#americancities — Public Fediverse posts

Chicago Crime: Failed by America, Again

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — July 10, 2026

Let’s start with the part that matters most.

I went looking for evidence that recent immigrants caused some kind of crime wave in Chicago over the last 15 years. I looked for it because people keep saying it, and because once somebody says something often enough in the United States, half the country starts treating it like it came down from Mount Sinai.

I could not find credible evidence for that claim.

That does not mean nobody who immigrated to the United States ever committed a crime in Chicago. Of course some did. Human beings commit crimes. That is not the question. The question is whether there is credible evidence that recent immigrants drove a crime wave in Chicago over the last 15 years.

I could not find it.

And there is a basic reason for that. Chicago’s public crime data do not appear to track immigration status in the normal public-facing crime dataset, and the Chicago Police Department says its officers are prohibited from asking about immigration status during routine interactions, traffic stops, or when someone reports a crime (Chicago Data Portal, n.d.; Chicago Police Department, n.d.). So right out of the gate, anyone making a sweeping statistical claim about “immigrant crime in Chicago” should be asked a very simple question: what dataset are you using?

Because if the city’s standard crime reporting does not cleanly track immigration status, then a whole lot of loud people are bluffing.

And that is before you get to the actual research.

When researchers did look closely at Chicago neighborhoods from 2010 through 2021, they found that immigration was unrelated to increases in gang violence and actually acted as a protective force against non-gang gun violence in Chicago community areas (Shihadeh et al., 2026). That is about as close as you can get to the claim people keep throwing around, and it cuts in the opposite direction.

The broader national evidence cuts the same way. A National Bureau of Economic Research study covering 150 years of U.S. data found that immigrants have had lower incarceration rates than the U.S.-born for a century and a half, and that in the modern era immigrants are substantially less likely to be incarcerated than people born in the United States (Abramitzky et al., 2023). If somebody wants to argue that Chicago is some giant exception to that pattern, then the burden is on them to prove it.

Good luck.

There is a narrower point people can make, and it needs to be handled honestly. Local reporting in 2024 noted that migrant arrests had increased since buses of asylum seekers began arriving in Chicago in 2022, but the vast majority of those arrests were for nonviolent offenses such as traffic violations and theft, not some grand collapse of public order (WTTW News, 2024). That is not nothing, but it is also not proof of a citywide immigrant-driven crime wave. It is a much smaller and far less dramatic claim.

Now let’s get to the second part, because this is where people’s politics start outrunning reality.

If you ask what can be said about crime in Chicago over the last 15 years, the answer is not “straight line down” and it is not “everything is getting worse.” The honest answer is messier than that.

Chicago, like a lot of the United States, saw major crime declines over the long run from the 1990s into the 2010s, then saw a serious pandemic-era disruption, especially in shootings and homicides, and then began to come back down again afterward. The University of Chicago Crime Lab’s 2024 end-of-year analysis found that Chicago homicides and nonfatal shootings both declined again in 2024 from the previous year, though the city still had work to do and gun violence remained too lethal (University of Chicago Crime Lab, 2025). Chicago Police’s own 2024 review likewise reported year-over-year declines in homicides and shooting incidents (Chicago Police Department, 2025).

That pattern fits the bigger national picture more than the panic merchants want to admit.

The FBI’s 2024 national crime release reported that violent crime in the United States fell an estimated 4.5% in 2024 compared with 2023, while murder and non-negligent manslaughter fell an estimated 14.9%, robbery fell 8.9%, and aggravated assault fell 3.0% (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2025). The Bureau of Justice Statistics’ 2024 report also found that property crime rates declined from 2023 to 2024 (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2026). Zoom out even farther and the long-run trend is even clearer: using FBI data, Pew reported that the violent crime rate in the United States fell 49% between 1993 and 2022 (Gramlich, 2024).

So yes, the basic suspicion is right. Over the long run, crime in the United States has generally gone down, not up, even though there have been ugly interruptions, including the pandemic spike. Chicago has shared in that larger pattern, though not in a neat, pretty, drama-free way.

Which brings me back to the political lie at the center of this whole thing.

