Trump border czar warns sanctuary cities nationwide to ‘expect action’

CHICAGO — As Chicagoans braced for a potential activation of the National Guard in their city, President Donald Trump’s border czar Tom Homan said residents of cities with pro-immigrant policies all over the United States should also expect stepped up immigration enforcement in their neighborhoods.

“You can expect action in sanctuary cities across the country,” Homan told CNN on Sunday.

Trump and members of his administration have long railed against “sanctuary city” policies, which can encompass a spectrum of practices, from jails that cannot hold immigrants accused of committing crimes beyond their allotted time or hand them over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody, to prohibiting police from inquiring about immigration status during arrests. On Sunday, Homan said the president is prioritizing federal action in cities with these policies because they “knowingly release illegal aliens, public safety threats, to the streets.” In recent days, Trump has also threatened to deploy the National Guard to Chicago, New York, Seattle, Baltimore, San Francisco and Portland, Oregon.

Homan declined to say how many National Guard troops will be deployed to Chicago, or where else they might be sent, but said the troops are a “force multiplier” to support immigration enforcement. Homan said the National Guard troops would not be arresting undocumented migrants in these cities but would rather support the work of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and Border Patrol agents.

“The National Guard does provide protection for us,” he said. “It does provide us infrastructure, provides us transportation, provides us additional processing capability that allows the ones with immigration authority, the badges and guns on the street, to continue arresting the bad guy.”

The comments come a day after Trump, on Truth Social, threatened Chicago with mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, sharing an edited illustration of himself as Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore from the Vietnam War film “Apocalypse Now.” Alongside the image, Trump wrote, “I love the smell of deportations in the morning.”

“Chicago [is] about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR,” Trump wrote. On Friday, the president signed an executive order rebranding the Defense Department as the Department of War without congressional approval.

As he made his way to the U.S. Open in New York on Sunday, Trump was asked by reporters whether he was “threatening to go to war with Chicago.”

“We’re not going to war,” Trump replied. “We’re going to clean up our cities.”

On Tuesday, Trump signaled that he planned to deploy National Guard troops to Chicago, an escalation in his administration’s effort to combat what he has characterized as rampant crime in cities and states led by Democratic elected officials. In the following days, Trump also floated the possibility of activating the guard in other Democratic-led cities. And on Saturday, the Department of Homeland Security said it launched an U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation in Massachusetts targeting “the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens.” The administration provided few details on the scale of the mission, but said it built on a May operation that resulted in nearly 1,500 arrests across Massachusetts, including dozens of migrant workers on Martha’s Vineyard.

Chicago had already been on high alert for a potential National Guard deployment after Trump said last month that the city would be “probably next” after he deployed guard troops to Washington. Mayor Brandon Johnson said on X on Saturday that Trump’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,” Johnson wrote.

Largely peaceful protests broke out across the city on Saturday, with thousands of marchers taking over Michigan Avenue demanding that Trump keep federal forces out of Chicago. Crowds also demonstrated outside the DHS offices in downtown Chicago, where temporary barriers had gone up around federal buildings the day before. On Thursday, The Washington Post reported that the Pentagon approved the use of the Naval Station Great Lakes, a Navy base on the outskirts of Chicago, as a staging ground from which the Trump administration can launch operations against undocumented immigrants.

Despite the tension, mass deportation operations had not kicked off in the city as of Sunday.

Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) told CBS News’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday morning that she didn’t have any indication that the Trump administration was poised to send National Guard troops to Chicago. Still, she criticized Trump’s Saturday Truth Social post, saying that the president “essentially declared war on a major city in his own nation.”

“This is not acceptable behavior,” she said.

Duckworth said she visited Naval Station Great Lakes and was told U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was looking for office space “but that no barracks, no detention facilities, none of that is being requested or prepared in order to support troops into Chicago.”

Duckworth said Department of Homeland Security employees refused to meet with her and other legislators at the Navy training base or discuss their plans for Chicago.

“We certainly have sent the administration multiple inquiries about what they are planning on doing, who are they bringing into Chicago,” she said. “They’ve not even reached out to local law enforcement to try to coordinate. You know, if they were truly, truly interested in fighting crime, then they would work with local law enforcement and ask them, ‘What do you need?’”

Chicago has long dealt with significant crime levels, although statistics show the problem is not as severe as Trump portrays it. Like other major U.S. cities, Chicago has seen a decline in crime since the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, and by mid-August, the city’s violent crime had decreased 23% compared with the same period last year, according to Chicago Police Department figures.

While Trump freely deployed troops to D.C., he faces a different set of legal questions if he deploys the guard to Chicago. In D.C., Trump serves as commander in chief of the National Guard because the District is not a state.

But his power is different outside of that city, and a federal judge ruled last Tuesday that Trump’s use of troops to carry out domestic law enforcement actions in California earlier this year violated federal law. However, that judge said the ruling was “narrowly tailored” and did not require the administration to pull back the 300 troops still stationed in Los Angeles. Instead, the judge blocked the troops from certain actions and stayed his ruling until next week.

A majority of Americans have expressed disapproval of Trump’s deployment of troops to D.C. and other cities. A CBS News poll conducted between Sept. 3 and 5 found that 57% of Americans oppose the deployment of the National Guard to D.C., while 58% oppose his potential deployment of the guard to other cities. However, 85% of Republicans support the deployment of the guard to U.S. cities, while 93% of Democrats and 64% of registered independents oppose it.