Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries on Sunday slammed President Donald Trump’s statement that he might deploy National Guard troops to Chicago, as the White House flexes federal power in the name of fighting crime.
“We should continue to support local law enforcement and not simply allow Donald Trump to play games with the lives of the American people as part of his effort to manufacture a crisis and create a distraction because he’s deeply unpopular,” Jeffries told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.”
Trump told reporters last Friday he was weighing sending troops to Chicago and New York, after federalizing Washington’s police department and bringing in the National Guard in mid-August.
Almost immediately, Illinois Democrats responded with force.
“An authoritarian power grab of major cities,” Gov. JB Pritzker called the move in a Friday post on X, placing it as the sole item on a list of “things People are NOT begging for” and needling Trump for his administration’s handling of the Epstein files. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said on X that deploying the national guard could “inflame tensions between residents and law enforcement” and “threaten to undermine the historic progress we have made” in fighting crime.
Democrats are skeptical of the president’s motivations, since crime in major cities — including Chicago — has been on a notable decline since the Covid-19 pandemic.
The National Guard troops detailed to the nation’s capital were authorized to carry “service-issue weapons” last week, and several Republican states have sent their own National Guard members to join the ones already dispatched to D.C. The Washington deployment will continue “for a while,” Trump said Thursday, even though nearly 80 percent of residents told a poll they oppose the president’s actions.
Jeffries pushed back on the notion that Democrats’ opposition to Trump’s national guard deployments meant the party isn’t serious about maintaining law and order, and accused the president of “exacerbating” the national mental health crisis that has contributed to violence.
“As Democrats, we want safer communities,” he told Bash. “We want to continue to make sure that crime can go down as it’s doing in Chicago, in New York, in Washington, D.C., and other places. And to do that, we should support local law enforcement. We should make sure that the flood of guns into these communities is cut off.”