Chicago has been useful for generations as a stage set for other people’s fears. If somebody wants to sell white panic, suburban panic, law-and-order panic, anti-Black panic, anti-poor panic, or anti-immigrant panic, Chicago is one of the names they reach for. They do that because the city already lives large in the American imagination. It has history, size, violence, corruption, labor conflict, segregation, machine politics, and enough mythology to stock a warehouse. That makes it easy to weaponize.

But easy is not the same thing as true.

What I found is that the immigrant-crime claim does not hold up well when you push on it. The data are not set up to support the broad claim cleanly in the first place, and the best Chicago-specific research I found points away from the stereotype, not toward it (Chicago Data Portal, n.d.; Shihadeh et al., 2026). The broader national evidence points away from it too (Abramitzky et al., 2023).

And once you strip that lie away, what are you left with?

You are left with Chicago being Chicago: a hard city, a real city, a city with crime problems that are rooted in poverty, segregation, guns, political failure, neighborhood abandonment, and the long American habit of treating some people as disposable. You are left with a country where crime, over the long haul, has generally declined even while politicians and media hustlers keep acting like we are all living through the fall of Rome (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2025; Gramlich, 2024).

That is the trick, isn’t it?

Reality got better in a lot of ways, and the sales pitch got crazier anyway.

So no, I do not buy the idea that immigrants have been dragging Chicago down for the last 15 years. I went looking for evidence, and I did not find credible support for that story. What I found instead was a familiar American racket: take a complicated city, flatten it into a slogan, blame outsiders, and hope nobody bothers to check the numbers.

I checked.

The numbers did not cooperate.

This essay is written by Cliff Potts, Editor-in-Chief of WPS News. WPS News has been active in one form or another on the internet since 2009; for more information, visit https://cliffpotts.org

If this work helps you understand what’s happening, help me keep it going: https://www.patreon.com/cw/WPSNews

References

Abramitzky, R., Boustan, L. P., Jácome, E., & Pérez, S. (2023). Immigrants and incarceration: New evidence over the last 150 years (Working Paper No. 31440). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://www.nber.org/papers/w31440

Bureau of Justice Statistics. (2026). Crime known to law enforcement, 2024. U.S. Department of Justice. https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/ckle24.pdf

Chicago Data Portal. (n.d.). Crimes — 2001 to present. City of Chicago. https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/dataset/crime.html

Chicago Police Department. (n.d.). Immigrant, migrant, and refugee communities. https://www.chicagopolice.org/imr/

Chicago Police Department. (2025). 2024 in review. https://www.chicagopolice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024-in-Review.pdf

Federal Bureau of Investigation. (2025, August 5). FBI releases 2024 reported crimes in the nation statistics. https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-releases-2024-reported-crimes-in-the-nation-statistics

Gramlich, J. (2024, April 24). What the data says about crime in the U.S. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-data-says-about-crime-in-the-us/

Shihadeh, E. S., Barranco, R., Stansfield, R., & Ousey, G. C. (2026). Immigration and gun violence in Chicago neighborhoods: Protection from non-gang violence but not gang violence. Journal of Criminal Justice, 92, 102179. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2026.102179

University of Chicago Crime Lab. (2025, January 3). 2024 end-of-year analysis: Chicago crime trends. https://crimelab.uchicago.edu/resources/2024-end-of-year-analysis-chicago-crime-trends/

WTTW News. (2024, September 19). Study challenges immigrant crime narrative: “There’s a disconnect between what data shows and what people hear.” https://news.wttw.com/2024/09/19/study-challenges-immigrant-crime-narrative-there-s-disconnect-between-what-data-shows-and

Mikasi from Kenosha, USA, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Chicago Crime: Failed by America, Again

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — July 10, 2026

Let’s start with the part that matters most.

I went looking for evidence that recent immigrants caused some kind of crime wave in Chicago over the last 15 years. I looked for it because people keep saying it, and because once somebody says something often enough in the United States, half the country starts treating it like it came down from Mount Sinai.

I could not find credible evidence for that claim.

That does not mean nobody who immigrated to the United States ever committed a crime in Chicago. Of course some did. Human beings commit crimes. That is not the question. The question is whether there is credible evidence that recent immigrants drove a crime wave in Chicago over the last 15 years.

I could not find it.

