How the White House Justifies a Surge of Police in Cities
Recent actions to expand federal authority on monuments and gun violence provide the backdrop for Trump’s planned deployment of federal agents.
The Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse in downtown Portland, Oregon, typically guarded by federal officials, has been an epicenter of clashes between federal agents and protesters.
Photographer: Rebecca Smeyne/BloombergJust days after his inauguration in January 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump pledged to dispatch law enforcement agents to Chicago. It wasn’t the first time: The president has long fixated on the city’s crime rate, and he raised the prospect of federal intervention several times over the course of his campaign. His first directive after his inauguration read as a warning. “If Chicago doesn’t fix the horrible ‘carnage’ going on,” Trump wrote via Twitter, “I will send in the Feds!”
Once again, the president is promising to send federal police officers to Chicago. This time, the context is different. Trump has set off alarms among critics and protesters by deploying federal agents from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to regulate the ongoing protests over police brutality in Portland, Oregon. Now he says he means to do the same in other cities.