I generally focus more on the iterative, step-by-step developments in a story like the Broadview Six case. So I want to make sure you see this Josh Kovensky piece on the context in which it all happened: Washington pressuring Chicago prosecutors to fall in line and abuse their power in the service of “Midway Blitz,” a U.S. attorney’s office hollowed out through high-level resignations and departures in 2025. All a mix desperation, violence and misconduct that brought us to that moment last October and today. Also don’t miss David Kurtz’s look at how the Broadview Six scandal is spreading to and endangering other cases which aren’t really tied to Midway Blitz at all.
I want to remind us of something that is easy to lose track of amidst the violence, predation and anger. Operations “Midway Blitz” and “Metro Surge” — both hideous faux-military operation tag lines — were never only or even mainly about mass deportation or even harassing immigrants (documented and not), though they did lots of both. Their aim was to terrorize blue cities, attack the communities that inhabit them and the states which are sovereign over them. This may strike some as a bold or ungenerous claim. But these operations were never efficient at rounding up undocumented immigrants. ICE has many more effective ways of doing that.
Trumpism can’t brook dissent or independent centers of power within the country, which Trump and his minions see as something like his property. That’s why federalism has always been and remains the sheet anchor of resistance to Trump’s would-be autocracy in his second term. The Supreme Court’s corrupt claims of authority have made Trump’s will unquestionable and unstoppable within the executive branch. But states are their own separate and distinct, albeit subordinate, sovereignties. The president simply cannot reach into a state government and fire an appointee, executive official or anyone else. There is no line of authority or connective tissue that makes it possible. This is a critical safeguard for American elections since the Constitution places the management of elections in state hands. Every one of Trump’s corrupt attempts and election-swindling gambits have been efforts to get around that basic, structural fact. The goal behind these blue city occupations was always to use force and violence to coerce those independent sovereignties, bring them to heel, attempting with violence and abuses of power what the Constitution clearly bars by any legal means.
That kind of end-run on the law can never be legitimate and it made the whole effort a war of violence against the federal Constitution, as well as the individual states.
They thought escalation could work to their benefit. Storm into a city with violence and abuses of power. Spur street protests in opposition. Then escalate or even call in the military to “protect” public safety against the protesters who were protesting the original abuses of power and domestic invasion by a rogue president.
But it didn’t work. Vigilance and organizing and strategic restraint mobilized public opinion against the president’s anti-constitutional violence.
The entire effort, from start to finish, was a war against the Constitution and the liberties, privileges and immunities of American citizens.
