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Trump’s threats loom over Chicago’s Mexican Independence Day celebrations

President Donald Trump’s plan to dispatch National Guard troops and immigration agents into Chicago has put many Latino residents on edge, prompting some to carry their U.S. passports while giving others pause about openly celebrating the upcoming Mexican Independence Day.

Though the holiday falls on Sept. 16, celebrations in Chicago span more than a week and draw hundreds of thousands of participants. Festivities kicked off with a Saturday parade through the heavily Mexican Pilsen neighborhood and continued with car caravans and lively street parties.

But this year, the typically joyful period coincides with Trump’s threats to add Chicago to the list of Democratic-led cities he has targeted for expanded federal enforcement. His administration has said it will step up immigration enforcement in Chicago, as it did in Los Angeles, and would deploy National Guard troops to help fight crime.

In addition to sending troops to Los Angeles in June, Trump deployed them last month in Washington, D.C., as part of his unprecedented law enforcement takeover of the nation’s capital.

“I love the smell of deportations in the morning,” Trump wrote on his social media site Truth Social on Saturday, making a reference to the 1979 war film “Apocalypse Now.” Trump continued, “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.”

State and city leaders have said they plan to sue the Trump administration.

“The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city. This is not a joke,” Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a Democrat, wrote in a post on X on Saturday, responding to Trump’s post. “This is not normal. Donald Trump isn’t a strongman, he’s a scared man. Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator.”

Although details about the promised Chicago operation have been sparse, local opposition is already widespread and includes suburban areas with their own immigrant communities.

“Fear is contagious, but so is courage,” Noche Diaz, an activist with Revcom Corps Chicago who attended Saturday’s parade, told NBC News. “And people who are decent and who do not want to see a fascist America with masked, heavily armed thugs rounding up brown people and terrorizing Black people need to start mass noncompliance and refusal to accept this.”

Mixed feelings about postponing festivities

The extended Mexican Independence Day celebrations reflect the size and vitality of Chicago’s Mexican American community. Mexicans make up more than one-fifth of the city’s total population and about 74% of its Latino residents, according to 2022 U.S. census estimates.

Organizers of the regular community parades and festivals have been divided over whether to move forward with precautions or to postpone in hopes that it will feel safer for many participants to have a true celebration in several months’ time.

In Pilsen, organizers said this week that community safety should be prioritized. A downtown Mexican Independence Day festival set for next weekend, though, was postponed this week by organizers, who said the decision was made to protect people.

“But also we just refuse to let our festival be a pawn in this political game,” said Germán González, an organizer of El Grito Chicago.

In Pilsen and Little Village, two of the city’s best-known neighborhoods with restaurants, businesses and cultural ties to Mexican culture, residents expressed disappointment at the fear and anxiety the potential federal intervention was instilling within the community during a time of year usually characterized by joy, togetherness and the celebration of Mexican American culture and heritage.

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