Overview
- Chicago police say roughly 24 separate shootings from Friday evening through Sunday night during the Juneteenth weekend left 39 people wounded and six dead, including a drive‑by attack in which two people in an SUV opened fire on a crowd.
- President Donald Trump publicly urged Governor J.B. Pritzker to request federal or National Guard forces and repeatedly said he could ‘‘fix’’ Chicago quickly, citing prior deployments to other cities as precedent.
- Governor Pritzker rejected calls for militarized intervention and instead requested targeted help from federal law‑enforcement agencies, naming the FBI, DEA and ATF as the assistance he has sought.
- City officials, faith leaders and violence‑prevention activists used the weekend’s violence to push for a proposed city Department of Gun Violence Prevention to coordinate programs and secure sustained funding while opposing federal militarization.
- Legal and political hurdles make a large federal troop deployment unlikely in the near term because of state opposition and past court limits on federalizing Guard forces, and the dispute is now shifting attention to funding and local prevention strategies.