President Donald Trump said Tuesday he would send members of the National Guard into Chicago over the city’s crime problem, but he did not specify a date, as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations are expected to be ramped up in next few days.
“Well, we’re going in. I didn’t say when we’re going in,” Trump said of the National Guard in speaking to reporters in the Oval Office at an unrelated news conference. “Look, I have an obligation. This isn’t a political thing. I have an obligation when we lose, when 20 people are killed over the last two and a half weeks, and 75 are shot with bullets.”
Trump renewed his criticisms of Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker, an ardent opponent of having the National Guard deployed in Chicago. Pritzker has said Trump’s attempts to federalize the military for law enforcement are unconstitutional and an attempt to intimidate dissent from his policies.
“There’s no place, there’s no place in the world, including you can go to Afghanistan. You can go to places that you would think of, they don’t even come close to this. Chicago is a hellhole right now,” he said.
The president’s comments came following a Labor Day weekend that saw more than four dozen people shot and eight killed between 10 p.m. Friday and 5 p.m. Monday.
Even though the spotlight was once again turned on Chicago violence with the threat of Trump sending in the National Guard, CPD records show the 2025 Labor Day weekend’s killing total actually was slightly down compared to other recent years. Records reviewed by the Tribune show that the Labor Day weekend in Chicago has in recent years seen, on average, 11 killings and about 38 other nonfatal shootings.
The worst recent year came in 2020, when 14 people were killed and 44 were wounded over that holiday period. This year’s figure comes during a continuing trend of better violence numbers in the city since the COVID-19 pandemic. Before the weekend began, Chicago had recorded 266 homicides in 2025, according to the Police Department. That was a 32% decline in killings from the same time period in 2024. Total shooting incidents also were down 36% citywide.
Trump had previously warned of National Guard intervention in Chicago but had said he would like to be invited by Pritzker — something the two-term Democratic governor said would not happen. Pritzker has expressed fears that protests over scaled-up ICE enforcement activity would provide a pretext for Trump to mobilize the Guard.
Trump contended his decision to mobilize the Guard and send Marines into Los Angeles in response to protests over immigration enforcement had saved the city. Only hours earlier, a federal judge in California ruled Trump’s mobilization of the Guard in Los Angeles was unconstitutional.
Trump said the ruling was made by a “radically left judge.”
Also during the press conference, Trump contended that a morning TV show interviewed a dozen people urging Guard intervention in Chicago.
“Most of them were African American. They were Black. And they were saying, ‘Please, please, please, let the president send it.’ These were people from Chicago. ‘Please. We need help. We need help. We can’t walk outside. We’re petrified,’” Trump said.
“If the governor of Illinois would call up, call me up. I would love to do it now. We’re going to do it anyway. We have the right to do it because I have an obligation to protect this country,” he said.
Trump, who federalized law enforcement in Washington, D.C., as well as deployed the National Guard, said the nation’s capital “serves as a template, and we’re going to do it elsewhere, but Chicago is certainly going to be high.”
But Trump has greater power to federalize resources, such as the Guard, in the District of Columbia, which is not a state. The president’s power is limited elsewhere by state sovereignty.
“It’s an honor to do it … A lot of presidents wouldn’t do what I’m doing. I don’t need this heat. But when I watch television last night and I’m watching the news and I see that nine people were killed in Chicago and 54 were badly wounded with bullets. I say, ‘That’s not this country. We have to do something,’” Trump said. “We have a lot of people. We have a great force. We have a great military force.”
After he spoke to reporters, the White House issued a statement asking, “For J.B. Pritzker, When Will Enough Be Enough?”
“Pritzker is too blinded by Trump Derangement Syndrome to … act in the best interest of his constituents and end this bloodshed,” the statement said. “The Trump Administration’s message to Chicagoans and residents in Democrat-run cities nationwide is simple: You don’t have to live like this.”
Tribune reporter Sam Charles contributed.
