Under threats of deploying federal agents to intensify immigration enforcement in communities across Chicago, including my own, our neighbors are beginning to prepare a coordinated response to the possibility of Donald Trump sending the National Guard to occupy our streets and neighborhoods to assist and protect federal agents. His threat is a hollow performance of power — one that betrays the values of a democratic society and undermines the very progress Chicago has built around public safety and human dignity for its residents in recent years. Safety does not grow from the barrel of a gun but from the soil of justice, dignity, and care.

Donald Trump claims that Chicago is experiencing extreme violence. But this past year, Chicago saw the fewest homicides in six decades — the safest summer since the 1960s. That progress did not come from flooding the streets with soldiers or police. It came because the city invested in people: in youth jobs, mental health services, violence interruption, and community infrastructure. We move closer to peace not by threatening more violence, but by steadily nourishing the conditions that allow everyone to thrive.

The National Guard is not a solution to Chicago’s problems. Even if the Guard successfully imposes quiet for a moment, their presence carries the seeds of an explosion of violence and aggression. Soldiers in military fatigues patrolling neighborhoods do not heal wounds; they deepen them. They make residents feel like enemies in their own homes, cowering in fear.

Residents of Chicago’s most violent neighborhoods need investments in their well-being, not the military. What is being offered to them by Trump is not safety but domination.

Look at the neighborhoods in Chicago where murders are virtually nonexistent. They are not patrolled by Humvees or flooded with military-style checkpoints. They are communities where schools are fully funded, where parks are clean and inviting, where families have access to jobs that pay them enough to support themselves and their families.

The same is true abroad. Governments that invest in universal health care, robust social safety nets, free education, and robust worker protections and benefits experience thriving and safe living conditions. What genuinely reduces violence is not force but investment and care.

To send the military into Chicago is not an act of public safety; it is an act of authoritarian control. We have seen this theater before. In Los Angeles, federal immigration enforcement became the pretext for military deployment. A federal judge ruled it illegal. It will be ruled illegal here as well.

Trump’s actions are not about crime or immigration or homelessness. The numbers tell the story. When Trump staged his occupation of Washington, DC, most of those arrested were not violent criminals, but people caught in traffic stops or minor offenses. Ninety-three percent of those taken by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had no criminal conviction. What is happening is a flexing of muscle to remind the nation who holds power — and to try to bend that nation to one man’s will.

The cruelty is compounded by the cost. Trump’s DC occupation cost four times as much as it would have cost to house the city’s entire homeless population. In Los Angeles, $134 million was spent on just sixty days of National Guard deployment. For the same money, Chicago could have hired 30,000 young people for summer jobs, reopened every shuttered mental health clinic, expanded mental health crisis response, and doubled the number of community violence intervention workers. Resources for these programs exist, but they are squandered on soldiers instead of invested in people.

What would an alternative to Trump’s authoritarian occupation look like? First, investing in violence prevention: credible messengers, often men and women who once walked the same streets and lived the same lives as those who are in danger of succumbing to violence — now using their life experiences de-escalate conflicts. These efforts are fragile and underfunded, but they save lives every day.

Second, investing in people’s basic needs: mental health clinics, summer employment for youth, workforce development, affordable housing. Every dollar spent in these and similar areas pays back multiple times over in safety and stability. We know this because we have seen it: the safest summer in sixty years came not from soldiers but from exactly these investments.

Trump, meanwhile, has undermined all of it. He cut $800 million in violence prevention funds. He slashed the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) by nearly a third, crippling the very agency tasked with stopping gun trafficking. He has hacked away at Medicaid, food assistance, and public education. These are not policies of safety. They are policies of sabotage.

The crisis we are in did not appear from thin air. It was built over decades of policies that worshiped profit while starving communities and dehumanizing vulnerable people. Entire neighborhoods in Chicago were abandoned then blamed for the despair that followed. Our mayor, Brandon Johnson, has begun the long process of reversing the effects of this neglect.

The antidote is not more greed, more punishment, more abandonment. The antidote is solidarity. Organized, collective action is how communities survive when governments betray them. Neighbors caring for neighbors, workers standing shoulder to shoulder, youth and elders demanding justice together — this is the foundation of real safety.

Community care is a recognition that our survival is bound up with one another’s. Howard Zinn reminded us that social progress has always come not from the top but from people joining hands and refusing to let go. If Chicago is to be saved, it will not be by occupation but by solidarity.

Here in Chicago, we have been organizing for decades to ensure protection for our most vulnerable residents. From bike and foot brigades patrolling our neighborhoods for ICE presence, to know-your-rights canvasses, mutual aid efforts, and rapid response networks operating all over the city, our people show up for each other. Our work as elected officials, as organizers, as neighbors, as workers, and as movement leaders is to create the spaces and structures to build the solidarity and community care that will get us out of this mess.

Safety is inseparable from justice. You cannot occupy your way to peace. You cannot humiliate people into harmony. And you cannot treat citizens like enemies without hollowing out democracy.

James Baldwin once wrote that “ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” To send soldiers into Chicago is precisely that alliance — ignorance of what truly creates safety, joined with the brute force of state power.

The choice before us is stark. We can continue on the path that gave us the safest summer in sixty years, or we can lurch backward into the nightmare of occupation. One path is dictatorship. The other is democracy, solidarity, and community care. Chicago’s people need schools, jobs, health care, affordable housing, and opportunity. They want their children to live. They do not want — and should not be forced to accept — tanks rolling down their blocks.