Israel’s genocide in Gaza has helped build a broader protest movement against imperialist regimes in Europe and the U.S. in particular.

Meanwhile, nonprofit organizations like Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights have been organizing ICE watch groups to warn residents against impending or unfolding raids and to inform them of their rights in case they are questioned or detained by ICE. The city has also launched its own “Know Your Rights” campaign to inform immigrants about how best to avoid detention and deportation, and the Chicago Police Department has so far said it will comply with municipal laws that forbid the police from cooperating with or helping immigration enforcement. Of course, as we’ve seen in other cities, while the Chicago police may not directly cooperate with ICE, they will be used to control, contain, and otherwise limit any attempts to protest or confront ICE members or the National Guard. While many, like Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic, have put their hopes in Chicago’s so-called socialist Democratic mayor Brandon Johnson to defend the city against Trump, it’s a mistake to rely on Democratic Party politicians to do the work of the working class. Johnson may have chanted “no federal troops in Chicago” during his Labor Day speech, but as the city executive, he is the one who will be sending the police to defend those very same troops if things get out of hand.

Several Chicago municipal unions, including the Chicago Teachers’ Union (CTU), which counts Johnson as a former member, have also begun to prepare for Trump’s impending attacks on immigrants in the city. The historically combative CTU, in particular, has taken a strong and unified stance against ICE and against Trump’s threats. Their members have been participating in a coordinated “Know Your Rights” leafleting targeted at students and their families. But the union is also asking that Chicago’s public schools prepare to move to remote learning to protect vulnerable students if there is an influx of ICE agents or the National Guard. “I am not here to relitigate remote learning,” said CTU president Stacy Davis Gates, adding, “I also am not here to relitigate the Civil War, but here we are.”

All this shows that there is a dedicated resistance growing in Chicago, and if Trump does send in troops or more agents, even more people will likely turn out to protest, mobilize, and confront them face to face. In Los Angeles, we saw how young people spontaneously came out to defend their communities by confronting and photographing ICE agents and sometimes through direct actions against ICE and ICE vehicles. Meanwhile, in DC, we also saw the community come out to harass (sometimes in the form of footlong sandwiches), to follow, and to record and report on the activities of ICE, the National Guard, and other federal agents.

It is quite possible, especially in the absence of more formal mass working-class organization, that the same kinds of spontaneous acts of resistance will happen in Chicago. But, as we saw in Los Angeles, spontaneous protests, violent confrontations, and mutual aid are important defensive tactics, but they are clearly not enough to stop Trump. Knowing your rights is important, but it is not a good defense when those rights are regularly being ignored and trampled on by a president who continues to disregard court orders, who welcomes such confrontations, and who uses ICE and the National Guard for his own political ends.

At the same time, the Democrats, like Governors Newsom and Pritzker and Mayors Bass and Johnson, are going to use everything at their disposal to avoid an escalation with the Trump regime and to limit the effectiveness of such actions. This is because the party is in shambles, and the DNC is racked with infighting; so a more aggressive left-wing stance would probably be unwelcome. If the mayor wants a future in the party, including not being primaried in the reelection, he’s likely going to be pressured to avoid any big protests. More than this, Trump is trying to use “law and order” as a wedge against the Dems, so having violent protests would, in the eyes of the mayor, “play into” this and potentially harm his reelection campaign.

This is why any confrontation with Trump has to come from the working class itself and must be grounded in working-class methods of struggle. The CTU’s demand for remote learning is an important one; parents should not have to fear being arrested for taking their children to school, but if the school district will not listen, the union and the families they serve have to be prepared to take collective action. This means shutting down all but the schools’ most essential emergency services and going on strike. But the teachers cannot be expected to lead this fight on their own. Sanitation workers, train and bus drivers, public service employees, Amazon workers, and unionized and nonunionized workers across the city need to coordinate, walk out of their workplaces, and shut the city down if they can.

A strike like that might sound like pie in the sky to some, especially the union bureaucrats who like to convince us that such things are just impossible, but how many of us, just six months ago, thought we would see the rule of law shredded, the federal government gutted, and the National Guard deployed to cities across the U.S. for no purpose other than to harass, arrest, and intimidate working people to appease Trump’s worst authoritarian impulses?

Whether it happens tomorrow or next week, or whether it takes months to organize, there is no time for doubt or second-guessing. The people of Chicago and working people across the United States have to stand together as a class for itself and directly and collectively confront the Trump regime and the useless Democratic Party, which has sold us out for decades.

[Top photo: Above photo: Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP.]