President Trump promised Monday to send more federal police personnel to major cities facing increased violence, amid reports that the Department of Homeland Security is developing plans to send 150 federal agents to Chicago.
“New York and Chicago and Philadelphia and Detroit and Baltimore … we are not going to allow this to happen in our country,” Trump said in the Oval Office. “We will have more federal law enforcement. I can tell you that.
While DHS has not officially announced that it will send additional personnel to the cities Trump mentioned, the president has for weeks denounced crime rates in American cities, while criticizing Democratic mayors and other officials for failing to crack down. The summer surge comes amid widespread protests against police brutality and racial injustice, which in some cases led cities to review police practices.
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Trump has specifically targeted Chicago in recent weeks for the rise in homicides and other violent crimes there, blaming “liberal Democrats” for the surge and promising swift action.
Chicago police reported that 10 people died over the weekend from gun violence and 60 more were injured, including 10 minors, in a series of shootings that overshadowed those over the same weekend last year, in that 43 people had been shot, three fatally. according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
The Chicago Tribune reported Monday that DHS has a plan to send 150 agents from Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI, to the city to help local police fight violent crime.
“DHS does not comment on any allegedly leaked operations,” a department spokesman said in a statement when asked by Fox News about the report.
DHS has not released any details of the plan so far, but city officials and federal law enforcement officers questioned by the newspaper confirmed the deployment, although they were unable to provide any details about what HSI or US agents would do. who would be the commands. below.
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Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said she is concerned that Trump may send federal agents to her city given the controversy surrounding the crackdown on the Portland riots.
“We don’t need federal agents without any insignia to take people off the streets and hold them, I believe, illegally,” Lightfoot said, according to the Tribune.
The administration has enlisted federal agents, including the U.S. Marshals Special Operations Group and an elite team of U.S. Customs and Border Protection based at the U.S. border.
But Oregon Public Broadcasting reported last week that some officers had been driving in unidentified vans and snatching protesters from streets that were not near federal property, without identifying themselves. The reports led Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum on Friday to sue Homeland Security and the Marshals Service in federal court.
The complaint says unidentified federal agents have captured people from the streets of Portland “without warning or explanation, without a court order, and without providing any way to determine who is leading this action.”
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In a statement, DHS insisted that the agents are identifying themselves as Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents. But they admitted that the officers were not wearing name tags, citing recent incidents of doxing against the police.
Demonstrations against systemic racism and police brutality have taken place every day in the largest city in Oregon since Minneapolis police killed George Floyd on May 25, but have become more chaotic in recent weeks. Protesters outside the city courthouse in the United States set fire to the entrance to the building early Monday morning before federal agents fired tear gas at him.
Trump criticized protesters in Portland as “anarchists,” while praising federal agents for their work in trying to calm the riots.
“They’ve been there for three days and they’ve really done a fantastic job in no time,” Trump said Monday. “They get caught, a lot of people in jail.”
About the protesters, Trump said: “These people are not protesters, these people are anarchists. These are people who hate our country and we are not going to let it go on. ”
Morgan Phillips and David Spunt of Fox News and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
