Over the weekend, we learned from the media that Donald Trump has been planning, for quite a while now, to deploy armed military personnel to the streets of Chicago. This is exactly the type of overreach that our country's founders warned against, and it's the reason that they established a federal system with a separation of powers built on checks and balances.What President Trump is doing is unprecedented and unwarranted. It is illegal. It is unconstitutional. It is un-American.No one from the White House or the executive branch has reached out to me or to the mayor. No one has reached out to our staffs. No effort has been made to coordinate or to ask for our assistance in identifying any actions that might be helpful to us. Local law enforcement has not been contacted. We have made no requests for federal intervention. None.We found out what Donald Trump was planning the same way that all of you did: We read a story in The Washington Post.If this was really about fighting crime and making the streets safe, what possible justification could the White House have for planning such an exceptional action without any conversations or consultations with the governor, the mayor, or the police?Let me answer that question: This is not about fighting crime. This is about Donald Trump searching for any justification to deploy the military in a blue city, in a blue state, to try and intimidate his political rivals.This is about the president of the United States and his complicit lackey, Stephen Miller, searching for ways to lay the groundwork to circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities and end elections.There is no emergency in Chicago that calls for armed military intervention. There is no inter- insurrection. There is no insurrection. Like every major American city in both blue and red states, we deal with crime in Chicago. Indeed, the violent crime rate is worse in red states and red cities.Here in Chicago, our civilian police force and elected leaders work every day to combat crime and to improve public safety, and it's working.Not one person here today will claim we have solved all crime in Chicago, nor can that be said of any major American metro area. But calling the military into a U.S. city to invade our streets and neighborhoods and disrupt the lives of everyday people is an extraordinary action, and it should require extraordinary justification.Look around you right now. Does this look like an emergency? Look at this. Go talk to the people of Chicago who are enjoying a gorgeous afternoon in this city. Ask the families buying ice cream on the Riverwalk. Go see the students who are at the beach after school. Talk to the workers that I just met taking the water taxi to get here. Find a family who's enjoying today sitting on their front porch and ask if they want their neighborhoods turned into a war zone by a wannabe dictator. Ask if they'd like to pass through a checkpoint with unidentified officers in masks while taking their kids to school.
And the important bit:
Finally, to the Trump administration officials who are complicit in this scheme, to the public servants who have forsaken their oath to the Constitution to serve the petty whims of an arrogant little man, to any federal official who would come to Chicago and try to incite my people into violence as a pretext for something darker and more dangerous: we are watching and we are taking names.
This country has survived darker periods than the one that we are going through right now, and eventually the pendulum will swing back, maybe even next year. Donald Trump has already shown himself to have little regard for the many acolytes that he has encouraged to commit crimes on his behalf.
You can delay justice for a time, but history shows you cannot prevent it from finding you eventually. If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law.
This man should be talking about kitchen table issues, which involves saying, "Donald Trump is distracting us from the price of eggs!"
Hakeem Jeffries must condemn!