And there is a basic reason for that. Chicago’s public crime data do not appear to track immigration status in the normal public-facing crime dataset, and the Chicago Police Department says its officers are prohibited from asking about immigration status during routine interactions, traffic stops, or when someone reports a crime (Chicago Data Portal, n.d.; Chicago Police Department, n.d.). So right out of the gate, anyone making a sweeping statistical claim about “immigrant crime in Chicago” should be asked a very simple question: what dataset are you using?

Because if the city’s standard crime reporting does not cleanly track immigration status, then a whole lot of loud people are bluffing.

And that is before you get to the actual research.

When researchers did look closely at Chicago neighborhoods from 2010 through 2021, they found that immigration was unrelated to increases in gang violence and actually acted as a protective force against non-gang gun violence in Chicago community areas (Shihadeh et al., 2026). That is about as close as you can get to the claim people keep throwing around, and it cuts in the opposite direction.

The broader national evidence cuts the same way. A National Bureau of Economic Research study covering 150 years of U.S. data found that immigrants have had lower incarceration rates than the U.S.-born for a century and a half, and that in the modern era immigrants are substantially less likely to be incarcerated than people born in the United States (Abramitzky et al., 2023). If somebody wants to argue that Chicago is some giant exception to that pattern, then the burden is on them to prove it.

Good luck.

There is a narrower point people can make, and it needs to be handled honestly. Local reporting in 2024 noted that migrant arrests had increased since buses of asylum seekers began arriving in Chicago in 2022, but the vast majority of those arrests were for nonviolent offenses such as traffic violations and theft, not some grand collapse of public order (WTTW News, 2024). That is not nothing, but it is also not proof of a citywide immigrant-driven crime wave. It is a much smaller and far less dramatic claim.

Now let’s get to the second part, because this is where people’s politics start outrunning reality.

If you ask what can be said about crime in Chicago over the last 15 years, the answer is not “straight line down” and it is not “everything is getting worse.” The honest answer is messier than that.

Chicago, like a lot of the United States, saw major crime declines over the long run from the 1990s into the 2010s, then saw a serious pandemic-era disruption, especially in shootings and homicides, and then began to come back down again afterward. The University of Chicago Crime Lab’s 2024 end-of-year analysis found that Chicago homicides and nonfatal shootings both declined again in 2024 from the previous year, though the city still had work to do and gun violence remained too lethal (University of Chicago Crime Lab, 2025). Chicago Police’s own 2024 review likewise reported year-over-year declines in homicides and shooting incidents (Chicago Police Department, 2025).

That pattern fits the bigger national picture more than the panic merchants want to admit.

The FBI’s 2024 national crime release reported that violent crime in the United States fell an estimated 4.5% in 2024 compared with 2023, while murder and non-negligent manslaughter fell an estimated 14.9%, robbery fell 8.9%, and aggravated assault fell 3.0% (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2025). The Bureau of Justice Statistics’ 2024 report also found that property crime rates declined from 2023 to 2024 (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2026). Zoom out even farther and the long-run trend is even clearer: using FBI data, Pew reported that the violent crime rate in the United States fell 49% between 1993 and 2022 (Gramlich, 2024).

So yes, the basic suspicion is right. Over the long run, crime in the United States has generally gone down, not up, even though there have been ugly interruptions, including the pandemic spike. Chicago has shared in that larger pattern, though not in a neat, pretty, drama-free way.

Which brings me back to the political lie at the center of this whole thing.

Chicago has been useful for generations as a stage set for other people’s fears. If somebody wants to sell white panic, suburban panic, law-and-order panic, anti-Black panic, anti-poor panic, or anti-immigrant panic, Chicago is one of the names they reach for. They do that because the city already lives large in the American imagination. It has history, size, violence, corruption, labor conflict, segregation, machine politics, and enough mythology to stock a warehouse. That makes it easy to weaponize.

But easy is not the same thing as true.

What I found is that the immigrant-crime claim does not hold up well when you push on it. The data are not set up to support the broad claim cleanly in the first place, and the best Chicago-specific research I found points away from the stereotype, not toward it (Chicago Data Portal, n.d.; Shihadeh et al., 2026). The broader national evidence points away from it too (Abramitzky et al., 2023).

And once you strip that lie away, what are you left with?

