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<\/picture> <\/div>\nTrump administration ordered the National Guard into Chicago: <\/strong>On Saturday morning, on the Southwest Side of Chicago in Brighton Park, two people driving cars reportedly attempted either to assault federal Border Patrol agents or to otherwise impede their work. The agents shot at one of the motorists\u201430-year-old Marimar Martinez, a U.S. citizen who was armed at the time\u2014who drove herself to the hospital, was treated, and recovered.<\/p>\n A criminal complaint, as The New York Times<\/em> summarizes it<\/a>, asserts that “three Border Patrol agents who were conducting an operation in Oak Lawn, Ill., were followed by Ms. Martinez and [21-year-old Anthony Ian Santos] Ruiz. They pursued the agents’ cars, running red lights and stop signs as they did so, and eventually crossed the city line into Chicago.” The two motorists then allegedly “drove into one of the federal agents’ cars, causing the agent to lose control of the vehicle….Once the agents’ car had stopped and the agents had stepped out of it, Ms. Martinez drove her car directly at one of the agents, the complaint said, prompting him to fire five shots at her.” The Department of Homeland Security claims that Martinez was “armed with a semiautomatic weapon,z]” which has not been corroborated elsewhere.<\/p>\n President Donald Trump pointed to such clashes as his justification for deploying 300 National Guardsmen to Chicago over the weekend. “Amidst ongoing violent riots and lawlessness, that local leaders like [Illinois Gov. JB] Pritzker have refused to step in to quell, President Trump has authorized 300 national guardsmen to protect federal officers and assets,” said White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson.<\/p>\n “It is absolutely outrageous and un-American to demand a Governor send military troops within our own borders and against our will,” Pritzker replied<\/a> in a statement, adding that Defense Department officials told him to “call up your troops, or we will.”<\/p>\n This has “never been about safety,” said Pritzker. “This is about control.” Or maybe it’s about optics<\/em>, and conveying a sense of enough-is-enough when it comes to violence by protesters.<\/p>\n The presence of federal agents has not improved matters. Teports emerged from Chicago over the course of the weekend indicating that federal agents\u2014believed to be from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and\/or the Border Patrol\u2014were shooting chemical irritants, stun grenades, and teargas at protesters (and, accidentally, at cops<\/a>).<\/p>\n The arrival of more feds might not improve matters much. “National Guard members in Illinois would work under Title 10 of federal law,” reports<\/a>\u00a0The Washington Post,<\/em> “prohibiting them from carrying out law enforcement duties. The mission would probably focus more narrowly on protecting federal law enforcement personnel and facilities, the officials said. It was not clear Saturday whether Guard members would carry firearms.”<\/p>\n “Over the past month, the Trump administration has surged federal agents into Chicago to make hundreds of arrests for immigration-related offenses,” adds the Post. <\/em>“The operations have strained relations with the community and prompted continual protests outside an ICE detention center in Broadview, a Chicago suburb.”<\/p>\n Meanwhile, federal judges are blocking<\/a> Trump’s attempts to send the National Guard into Portland, where similar skirmishes are playing out.<\/p>\n Scenes from New York:<\/em><\/strong> “Once last-resort care for midnight fevers, weekend sports injuries and car-wreck victims, the emergency room has become the doctor’s office for millions of people,” reports<\/a> The New York Times<\/em> in a piece covering what might have happened to 20-year-old Sam Terblanche, a Columbia student who visited the Mount Sinai Morningside emergency room twice before being discharged and dying in his dorm room. “<\/em>Patients come in with stomach pain, chest pain and cough; head injuries, overdoses and nonspecific complaints; depression, hypertension and hunger.”<\/p>\n “The first job of any emergency physician…is to identify and treat patients in need of resuscitation,” an E.R. doctor named Reuben Strayer explained to the Times.\u00a0<\/em>“Far more difficult to determine,” the paper adds, “is which patients are in imminent danger. This requires a rigorous, focused and nuanced assessment of every patient who is neither obviously dying nor obviously well. ‘You can take vital signs and if their vitals are reassuring and they look OK, the vast majority of them are OK. But not all of them,’ Strayer told me. The patient who looks well but is in danger is both a physician’s urgent concern and a needle in a haystack\u2014and ‘the more “well” patients who use the E.D. as their primary care, the harder it becomes to find these needles,’ he said.” There is something profoundly broken with our health care system if people are routinely using the emergency room as a means of getting care for non-urgent conditions, which makes it harder for people in true emergencies to get the care they need.<\/p>\n More concisely:<\/p>\n A Republican is just a liberal mugged by an urban emergency room<\/p>\n — pjeffa (????,????) (@jeff82874662) October 5, 2025<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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