For months, Donald Trump and his administration have been using violent crime as a justification for ramping up Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) operations and sending or threatening to send the national guard to blue cities – first in Los Angeles, then Washington DC and, last week, Chicago.
But for those who work on the ground to prevent crime, the White House’s approaches will do little to address underlying causes. Instead, they say, increased law enforcement will only lead to harassment and increased surveillance in communities that are already overpoliced.
“[Trump doesn’t] mean well for our community,” said Teny Gross, executive director of the Institute for Nonviolence Chicago, a non-profit that offers services for people most at risk of shooting someone or being shot. “Yes, there’s a lot of violence, and it’s because of policies over decades. If you want to go after violence, go to the cities and invest in them, not just send in the national guard.”
Gross has worked in violence prevention for more than three decades. Over the years, he’s heard Chicagoans talk about the need for increased law enforcement in their neighborhoods, including deploying the national guard – comments he saw as expressions of understandable desperation. He says residents have grown exhausted from witnessing decades of bloodshed and poverty that go unabated under both Republican and Democratic administrations.
Still, he said that these issues won’t be solved through the shows of force Trump is enacting. “We deal with grief daily. We see death daily. This is not a serious solution,” he said.
Last year, 574 people were killed in Chicago, primarily from gunshot wounds, giving the city a homicide rate of 17 per 100,000 people. This is far below that of some cities in red states, such as Birmingham, Alabama, and Shreveport, Louisiana, whose rates were 59 and 41, respectively, that same year. Still, Chicago’s reputation for shootings is being exploited to normalize military force on city streets and expand law enforcement in neighborhoods that are already highly policed and surveilled, said Ethan Ucker, executive director of Stick Talk, a Chicago non-profit that approaches youth gun-carrying through a harm reduction lens.
“Those narratives are strategically being deployed to justify state violence,” Ucker said. “I worry about increasing and accelerating criminalization. But that won’t stop when the national guard leaves. It’s ongoing.”
The Rev Ciera Bates-Chamberlain, who leads Live Free Illinois, a coalition of faith-based organizations that advocate for criminal justice reform and public safety, said if Trump actually wants to help, he would emphasize better clearance rates and community-based support services for victims of crime, and would get gun trafficking under control.
“We’ve advocated for more community-based resources to be invested in,” she said. “We’ve advocated to improve clearance rates. But to completely disregard those requests is immoral and not about protecting citizens.”
Bates-Chamberlain, a native of Chicago’s South Side who’s worked in the violence prevention space for more than a decade, said that “two things can be true at the same time” when it comes to the current national conversation about crime in the US. While Chicago’s leadership is boasting a more than 30% decline in homicides in 2025 so far, there were still nearly 200 people killed in the city by the end of June and many more injured.
“The numbers are down, yet communities are still feeling the impact,” she said.
But the pain these losses and injuries carry and their reverberations throughout the community won’t be addressed by sending more law enforcement to the street, Bates-Chamberlain said.
“He’s politicizing our pain and that is diabolical and despicable for the president of the United States to do,” she said. “This is really harmful.”