You are left with Chicago being Chicago: a hard city, a real city, a city with crime problems that are rooted in poverty, segregation, guns, political failure, neighborhood abandonment, and the long American habit of treating some people as disposable. You are left with a country where crime, over the long haul, has generally declined even while politicians and media hustlers keep acting like we are all living through the fall of Rome (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2025; Gramlich, 2024).

That is the trick, isn’t it?

Reality got better in a lot of ways, and the sales pitch got crazier anyway.

So no, I do not buy the idea that immigrants have been dragging Chicago down for the last 15 years. I went looking for evidence, and I did not find credible support for that story. What I found instead was a familiar American racket: take a complicated city, flatten it into a slogan, blame outsiders, and hope nobody bothers to check the numbers.

I checked.

The numbers did not cooperate.

This essay is written by Cliff Potts, Editor-in-Chief of WPS News. WPS News has been active in one form or another on the internet since 2009; for more information, visit https://cliffpotts.org

If this work helps you understand what’s happening, help me keep it going: https://www.patreon.com/cw/WPSNews

References

Abramitzky, R., Boustan, L. P., Jácome, E., & Pérez, S. (2023). Immigrants and incarceration: New evidence over the last 150 years (Working Paper No. 31440). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://www.nber.org/papers/w31440

Bureau of Justice Statistics. (2026). Crime known to law enforcement, 2024. U.S. Department of Justice. https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/ckle24.pdf

Chicago Data Portal. (n.d.). Crimes — 2001 to present. City of Chicago. https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/dataset/crime.html

Chicago Police Department. (n.d.). Immigrant, migrant, and refugee communities. https://www.chicagopolice.org/imr/

Chicago Police Department. (2025). 2024 in review. https://www.chicagopolice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024-in-Review.pdf

Federal Bureau of Investigation. (2025, August 5). FBI releases 2024 reported crimes in the nation statistics. https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-releases-2024-reported-crimes-in-the-nation-statistics

Gramlich, J. (2024, April 24). What the data says about crime in the U.S. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-data-says-about-crime-in-the-us/

Shihadeh, E. S., Barranco, R., Stansfield, R., & Ousey, G. C. (2026). Immigration and gun violence in Chicago neighborhoods: Protection from non-gang violence but not gang violence. Journal of Criminal Justice, 92, 102179. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2026.102179

University of Chicago Crime Lab. (2025, January 3). 2024 end-of-year analysis: Chicago crime trends. https://crimelab.uchicago.edu/resources/2024-end-of-year-analysis-chicago-crime-trends/

WTTW News. (2024, September 19). Study challenges immigrant crime narrative: “There’s a disconnect between what data shows and what people hear.” https://news.wttw.com/2024/09/19/study-challenges-immigrant-crime-narrative-there-s-disconnect-between-what-data-shows-and

Mikasi from Kenosha, USA, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

https://www.tkhunt.com/2350346/ Laura Ingraham: It’s not a protest #(Media #AmericanCities #BREAKINGNEWS #CivilConflict #ConservativeAnalysis #FoxNewsChannel #HardLeftRevolutionaries #LawEnforcement #NationalDebate #PoliticalUnrest #ProtestersLabeledInsurgents #PublicDisorder #StreetDemonstrations #TheIngrahamAngleYoutube #USA #ローラ

‘No Kings’ protests: where does Democratic resistance go next? – BBC

After ‘No Kings’ protests, where does Democratic resistance go next?

1 hour ago, Anthony Zurcher, North America correspondent

This weekend’s “No Kings” demonstrations drew an estimated crowd of millions across the US to protest President Donald Trump’s policies and his willingness to push the boundaries of presidential authority.

It was a moment for likeminded Democrats, liberals and some anti-Trump Republicans to rally together at a time when the American left has little formal power in national politics.

But where do they go from here?

By most accounts, the turnout at Saturday’s events – in major US cities like Chicago, New York, Washington and Los Angeles, as well as hundreds of smaller towns – was higher than expected and surpassed the first “No Kings” rally in June.

Congressional Republicans had warned that the demonstrations would be “anti-American”, and some conservative governors had put their law enforcement and National Guard on alert in case of violence.

The massive rallies turned out to be peaceful – a carnival, not carnage. In New York City, there were no protest-related arrests, and the gathering in Washington DC featured families and young children.

