Pointlessly posting National Guard members outside of federal buildings is not in fact a "military invasion" of Chicago. It's stupid! But not much more than that.
Like, are they going to start shooting people? Probably not, probably it will go the same way as the LA invasion where the troops just kinda slink away after Trump gets distracted and Stephen Miller kidnaps all the immigrants he was looking for. But what happens if the Chicago PD tries to obstruct some operation or another on a day Trump got up on the wrong side of the bed?
Without support from a law enforcement agency with actual arrest powers, marching around like toy soldiers is all they can do. A detachment of National Guardsmen "arrest" someone, take them to the ground, zip-tie their wrists. Now what? Every step after this involves cooperation with a prosecutor --- unless a federal crime is charged, a local prosecutor. They're doing this to freak you out, not because the National Guard can actually do any policing. Policing is as much about logistics and procedural infrastructure as it is about patrol.
Freaking people out is the goal of many military deployments! The point of a presence patrol isn’t typically that you want to shoot the locals; the ideal scenario is that they acknowledge you could shoot them if you wanted and submit to your authority. If you don’t want the Mississippi national guard taking over your city hall to declare Trump the winner of the 2028 election, you’d better start denying their authority to operate in your city now.
I live in LA and it's terrifying. There are soldiers in our streets without our consent. It isn't going to end with this. They're going to keep escalating. At this point, I dlthink half the country would he fine if Trump started bombing us.
The very fact that there are soldiers being stationed in our city without our consent by a hostile government is terrifying. I'm not scared of what they're doing, I'm scared of what they could do in the future and I'm scared that a large part of the country doesn't think this is a big deal or even seems to be cheering this on.
I'm not cheering it on, but because I know that the point of the deployment is to freak me out, I refuse to take the bait. It's not like people carrying automatic weapons is a sight unknown to western Democracies; you see it all over Europe.
When they do something crazy, I'll be right there with you. But the President has the power to deploy the Guard to protect federal property, and while these deployments are abusive, they're not unlawful. Most of what people say about the Guard actually taking over policing is implausible. So I'm just going to call it out for the bad policy that it is and then not act like the collapse of society is imminent.
The fact that "a large part of the country" doesn't think this is a big deal should tell you something valuable about what the best next moves are.
Like, are they going to start shooting people? Probably not, probably it will go the same way as the LA invasion where the troops just kinda slink away after Trump gets distracted and Stephen Miller kidnaps all the immigrants he was looking for. But what happens if the Chicago PD tries to obstruct some operation or another on a day Trump got up on the wrong side of the bed?