The US Department of Defense has been planning a military deployment into Chicago for weeks, the Washington Post reported Saturday, one day after Trump reiterated his threat to follow up his occupation of Washington D.C. with troop movements into other US cities.

The Post reported that the Pentagon plan was “a model that could later be used in other major cities, officials familiar with the matter said.” The article continued:

The planning, which has not been previously disclosed, involves several options, including mobilizing at least a few thousand members of the National Guard as soon as September to what is the third most populous city in the United States.

On Friday, Trump blasted Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson as “grossly incompetent” and the city as “a mess.” He declared, “We’ll straighten that one out probably next. That’ll be our next one after this. And it won’t even be tough.” He added threats to New York City and San Francisco, and on Saturday he singled out Baltimore as another target for imminent military occupation.

All these threats are illegal and unconstitutional, as Trump has presented no justification for federalizing National Guard units in Illinois, New York or Maryland, as he did in California in June. The occupation of Washington D.C. is a special case, legally, since the District of Columbia is federal territory and the D.C. National Guard is at all times under direct federal control.

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, a billionaire Democrat, issued a statement declaring:

After using Los Angeles and Washington D.C. as his testing ground for authoritarian overreach, Trump is now openly flirting with the idea of taking over other states and cities... Trump’s goal is to incite fear in our communities and destabilize existing public safety efforts—all to create a justification to further abuse his power.

Chicago Mayor Johnson, a Democrat and former lobbyist for the Chicago Teachers Union, said, “We have grave concerns about the impact of any unlawful deployment of National Guard troops to the City of Chicago. The problem with the president’s approach is that it is uncoordinated, uncalled for, and unsound.”

It is hard to imagine more tepid language to describe a military occupation.

Both Pritzker and Johnson said they had received no contact from the federal government about the dispatch of troops and they had made no such request. Pritzker declared that there is “no emergency that warrants the president of the United States federalizing the Illinois National Guard, deploying the National Guard from other states, or sending active duty military within our own borders.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi said Thursday that she had given Pritzker and Johnson until August 19—last Tuesday—to revoke city and state laws limiting cooperation with federal immigration actions (so-called sanctuary city and sanctuary state laws). She told Fox Business that the message to Illinois and other states with similar laws was “you better comply or you’re next.”

According to the Post, “The officials familiar with the matter said that a military intervention in Chicago has long been in planning, probably in conjunction with expanded operations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to search for undocumented migrants.”

That has been the initial focus of the police-military occupation of Washington D.C. Of the 719 arrests since August 11, when Trump ordered troops into the city, more than 300 have been for immigration violations. The actual criminal arrests have been fewer than the DC Metropolitan police alone carry out in a typical two-week period.

The main function of the National Guard troops has been to serve as a show of force around federal buildings, like the White House and the Capitol, and at tourist sites, including the National Mall, the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. That may change this week, as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth issued orders Friday for the troops to begin carrying weapons—usually M-4 semi-automatic rifles or M-4A1 carbines that are fully automatic.

Under the 1973 D.C. Home Rule Act, Trump’s takeover of the Washington Metropolitan police is limited to 30 days, unless Congress passes legislation to extend his authority, which would require Democratic Party acquiescence in the Senate. But the deployment of National Guard troops from D.C. and six Republican-run states, as well as armed federal police from a half-dozen agencies, would continue.

If Trump federalizes the Illinois National Guard on the pretext that violence in Chicago constitutes an insurrection against state authority, both the governor and the mayor will limit their response to lawsuits, which will take months to proceed through the courts. In the meantime, they will do nothing—the same policy carried out by Governor Gavin Newsom in California, where a federal court case is underway.

Alternatively, Trump could invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 and send in regular troops, an action that would immediately escalate the attack on democratic rights, bringing the United States to the brink of open police-military dictatorship.

Trump has mentioned other cities as targets for military occupation after Chicago, including New York, San Francisco, Oakland and Baltimore. He claimed Friday that his occupation of Washington was a huge success in suppressing crime, claiming there were no murders in the District last week: “That’s the first time in anybody’s memory that you haven’t had a murder in a week.”

Actually, there were four weeks this year before the military occupation without any homicides, and the rates of most violent crimes have fallen significantly from 2024 to 2025, contrary to the lies being spewed out by the White House. CNN reported that while arrests for violent crime actually fell since August 11, arrests for immigration violations have risen tenfold during the same period.

Meanwhile, Fox News revealed that 1,700 National Guard troops were being prepared to deploy to 19 states this fall to back up Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and detention of migrants. The military planning provides for activation of relatively small numbers of soldiers from 19 states, all but one with Republican governors: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Wyoming. Two other Republican-run states, Mississippi and West Virginia, have deployed National Guard troops to Washington but are not involved in the immigration deployments.

The bulk of the National Guard troops will be deployed in Texas, where the Trump administration has just opened the largest concentration camp for immigrants in US history, at Fort Bliss, just outside El Paso and near the US-Mexico border. The troops will remain under the command of their home state governors regardless of where they are deployed. The White House denied that any of these troops would participate in the occupation of US cities threatened by Trump.

Despite the verbal protests from top Illinois Democrats, the national leadership of the Democratic Party has not lifted a finger to oppose Trump’s drive toward authoritarian rule. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, appearing on CNN on Sunday, said that Trump had “manufactured a crisis” and was “playing games with the lives of Americans,” but did not even hint that the US president was engaged in a step-by-step seizure of power. He declared, “We should continue to support local law enforcement.”

Rahm Emanuel, former mayor of Chicago, congressman and White House chief of staff in the Obama administration, noted to CNN that Trump, during his two terms in office, had never ordered the deployment of US troops overseas, but only into American cities. A would-be candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028, Emanuel demonstrated the real concern of this party of Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus: that Trump has neglected the global interests of American imperialism, particularly the war in Ukraine against Russia.