“Today all across America in numbers that may eclipse any day of protest in our nation’s history, Americans are saying loudly and proudly that we are a free people, we are not a people that can be ruled, our government is not for sale,” Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut said in his speech to the Washington DC rally.

Just down the street from the No Kings gathering in the nation’s capital, the White House responded to the protests with derision.

“Who cares,” deputy press secretary Abigail Jackson wrote in response to multiple media inquiries about the marches.

Trump shared several AI-generated videos on his Truth Social website of him wearing a crown, including one where he was flying a jet that dumped what appeared to be human waste on the protesters.

While Republicans may be downplaying the significance of the marches, the scale of the turnout – along with Trump’s net negative approval rating in major opinion polls – hints at a Democratic opportunity to rebound from last year’s electoral defeats.

The party still has a long way to go, however.

Polls suggest only a third of Americans view it favourably – the lowest for decades – and Democrats are divided over how to mount an effective opposition to Trump when they no longer control either chamber of Congress.

Liberals took to the streets on Saturday for a variety of reasons. Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement, his tariff policies, his government cuts, his foreign policy, his deployment of National Guard in US cities and his norm-breaking use of presidential authority were all frequent topics of concern and outrage.

Some of the frustration was also directed at Democratic leaders.

“We’re just taking it on the chin, and we’re not speaking out,” one march attendee in Washington DC told NBC News on Saturday. “You know, I think we need to throw some more elbows. Unfortunately, the high road doesn’t work.”

The Democrats have been more combative over the ongoing government shutdown, which is about to enter its fourth week. They have been unwilling to approve a short-term extension of current federal spending without a bipartisan agreement to address health-insurance subsidies for low-income Americans set to expire at the end of the year.

Because of Senate parliamentary rules, Democrats have some power despite being in the minority – and, at least so far, the public seems to be assigning at least as much, if not more, blame for the impasse to Trump and the Republican majority.

But the strategy comes with risks too. The pain from the shutdown – particularly for those in the Democratic coalition – is only going to increase as the weeks go by.

Many federal workers have missed paycheques and are facing financial hardship. Funding is expected to run out for low-income food support. The US judicial system is scaling back its operations. And the Trump administration is using the shutdown to order new cuts to the federal workforce and suspend domestic spending, targeting Democratic states and cities.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: ‘No Kings’ protests: where does Democratic resistance go next?

#2025 #America #AmericanCities #BBC #DonaldTrump #Education #Health #History #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #NewYork #NoKings #Opinion #Politics #protest #Resistance #Science #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates

‘No Kings’ protests: where does Democratic resistance go next? – BBC

After ‘No Kings’ protests, where does Democratic resistance go next?

1 hour ago, Anthony Zurcher, North America correspondent

This weekend’s “No Kings” demonstrations drew an estimated crowd of millions across the US to protest President Donald Trump’s policies and his willingness to push the boundaries of presidential authority.

It was a moment for likeminded Democrats, liberals and some anti-Trump Republicans to rally together at a time when the American left has little formal power in national politics.

But where do they go from here?

By most accounts, the turnout at Saturday’s events – in major US cities like Chicago, New York, Washington and Los Angeles, as well as hundreds of smaller towns – was higher than expected and surpassed the first “No Kings” rally in June.

Congressional Republicans had warned that the demonstrations would be “anti-American”, and some conservative governors had put their law enforcement and National Guard on alert in case of violence.

The massive rallies turned out to be peaceful – a carnival, not carnage. In New York City, there were no protest-related arrests, and the gathering in Washington DC featured families and young children.

“Today all across America in numbers that may eclipse any day of protest in our nation’s history, Americans are saying loudly and proudly that we are a free people, we are not a people that can be ruled, our government is not for sale,” Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut said in his speech to the Washington DC rally.

Just down the street from the No Kings gathering in the nation’s capital, the White House responded to the protests with derision.

“Who cares,” deputy press secretary Abigail Jackson wrote in response to multiple media inquiries about the marches.

Trump shared several AI-generated videos on his Truth Social website of him wearing a crown, including one where he was flying a jet that dumped what appeared to be human waste on the protesters.

While Republicans may be downplaying the significance of the marches, the scale of the turnout – along with Trump’s net negative approval rating in major opinion polls – hints at a Democratic opportunity to rebound from last year’s electoral defeats.

