Robert Reich Substack

10/06/2025

The first step has been for the Department of Homeland Security to deploy ICE agents to use aggressive tactics in targeted cities.

ICE has sent masked and armed federal agents into cities with Democratic mayors to do the following:

• Arrest and detain people outside immigration courtrooms.
• Fire tear gas and chemical munitions on city streets without warning.
• Raid homes and apartments in the middle of the night and arrest their occupants willy-nilly, including Americans, people legally in the country, and children.
• Use racial profiling to stop anyone looking Latino and demand proof of citizenship without warrants.
• Detain people they believe are here illegally, and do so without due process.

The second step is for such aggressive tactics to provoke demonstrations, and for Trump to exaggerate the scale and severity of them.

Trump has described Portland as a “war-ravaged” city “burning to the ground” with “insurrectionists all over the place.” In fact, demonstrations there had been muted and rarely expanded beyond a one-block radius of the immigration detention facility in the city.

On September 6, Trump posted on social media an image of the Chicago skyline in flames with the words “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR” and a depiction of himself in the image of the fictitious warmonger character Lt. Col. Kilgore from the 1979 film “Apocalypse Now,” titling the post “Chipocalypse Now.”

Yesterday, he described Chicago as a crime-ridden “war zone.”

The third step is for Trump and Hegseth to deploy federalized National Guard troops to control the demonstrators, an act that’s already enflaming the public and provoking some actual violence.

Until Trump’s announcement that he was sending troops into Portland, protests rarely numbered more than two dozen people. Since his announcement, clashes have become more violent.

The fourth step will be for Trump and Hegseth to invoke the Insurrection Act.