. HUMAN RIGHTS .
An article by Jon Queally from Common Dreams
Many thousands marched in solidarity through downtown Chicago over the weekend of September 6 to denounce the growing threat of President Donald Trump’s authoritarianism, with the Midwest’s largest city his latest target.
(Editor’s note: In more recent news, Trump was forced to back down from his threat to invade Chicago in the face of the united opposition in Chicago, including opposition by the mayor and by the governor of the State of Illinois.
Organized by the Coalition Against the Trump Agenda and the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, city residents demonstrated in droves on Saturday afternoon, walking down Michigan Avenue carrying signs that read: “National Guard Stay Out of Chicago!“; “ICE Out of Chicago!“; “No Trump! No Troops!“; “No Nazis – No Kings”; and “Rise Up! Fight Back!”
At a rally ahead of the march, Reverend Ciera Bates-Chamberlain of Live Free Illinois, a member of the coalition behind the march, denounced Trump’s threat to send a large-scale deportation force and National Guard troops to the city as well as the president’s wider far-right agenda.
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The struggle for human rights, is it gathering force in the USA?
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“Trump has spent billions on federal guards and the militarization of our community, pouring money into weapons and intimidation instead of investing in schools, hospitals, jobs, and housing,” Bates-Chamberlain said, according to Chicago’s Channel 5 news. “He has stripped us of vital resources meant to help us live, only to use them to try to break our spirits.”
Trump on Saturday threatened to show the people of Chicago “why it’s called the Department of War,” a reference to the recent rebranding of the Department of Defense. The president shared a meme from the Vietnam War film “Apocalypse Now,” with himself superimposed on the war-hungry Lieutenant Colonel, and wrote: “I love the smell of deportations in the morning.”
Even for Trump, known for his repulsive comments and increasingly autocratic behavior, the open threat to make war on a US city—despite later efforts to walk it back or efforts to gaslight people into thinking it didn’t mean what it clearly meant—was seen as a chilling escalation in rhetoric and intent.
“The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city,” said Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker in response to the post. “This is not a joke. This is not normal.”
On Sunday, Trump’s so-called Border Czar Tom Homan appeared on television and said, “You can expect action in most sanctuary cities across the country” in the week ahead, threatening immigrant communities with the likelihood of raids and saying National Guard troop deployments to back up those operations are “always on the table.”
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