1 of 2 | President Donald Trump speaks alongside Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as he signs an executive order for the Department of Defense to be renamed the Department of War in the Oval Office of the White House on Friday. Photo by Francis Chung/UPI | License Photo
President Donald Trump on Saturday threatened to unleash the newly named Department of War on Chicago in a crackdown on illegal immigration and crime, which Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker denounced as “threatening to go to war with an American city.”
On Truth Social, Trump displayed an artificial intelligence-generated image that appears to parody the 1979 movie Apocalypse Now with “Chipocalypse Now.” Helicopters fly over the Chicago skyline in a fiery background like Vietnam War scenes.
“I loved the smell of deportations in the morning,” was written as an adaptation of “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” from the film.
Trump is depicted in U.S. Army fatigues with sunglasses and wearing a Stetson U.S. Cavalry hat like the lieutenant colonel portrayed in the movie by actor Robert Duvall.
“Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR,” he wrote, one day after an executive order changed the name from Department of Defense, though Congress needs to approve the change.
Pritzker, a two-term governor and possible presidential candidate in 2028, quickly posted on X that “The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city. This is not a joke. This is not normal. Donald Trump isn’t a strongman, he’s a scared man. Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator.”
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, a Democrat who was elected in 2023, also posted on X that “The President’s threats are beneath the honor of our nation, but the reality is that he wants to occupy our city and break our Constitution. We must defend our democracy from this authoritarianism by protecting each other and protecting Chicago from Donald Trump.”
Trump has threatened to send the National Guard to Chicago to help fight crime. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem also wants to send agents, including with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to handle immigration matters. Some of the Guard and agents will be housed at Naval Station Great Lakes in North Chicago, about 40 miles north of downtown Chicago.
DHS asked the Pentagon to accommodate roughly 250 federal agents and 140 vehicles at the largest military base in Illinois and the Navy’s largest training station, according to an internal government memo obtained by CBS News this week.
Personnel and equipment began arriving this week, with plans to stay for 30 days, according to the memo.
DHS will “go to wherever these criminal illegal aliens are – including Chicago, Boston, and other cities,” the agency said in a statement to CBS News.
“Under President Trump and Secretary Noem, nowhere is a safe haven for criminal illegal aliens,” the department said. “If you come to our country illegally and break our laws, we will hunt you down, arrest you, deport you, and you will never return.”
In June, Trump sent National Guard troops and U.S. Marines to Los Angeles, ostensibly to quell protests. And last month, he deployed the guard to Washington, D.C., to deter crime.
On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer ruled the Trump administration violated the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of the military for domestic law enforcement. Breyer, appointed by President Bill Clinton, stayed the ruling until Sept. 12 to allow the administration to appeal.
Trump has mentioned Chicago, the third-largest city in the country, with a population of 2.8 million, could be next, though he also mentioned New Orleans, which has a Democratic mayor but a Republican governor.
Illinois has two Democratic senators.
“This tweet this morning was disgusting, to suggest that the troops are coming into Chicago or that the Department of War is going to be engaged is an embarrassment,” Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin said, according to WFLD-TV.
Trump, in targeting a blue state, has never received the most votes in three Illinois presidential elections.
“We’re going in. I didn’t say when, we’re going in,” Trump said in an Oval Office event Tuesday.
Seven days ago, Johnson signed an executive order that demands Trump end “his threats to deploy the National Guard to his city.” The “Protecting Chicago Initiative” is in response to a “credible threat” that troops will be deployed in a few days, and directs the city to pursue all legal and legislative avenues stop stop the deployment.
Trump has called Chicago a “hellhole,” despite violent crime having overall decreased in the city. Seven days ago, however, he also cited “six people were killed, and 24 people were shot, in Chicago the past weekend.”
“We’re going to make our cities very, very safe,” Trump said on Aug. 22. “Chicago’s a mess. You have an incompetent mayor. Grossly incompetent and we’ll straighten that one out probably next. That will be our next one after this. And it won’t even be tough.”
“No, Donald. You can’t do whatever you want,” Pritzker responded to the president on X.
Crime and immigration in Chicago
Through late August, Chicago had 266 homicides in 2025, according to the Chicago Police Department, the Chicago Tribune reported.
The top homicide rate in the United States is in Memphis, Tenn., with 409 deaths per 100,000 population, for a total of 372 in 2023, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Chicago wasn’t even in the top 15 in the country, with its 29.7 deaths per 100,000 population.
Among large metro counties, Orleans Parish in New Orleans has the most homicides per 100,000 people at 48. But Cook County, home to Chicago and its metropolitan area, had 805 homicides in 2023 — the most in the nation.
Chicago’s highest concentrations of crime is in neighborhoods on the South and West sides, and not downtown. The governor showed off parts of the city last week, including where crime dropped.
On Friday, Chicago Police Superintendent Larry Snelling said he had not received any information about federal deployment. “The last thing our department needs to be is in the dark,” he told the Chicago Tribune.
Pritzker said he thought the surge in ICE enforcement was tied to parades and celebrations of Mexican Independence Day. Organizers postponed a festival scheduled for later this month.
“It’s, I believe, a nefarious plan,” Pritzker told Jen Psaki on MSNBC on Friday. “It’s one that’s been repeated over and over again by, well, tyrannical dictatorships across history, where you try to incite the local population into some mayhem by sending in police or other disruptors and then claim that there’s too much mayhem on the ground and, therefore, there must be troops that are sent in. And, that’s how you basically convert a democracy into something other than that.”
He also said it was “kind of a frightening development in the history of the country that you have a federal government not communicating with state government about something like this.”
There were approximately 550,000 unauthorized immigrants in Illinois with a population of 12.5 million in 2023, according to the Pew Research Center. Nationwide, the total of undocumented immigrants is 14 million.
Through August, nearly 350,000 immigrants have been deported, including 200,000 by ICE, plus Border Patrol, Coast and self-deports sinceTrump returned to office in January, CNN reported.
