Chicago – August 23, 2025
President Donald Trump said Friday that Chicago will be the next city that his administration targets for a federal crackdown on crime and suggested a longer and more intense campaign in the nation’s capital.
Trump said from the Oval Office. “I think Chicago will be our next and then we’ll help with New York.” He said he could keep National Guard members in the city “as long as I want” by declaring a national emergency, a prospect likely to unnerve city residents.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said in a statement: “We take President Trump’s statements seriously, but to be clear the City has not received any formal communication from the Trump administration regarding additional federal law enforcement or military deployments to Chicago.” He said homicides, robberies and shootings have dropped significantly in the past year.
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker said on X that Trump had used Los Angeles and Washington, DC, as “his testing ground for authoritarian overreach” and he was now trying “to incite fear in our communities and destabilize existing public safety efforts — all to create a justification to further abuse his power.”
For his part, Trump attacked Johnson as “incompetent,” claiming the city has grown dangerous on his watch and vowing to use the federal government to intervene.
It was not immediately clear how a federal crackdown in Chicago would work and how closely it would resemble what has happened in DC. The district is not a part of any state and has restrictions on its ability to govern its own affairs, so the president has the ability to effectively federalize its police force.
