As crowds celebrated the Mexican Independence Day parade in Pilsen and the city prepares for ramped-up immigration enforcement, President Donald Trump threatened Chicago in a post on social media Saturday, saying the city was about to find out “why it’s called the Department of War.”
“‘I love the smell of deportations in the morning,’” he posted on Truth Social, a reference to the 1979 Vietnam War movie “Apocalypse Now” where Robert Duvall’s character Lt. Col. Kilgore says, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”
“Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of War,” the post continued, which included an image of Trump dressed in an Army uniform and helicopters flying in the background with the words “Chipocalypse Now.”
Trump signed an executive order Friday authorizing the Department of War as a secondary title for the Department of Defense in a move that he said sends “a message of strength.”
The White House shared the post on its X account.
Gov. JB Pritzker responded to Trump’s post Saturday on X, saying it “is not normal.”
“The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city,” Pritzker said in the post.
“This is not a joke. This is not normal.”
Speaking at the 24th annual Mexican Independence Day Parade in Pilsen on Saturday, Sen. Dick Durbin called Trump’s post “disgusting.” “To suggest that the troops are coming into Chicago is an embarrassment,” he said.
In an appearance on MSNBC’s “The Briefing With Jen Psaki” on Friday night, Pritzker said the federal government was “preparing to invade the communities around Chicago like Little Village, like Pilsen, perhaps beginning early morning tomorrow.”
In a post on X, Mayor Brandon Johnson called on Chicagoans to protect each other amid the threats.
“The President’s threats are beneath the honor of our nation, but the reality is that he wants to occupy our city and break our Constitution,” Johnson said in the post. “We must defend our democracy from this authoritarianism by protecting each other and protecting Chicago from Donald Trump.”
Defending people is what brought Priscilla Read to the Pilsen parade on Saturday.
“We’re organizing to document detentions, report them, and do our best to defend people who are detained. In fact, that’s one of the main reasons we’re here today. Cameras at the ready. So far, there haven’t been any incidents, but [we are] prepared to document because that’s basically what we can do at this point,” said Read, 76.
“If you are defenders of democracy and human rights, you need to be in solidarity right now.”
Kenneth Morrison of Pilsen watched the parade go by as he sat outside Cafe Jumping Bean. “It’s disturbing that [Trump] wants to pick a fight.”
He said he thinks the posts will continue to fuel preconceived negative notions of Chicago.
People not living in Chicago “believe the narrative that Chicago is a hellhole. They don’t see anything like what we just saw a moment ago,” he said of the celebration at the parade.
“They just think we’re dodging bullets,” he added.
Trump’s post comes as he ramps up federal enforcement in Chicago and the city prepares for anticipated increased operations by ICE.
The New York Times reports that ICE officials have requisitioned thousands of handcuffs, belly chains, leg irons, as well as a number of gas masks, license plate readers and buses in advance of the Chicago operation.
In his MSNBC interview, Pritzker said the Illinois State Police received a call from Gregory Bovino, a leader at U.S. Customs and Border Patrol and ICE who is leading the planned deployment in Chicago, who said troops “are coming and that they intend to be in place by the end of this week.”
Demonstrators protested Saturday outside Naval Station Great Lakes near North Chicago, where hundreds of federal agents are reportedly being sent to carry out Trump’s mission to curb crime and make immigration arrests in Chicago.
Telling the White House ‘no’
On Saturday evening, near 1,500 people marched through the Loop to express opposition to the potential federal presence, stopping briefly in front of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Chicago field office, the Dirksen Federal Courthouse and Trump Tower.
“If [Trump] thinks his prevalent theatrics to undermine our sovereignty will shut out the passion we have for protecting our people, this is Chicago and he is sorely mistaken,” Viviana Barajas, a member of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, said during a rally at Congress Plaza.
Kevin Ryan, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, carried a sign reading, “Veterans Demand No Troops on Our Streets.”
“There’s no emergency that would warrant the National Guard or any kind of federal troops,” said Ryan, 33, who has been deployed to Afghanistan, Africa and Europe, and had assignments at the Pentagon.
“And our military is meant to deter and defeat military threats, not to police our cities,” said Ryan, a Lake View resident and a former Chicago Public Schools teacher. “It’s escalatory and dangerous. These people are not trained to handle crowds, to do police activity. They’re trained to conduct war.”
The sign Ryan carried addressed Trump’s plan to deploy troops, but he also criticized the rise in ICE activity in Chicago and the recent legislation that boosted funding for ICE, giving the agency $75 billion over four years.
“They say that they’re targeting criminals, but we all know that’s not true,” Ryan said. “And they have these outrageous quotas that they’ve been trying to meet, and so they’re just taking our neighbors off the street without due process, detaining them indefinitely without due process and then trying to ship them off to third countries that they have no one there that they can contact to help them.”
The Coalition Against the Trump Agenda led the downtown protest. Dozens of organizations comprise the group, including the ICIRR, Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression and Organized Communities Against Deportations.
The purpose of Saturday’s protest was to show the White House and the rest of the U.S. that “we will not be scared” of the president’s policies and targeting of Chicago, said Nazek Sankari, a spokesperson for the U.S. Palestinian Community Network, another organizer of the event.
“Trump talks hatefully about our neighbors on the South, West and Southwest Side of Chicago, but he doesn’t know our city,” Sankari said. “He doesn’t know and understand our city, he doesn’t realize that we have always produced some of the most powerful resistance in the U.S.”
Contributing: AP
Nazek Sankari, of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network, speaks as protesters rally on Michigan Avenue near East Ida B. Wells Drive before marching through the Loop to decry threats from the Trump administration to increase ICE raids and send the federalized National Guard to the city of Chicago, Saturday, Sept. 6, 2025.
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