The party still has a long way to go, however.

Polls suggest only a third of Americans view it favourably – the lowest for decades – and Democrats are divided over how to mount an effective opposition to Trump when they no longer control either chamber of Congress.

Liberals took to the streets on Saturday for a variety of reasons. Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement, his tariff policies, his government cuts, his foreign policy, his deployment of National Guard in US cities and his norm-breaking use of presidential authority were all frequent topics of concern and outrage.

Some of the frustration was also directed at Democratic leaders.

“We’re just taking it on the chin, and we’re not speaking out,” one march attendee in Washington DC told NBC News on Saturday. “You know, I think we need to throw some more elbows. Unfortunately, the high road doesn’t work.”

The Democrats have been more combative over the ongoing government shutdown, which is about to enter its fourth week. They have been unwilling to approve a short-term extension of current federal spending without a bipartisan agreement to address health-insurance subsidies for low-income Americans set to expire at the end of the year.

Because of Senate parliamentary rules, Democrats have some power despite being in the minority – and, at least so far, the public seems to be assigning at least as much, if not more, blame for the impasse to Trump and the Republican majority.

But the strategy comes with risks too. The pain from the shutdown – particularly for those in the Democratic coalition – is only going to increase as the weeks go by.

Many federal workers have missed paycheques and are facing financial hardship. Funding is expected to run out for low-income food support. The US judicial system is scaling back its operations. And the Trump administration is using the shutdown to order new cuts to the federal workforce and suspend domestic spending, targeting Democratic states and cities.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: ‘No Kings’ protests: where does Democratic resistance go next?

#2025 #America #AmericanCities #BBC #DonaldTrump #Education #Health #History #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #NewYork #NoKings #Opinion #Politics #protest #Resistance #Science #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates

@dollemore.com (a marine) talks about #DonaldTrump 's dark and UNHINGED speech at #Quantico in which he made SEVERAL remarks meant to gear up the senior military leaders to ready themselves for the war Trump wants waged against #AmericanCities and #American CITIZENS!! youtu.be/M97_2PZ8gVs?...

Donald Trump DECLARES WAR ON A...

L.A. Ruling Complicates Trump’s Threats to Send Troops to More Cities – The New York Times

news analysis

L.A. Ruling Complicates Trump’s Threats to Send Troops to More Cities

As Democratic cities brace for possible military deployments, Democratic governors see in a lower-court ruling the potential for legal protections.

By Charlie Savage, Reporting from Washington, D.C., Sept. 2, 2025Updated 4:16 p.m. ET

Mr. Trump has made those threats in the context of his anti-crime operation in Washington, D.C., which has involved both civilian federal agents and National Guard troops under federal control. But because the District of Columbia is not a state, the federal government has greater latitude to use the Guard there.

The Posse Comitatus Act, enacted in 1878, makes it illegal to use federal troops for domestic policing under normal circumstances. So to keep from running afoul of that law, Mr. Trump would need a legal rationale for deploying troops to cities like Chicago.

One potential model for Mr. Trump might be the reasoning his administration offered for sending troops to Los Angeles over the summer, ostensibly to protect federal agents and facilities. But on Tuesday, Judge Charles Breyer of the Federal District Court in San Francisco held that the administration has been using those troops too expansively.

The judge barred the federal government from using troops anywhere in California to engage in “arrests, apprehensions, searches, seizures, security patrols, traffic control, crowd control, riot control, evidence collection, interrogation, or acting as informants.”

Speaking to reporters later on Tuesday, Mr. Trump called Judge Breyer a “radical left judge.” The judge’s order is scheduled to take effect Sept. 12, giving the Trump administration time to appeal.

There are reasons for caution at this stage. An appeals court has already overturned an earlier decision by Judge Breyer, in which he tried to strike down Mr. Trump’s assertion of federal control of California National Guard troops over the objections of the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom.

But if other courts adopt Judge Breyer’s reasoning, it would limit Mr. Trump’s ability to use the operation in Los Angeles as a precedent to justify deploying federal troops into other cities to fight crime.

Democratic governors far from California said on Tuesday that the judge’s ruling was a victory for them as well.

