The Insurrection Act and the War at Home

Fear, force, and the line America has crossed.

I spent my career protecting this country. Now I’m watching the machinery I once helped shape being turned against our own people. Chicago isn’t a battlefield, but we’re treating it like one. I’ve been in the rooms where national security decisions are made. I’ve sat through years of classified and unclassified briefings on terrorism, immigration, and domestic crises. I’ve debated when and how force should ever be used on U.S. soil and overseas. And I’ve sat face-to-face with Stephen Miller.

So when I watch helicopters circling Chicago, families zip-tied in the dark, protesters gassed outside an ICE facility, and now National Guard troops ordered to patrol American streets under Operation Midway Blitz, I know exactly what I’m seeing.

This isn’t homeland security. It’s federalized fear, a campaign of cruelty disguised as law and order.

From raids to militarization

A federal judge just declined to block President Trump’s order to deploy National Guard troops to Illinois. Hundreds of soldiers from Illinois and Texas are now set to arrive in the Chicago region. Governor J.B. Pritzker called it “an unconstitutional invasion of Illinois by the federal government.” He’s right. Federal immigration agents have turned Chicago into a testing ground for authoritarian tactics: helicopters over the South Side, chemical agents near schools, and residents zip-tied without warrants. Just days ago, U.S. Border Patrol agents were deployed to Chicago in a late-night raid on an apartment building, rappelling from helicopters onto rooftops and breaking down doors in what officials claimed was a gang operation. It swept up U.S. citizens and families instead.

It was a stunning escalation: Border Patrol agents, usually tasked with guarding America’s borders, were now acting as an urban strike force in a major U.S. city. It’s the clearest sign yet that Trump’s immigration crackdown has morphed into something far bigger, a domestic militarization campaign under the banner of “security.”

Some of you may be sitting back thinking this is about illegal immigrants. It’s not. Once fear becomes policy, it never stops where it starts. No one is immune once power learns it can rule by cruelty. This is federal overreach, plain and simple, the weaponization of government against its own people.

Uniformed soldiers are being deployed to “protect federal assets.”

This is not protection. It’s an occupation.

And now, Donald Trump is threatening to go even further.

On Monday, he told reporters he’s prepared to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807, the law that allows a president to deploy active-duty U.S. troops on domestic soil. It was written to crush rebellions more than two centuries ago. Trump said, “If I had to enact it, I’d do that—if people were being killed and courts or governors were holding us up.”

The President of the United States is threatening to use the military against Americans if judges or governors try to stop him. He’s been waiting to do this since the summer of 2020, when his own defense secretary at the time, Mark Esper, and other military brass refused to let him invoke the act. I was there for these meetings and debates. Today, that restraint is gone. The guardrails are gone. And the danger is no longer theoretical.

The ideology of cruelty

What Trump is doing with the Insurrection Act isn’t improvisation, it’s the logical endpoint of the worldview I saw up close in the White House.

Stephen Miller often argued that “toughness” was what the base wanted, that cruelty itself projected control and strength. Fear was the metric of success. Families crying on television were considered proof that the policy was working.

That mentality came to life in the 2018 family-separation policy, defended even by Miller’s wife, Katie Miller, who infamously said after visiting a child-detention center: “They sent me there to become more compassionate. It didn’t work.” She added that people needed to assimilate, and why would we want “Little Havana” in our country? I’ll never forget sitting in a Cabinet meeting where her husband, Stephen Miller, made a similar argument—questioning why we’d want Iraqi communities in the United States, right after General Mattis emphasized that we had a moral obligation to protect the translators who risked their lives for our troops. When Miller’s bald head started to glow red from the hatred he was spitting out, you could feel the air shift in the room, a quiet recognition that cruelty wasn’t just policy for him, it was personal. It’s the exact look you see on TV today, the same venom disguised as conviction.

That callousness is now doctrine. What began as a border experiment has metastasized into national policy, a global export of cruelty dressed up as security.

When Trust Dies

So what happens when people stop believing the law protects them? When law enforcement becomes a force to fear instead of one that serves? I’ve seen what that looks like abroad, when citizens stop calling the police because they expect intimidation instead of help. That’s when the social contract collapses. Once trust dies, fear fills the void. Crimes go unreported. Extremism festers. When people believe power is unaccountable, they often resort to taking justice into their own hands or give up on it entirely. That’s the endgame of authoritarianism: a society where everyone is suspect and no one feels safe. Where enforcement replaces law, and obedience replaces trust.

When that day comes, it won’t matter what party you belong to or what faith you hold. No one will be immune to the consequences of a government that has taught its citizens to fear it.

Chicago is not a battlefield. Neither is America.

It’s a city of families, teachers, and small-business owners who deserve to sleep without rotor blades overhead. I once helped shape homeland-security policy. I know what those words are supposed to mean. They’re supposed to protect the homeland, not occupy it.

Helicopters over Chicago don’t make us stronger. Troops in our streets don’t make us safe. They make us smaller, and they prove that the greatest threat to our security right now isn’t coming from outside our borders. It’s coming from those who’ve forgotten what this country stands for.

More soon,

Olivia