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President Donald Trump has announced the deployment of ‘hundreds’ of federal law enforcement officers to Chicago as part of a federal crackdown on violent crime in the US, pledging to “never” defund the police.

The FBI, Department of Homeland Security, US Marshals and other federal agencies will be sending officers to Chicago, the president announced, noting that more than 400 people have been killed in the city just this year, and over a thousand injured in shootings.

“We will not stand by and watch it happen,” Trump said.

Americans of all races and in all postal codes deserve to live in safety and “no mother should ever have to cradle her dead child in her arms simply because politicians refused to do what is necessary to secure their neighborhood and secure their city,” he added.

Trump also pledged not only to “never defund the police,” but to hire “more great police” in order to “make law enforcement stronger.”

“What cities are doing is absolute insanity,” Trump continued, slamming politicians for seeking to cut law enforcement budgets while pushing “sanctuary city” policies.

‘Operation Legend’ is a Department of Justice undertaking named after LeGend Taliferro, a 4-year-old boy murdered earlier this month when someone shot up his house in Kansas City, Missouri. His family was in attendance at the White House event on Wednesday.

The operation initially focused on Kansas City, but has since been expanded to Chicago, Illinois and Albuquerque, New Mexico. Attorney General William Barr has offered rewards for information leading to the arrest of Taliferro’s killer, as well as those of other children murdered in recent shootings.

Trump blamed Democratic politicians’ “effort[s] to shut down police in their own communities” for creating “a shocking explosion of shootings, killing, violence, murders” that “shocks the conscience of our nation.”

Violent crime has risen sharply over the last two months across major US cities, as protesters outraged by the killing of George Floyd, an African-American man, in Minnesota, demanded to “defund the police” in response.

The previous rollout of Department of Homeland Security personnel in Portland horrified locals, who shared videos of federal agents “kidnapping” protesters into unmarked vans and likened the feds’ tactics to a fascist dictatorship. DHS Secretary Chad Wolf didn’t help his case by describing how the agency had to “go out and proactively arrest individuals” due to a lack of support from local law enforcement.

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