The long history behind Trump’s war against blue states and cities
States and cities have been resisting federal incursions for centuries
In a press conference on Monday, President Donald Trump threatened to expand his use of the U.S. military to address fake “emergencies” in U.S. cities as he has done in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. — this time to Chicago. Reportedly, the Pentagon has been drawing up plans for a military deployment to Chicago for weeks.
Read more: Eight things to know about the National Guard in Washington, D.C.
Mayor Brandon Johnson and Governor J.B. Pritzker held a press conference on Monday in response. The two leaders are working together to “evaluate all of [their] legal options to protect the people of Chicago from unconstitutional federal overreach.”
"Any attempt to intimidate our people from being able to live their lives, that is the quintessential example of terrorism, and we will not bend, break, or bow to that type of tyranny," said Johnson.
"If you hurt my people,” Pritzker said, speaking directly to Trump administration officials, “nothing will stop me — not time or political circumstance — from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law."
Pritzker and Johnson’s proactive defense of Chicago and of democratic principles writ large is an example of how the broad pro-democracy coalition can use one of the few remaining levers of power to push back against the administration’s overreach — our federalist system.
These actions are not radical escalations or departures from the norms of the American liberal democratic order. Indeed, there’s a long historical precedent for state and localities’ refusal to be weaponized by the federal government to carry out an anti-democratic agenda.
For most of us, when we think about state resistance to federal law, we think of the Jim Crow era and Civil Rights Movement — when the federal government was the leading force defending individual rights, and “states’ rights” was a justification for illiberal actions, like Virginia senator Harry F. Byrd Sr.’s “Massive Resistance” plan to oppose school desegregation after Brown v. Board of Education. In those days, the federal government stepped in to force states to recognize the rights of their citizens — it’s why President John F. Kennedy deployed U.S. Marshals to ensure the enrollment of the University of Mississippi’s first Black student, James Meredith. And why President Dwight Eisenhower deployed regular military forces (the 101st Airborne Division) to ensure the safety of the “Little Rock Nine” when Gov. Orval Faubus ordered the Arkansas National Guard to prevent them from integrating Little Rock’s Central High School.
But a century earlier, in the 1850s, Southern slaveholders and their Northern allies dominated the federal government, leaving the defense of citizens’ rights to the states.
As part of the Compromise of 1850, the federal government passed the Fugitive Slave Law. According to historian Eric Foner:
The measure created a new category of federal officeholder, U.S. commissioners, authorized to hear cases of accused fugitives and issue certificates of removal, documents that could not be challenged in any court. The fugitive could neither claim a writ of habeas corpus nor testify at the hearing, whose sole purpose was to establish his or her identity. Federal marshals could deputize individuals to execute a commissioner’s orders and, if necessary, call on the assistance of local officials and even bystanders.
The act included severe civil and criminal penalties for anyone who harbored fugitive slaves or interfered with their capture, as well as for local officials who failed to carry out a commissioner’s order or from whom a fugitive escaped.
(I also recommend this piece by Foner for The Nation, written in response to the first Trump administration’s Muslim ban and mass deportation threats in 2017.)
The law was intended to quash decadeslong Northern resistance to similar provisions dealing with escaped enslaved people, overriding state and local laws and deputizing “individual citizens to assist… in capturing runaways.”
But the law instead reinvigorated Northern citizens and governments. Abolitionist groups in Northern cities organized to shelter escaped enslaved people, help them escape to Canada, and purchase the freedom of those who had been returned to their enslavers.
Northerners petitioned Congress to repeal the Fugitive Slave Law, and public figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson called for noncompliance.
The Wisconsin state legislature “nullified” the Fugitive Slave Law, and the state Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional.
Massachusetts passed a new law to nullify the federal provision, making it illegal for state and local officials to assist in returning escaped enslaved people and granting jury trials for accused fugitives.
It’s worth noting that, unlike with Washington, D.C., the president is not the commander-in-chief of the Illinois National Guard or any other state’s Guard — that’s the role of governors. He cannot federalize local law enforcement agencies in any state. So to achieve his takeover of states and cities, he must go through or around state and local leaders. In deciding how to respond, state and local leaders facing a new era of federal incursion should look to the history of the 1850s.
The same tools — legal resistance, petitions to Congress, legislation, and judicial oversight — are all available to state and local governments today, and just like 19th-century activists, everyday Americans can pressure their leaders to use these tools to resist federal overreach.
Read more: How to stop Trump’s National Guard weaponization.
To their credit, state and local leaders across the country have already begun to use these tactics. Take the governor of Washington State, Bob Ferguson, and Boston’s mayor, Michelle Wu, who wrote to Attorney General Pam Bondi stating their refusal to submit to the Trump administration’s threats to take over their state and city, respectively. California Gov. Gavin Newsom sued the Trump administration for deploying the California National Guard without the governor’s consent. Vermont’s Republican governor, Phil Scott, refused to supply his state’s National Guard troops to aid the president’s takeover of Washington, D.C. And Spencer Cox, the Republican governor of Utah, declared that his state would not provide National Guard troops to aid the Trump administration with immigration detentions.
If all these local leaders hold strong in protecting their citizens’ right to self-governance, their principled stands can be a template — among the first of many acts to deny the Trump administration’s attempts to make our cities and states agents of his authoritarian project.