Sending in the Guard

Plus: Kilmar Abrego Garcia's case, what's wrong with emergency rooms, and more...

Trump administration ordered the National Guard into Chicago: 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—30-year-old Marimar Martinez, a U.S. citizen who was armed at the time—who drove herself to the hospital, was treated, and recovered.

A criminal complaint, as The New York Times summarizes it, 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.

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.

"It is absolutely outrageous and un-American to demand a Governor send military troops within our own borders and against our will," Pritzker replied in a statement, adding that Defense Department officials told him to "call up your troops, or we will."

This has "never been about safety," said Pritzker. "This is about control." Or maybe it's about optics, and conveying a sense of enough-is-enough when it comes to violence by protesters.

The presence of federal agents has not improved matters. Teports emerged from Chicago over the course of the weekend indicating that federal agents—believed to be from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and/or the Border Patrol—were shooting chemical irritants, stun grenades, and teargas at protesters (and, accidentally, at cops).

The arrival of more feds might not improve matters much. "National Guard members in Illinois would work under Title 10 of federal law," reports The Washington Post, "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."

"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. "The operations have strained relations with the community and prompted continual protests outside an ICE detention center in Broadview, a Chicago suburb."

Meanwhile, federal judges are blocking Trump's attempts to send the National Guard into Portland, where similar skirmishes are playing out.

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Scenes from New York: "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 The New York Times 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. "Patients come in with stomach pain, chest pain and cough; head injuries, overdoses and nonspecific complaints; depression, hypertension and hunger."

"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. "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—and '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.

More concisely:

A Republican is just a liberal mugged by an urban emergency room

— pjeffa (????,????) (@jeff82874662) October 5, 2025

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QUICK HITS

• "A federal judge has concluded that the Department of Justice's prosecution of Kilmar Abrego Garcia on human smuggling charges may be an illegal retaliation after he successfully sued the Trump administration over his deportation to El Salvador," reports the Associated Press. U.S. District Court Judge Waverly Crenshaw "said Abrego Garcia had shown that there is 'some evidence that the prosecution against him may be vindictive.' That evidence included statements by various Trump administration officials and the timeline of the charges being filed."
• "Sebastien Lecornu unexpectedly resigned as France's prime minister on Monday, blaming the intransigence of the groups in the country's fractured parliament and deepening a national political crisis," reports Bloomberg. "His resignation came less than 24 hours after President Emmanuel Macron named a new cabinet stacked with centrist loyalists, ignoring threats from opposition parties not to appoint a continuity government. That plan immediately backfired." At issue: France has a huge deficit and needs to either raise taxes or cut spending.
• Temporary Protected Status recipients continue to be caught in legal limbo:

JUST IN: The Supreme Court allows the Trump administration to again end the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants, pausing a lower court order that found the Department of Homeland Security's decision to be unlawful. pic.twitter.com/i132npa3UB

— Camilo Montoya-Galvez (@camiloreports) October 3, 2025

• This year's United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP30, is being held in Belem, Brazil—on the edge of the Amazon—where high hotel prices are forcing countries' governments to consider housing their delegations in converted love motels and in cruise ships to make ends meet (or so they say). It's classic environmentalistbrain: a total inability to grasp second-order impacts. Of course Belem doesn't have great capacity to host a conference of this size! The love-motel coopting was a predictable outcome.
• Bluesky users try to get someone who doesn't use Bluesky banned from the platform by…threatening a boycott for a product they don't pay for. You truly can't make this up. I will shed no tears if this platform must go the way of the dodo:

Btw the Bluesky userbase is currently threatening another "posters' strike" again to get the staff to ban Jesse Singal, who doesn't even use Bluesky, and the CEO is finally starting to lose it with them https://t.co/zJ7HWupi1G pic.twitter.com/ZKGvTtMVlu

— Key ???? ???? (@KeyTryer) October 5, 2025