“This ruling confirms what the American people already knew — this deployment was never about public safety,” said Gov. Maura Healey of Massachusetts, who has spoken out against Mr. Trump’s domestic use of the military. “It was yet another political stunt from President Trump intended to intimidate and punish anyone who disagrees with him.”

Continue/Read Original Article Here: L.A. Ruling Complicates Trump’s Threats to Send Troops to More Cities – The New York Times

#2025 #America #AmericanCities #DonaldTrump #FederalizePolice #Health #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Politics #Resistance #Science #Travel #Trump #TrumpAdministration #USTroops #UnitedStates

L.A. Ruling Complicates Trump’s Threats to Send Troops to More Cities – The New York Times

news analysis

L.A. Ruling Complicates Trump’s Threats to Send Troops to More Cities

As Democratic cities brace for possible military deployments, Democratic governors see in a lower-court ruling the potential for legal protections.

By Charlie Savage, Reporting from Washington, D.C., Sept. 2, 2025Updated 4:16 p.m. ET

Mr. Trump has made those threats in the context of his anti-crime operation in Washington, D.C., which has involved both civilian federal agents and National Guard troops under federal control. But because the District of Columbia is not a state, the federal government has greater latitude to use the Guard there.

The Posse Comitatus Act, enacted in 1878, makes it illegal to use federal troops for domestic policing under normal circumstances. So to keep from running afoul of that law, Mr. Trump would need a legal rationale for deploying troops to cities like Chicago.

One potential model for Mr. Trump might be the reasoning his administration offered for sending troops to Los Angeles over the summer, ostensibly to protect federal agents and facilities. But on Tuesday, Judge Charles Breyer of the Federal District Court in San Francisco held that the administration has been using those troops too expansively.

The judge barred the federal government from using troops anywhere in California to engage in “arrests, apprehensions, searches, seizures, security patrols, traffic control, crowd control, riot control, evidence collection, interrogation, or acting as informants.”

Speaking to reporters later on Tuesday, Mr. Trump called Judge Breyer a “radical left judge.” The judge’s order is scheduled to take effect Sept. 12, giving the Trump administration time to appeal.

There are reasons for caution at this stage. An appeals court has already overturned an earlier decision by Judge Breyer, in which he tried to strike down Mr. Trump’s assertion of federal control of California National Guard troops over the objections of the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom.

But if other courts adopt Judge Breyer’s reasoning, it would limit Mr. Trump’s ability to use the operation in Los Angeles as a precedent to justify deploying federal troops into other cities to fight crime.

Democratic governors far from California said on Tuesday that the judge’s ruling was a victory for them as well.

“This ruling confirms what the American people already knew — this deployment was never about public safety,” said Gov. Maura Healey of Massachusetts, who has spoken out against Mr. Trump’s domestic use of the military. “It was yet another political stunt from President Trump intended to intimidate and punish anyone who disagrees with him.”

Continue/Read Original Article Here: L.A. Ruling Complicates Trump’s Threats to Send Troops to More Cities – The New York Times

#2025 #America #AmericanCities #DonaldTrump #FederalizePolice #Health #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Politics #Resistance #Science #Travel #Trump #TrumpAdministration #USTroops #UnitedStates

Booms, Not Busts, Drives Innovation, Especially in Mid Size American Cities

https://www.governance.fyi/p/booms-not-busts-drives-innovation

#HackerNews #Booms #Innovation #MidSizeCities #EconomicGrowth #AmericanCities

Booms, Not Busts, Drives Innovation, Especially in Mid Size American Cities

https://www.governance.fyi/p/booms-not-busts-drives-innovation

#HackerNews #Booms #Innovation #MidSizeCities #EconomicGrowth #AmericanCities

#MissingMiddle of #AmericanCities

https://www.culture-critic.com/p/why-do-american-cities-feel-lifeless

Several American cities are named after their foremost adversary. Why?
 😅🤔

Currently there are 26 cities & towns named #Moscow in the US. 3 St
 Petersburgs, including 1 in #Florida.

#Cairo aside, why aren't any Tehrans in the Orange County, #Virginia or #Texas? Or #Pyongyang in #California?

#unitedstates #usa #placenames #quiz #placename #merica #desantis #trump #biden #mastodon #tehran #americancities #orangecounty #GOP #bluestates #redstates #stpetersburg #iran #korea #northkorea #egypt