I’m a Chicagoan. People here are pissed, but for the most part everyone expects it to end up being a symbolic event: National Guard troops guarding federal property with overpowered weapons and marching around in the extremely safe downtown/Loop area. Tanks going down Michigan Avenue for the sole purpose of driving social media attention.   Protests maybe will get slightly out of hand with some arrests, looting, tear gas, and rubber bullets. That’s kind of on the extreme end of what we’re expecting. While the spectacle unfolds, Chicago police will keep the protests largely contained. ICE will round up hundreds of our undocumented, mostly law-abiding neighbors. There will be sensationalist news stories that make it sound more intense than it is on the front lines. Mostly it will be troops who don’t want to be there and don’t need to be getting screamed at by an angry but nonviolent crowd.  

The occupying troops won’t go anywhere near the (very few) actually dangerous neighborhoods on the far south and west sides of the city. There will be little if any meaningful violence (obviously apart from the ICE roundups and deportations). J.B. Pritzker will make several inspiring but cautious speeches; he’ll eventually sue the federal government, which will go nowhere. After 45 days or whatever Trump will report cherry-picked or fabricated statistics, declare victory over the gangs and immigrants, denounce Pritzker and Brandon Johnson, and withdraw the visible troop presence.  

The whole episode will be authoritarian porn for MAGA supporters and another step in the process of consolidating a fascist police state. In a nutshell, that’s what we’re expecting here in Chicago.  

There is a small but nontrivial chance that things could really go off the rails in Chicago and plunge us into a civil war. For that to happen, you’d probably need protests to get significantly more violent than I think is likely, leading to the use of lethal force by federal troops (not just Chicago PD). If several Chicagoans are killed in the protests—especially if it’s not a clear suicide-by-cop situation—the city will go apeshit. There’s a plausible domino sequence that could result in barricades, autonomous zones, and some level of urban guerrilla war. At that point, all bets are off and we’re probably looking at something like a supercharged version of the Irish Troubles. I don’t think Pritzker, Newsom, Walz, et al will have any power to raise militias and threaten secession (they’d be rounded up and jailed immediately), so we’d probably be looking at urban citizen collectives ramping up small-scale attacks and unprecedented protests in Washington, DC.