One of Chicago’s most prominent South Side Democrats thinks the anti-ICE radicals are only showing why federal troops are needed in the Windy City.
He also blames local liberal leaders for goading agitators into the violence seen over the weekend.
Raymond Lopez — alderman for Chicago’s 15th Ward — fears rhetoric from leaders like Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson is pushing the city and the country to a dangerous place that there may be no coming back from.
“The politics of this city and of hyper progressive liberalism is bringing us closer to the brink with an escalation that I don’t think any of us truly wants to see,” Lopez told The Post.
“The governor, the mayor, with a wink and a nod, told everyone to protest peacefully. And we’ve seen the exact opposite unfold,” he added.
“They’re continuing to play a game of chicken with other people’s lives.”
Lopez is one of Chicago’s only Democratic leaders to openly support President Trump’s plan to use the National Guard to fight local crime since it was first proposed over the summer.
He said his position hasn’t changed since the White House confirmed over the weekend that 300 troops would be dispatched to protect ICE agents conducting immigration-enforcement raids in the city.
Those ICE operations were targeted by violent harassment, with some protesters even following federal agents and boxing them in on Saturday, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
Chicago police were reportedly ordered not to answer federal agents calls for back-up.
The Chicago Police Department has since disputed those reports.
Lopez feels that such behavior — encouraged “directly or indirectly” by local leadership — made Trump’s decision to send in federal troops “a fore-drawn conclusion.”
“If we’re not going to allow law enforcement to protect [ICE] and keep the peace with our residents, then the president of the United States most definitely is going to take that action,” he said. “We cannot have our our citizenry thinking that they can take up arms against the federal government and suffer no consequences.”
And none of the current chaos had to happen if leaders simply followed a “common sense” approach to apprehending Chicago’s worst criminal element by just coordinating with the federal government to “surgically” remove them months ago, Lopez said.
“Instead, what we got were politicians — from the governor to the mayor on down — challenging the Trump administration to go into our communities and find those targets themselves,” he said. “They almost joked about it, as if they as if that would never have been a possibility or a reality. And yet here we are today.”
“We are making the case as to why we need the National Guard now more than ever, with people choosing to try to attack federal law enforcement agents here in the city of Chicago,” Lopez added.
Tensions have continued to boil as National Guard troops began arriving in the Chicago area Tuesday — with Trump raging on Truth Social that Pritzker and Johnson both should be “in jail,” while the governor and mayor returned fire by calling the president a “wannabe dictator.”
Alderman Lopez maintains that both sides are so busy playing politics they’ve forgotten about the Chicagoans they claim to be protecting — and that the longer they squabble, the greater the stakes become.
“We have nearly three and a half years left with Donald Trump. We better figure it out because we cannot exist in this fashion,” he said, adding that federal agents are “going to do what they’re trained to do, which is to de-escalate by any means necessary in order to protect life and property.”
“This is what you get when you are acting in this manner with people who are trained in a very different level,” he added.
“I don’t think they’re prepared for what’s going to happen next.”
