Aaron Hughes went to the Kedzie Armory in 2000 to enlist in the Illinois National Guard hoping to serve by helping place sandbags after catastrophic flooding along the Mississippi River..
Three years later, he was running transportation missions between Kuwait and Iraq in a 1953 truck with no radio and no maps. He never helped clean up flooding or provided assistance after any natural disaster.
“People don’t join the military to patrol the streets of major cities of the United States,” said Hughes, 43, who joined fellow members of About Face: Veterans Against the War on Tuesday in Federal Plaza to call on National Guard members to resist President Donald Trump’s plan to deploy troops to Chicago to combat crime.
The vets specifically suggested that National Guard members invoke their duty to disobey unlawful orders, while pointing to a federal judge’s ruling in California that found Trump’s use of the military in Los Angeles this year violated federal law.
Like Hughes, the reality of Daniel Lakemacher’s service was vastly different from the expectations he had when he enlisted.
Lakemacher was a psychiatric technician specialist for the Navy’s Hospital Corps from 2005 to 2009, serving at the Guantanamo Bay prison for close to a year. He was discharged from the military as a conscientious objector after undergoing “a lot of reflection, introspection, learning.
“I saw and I experienced so much how the military can work to stifle one’s individual conscience,” said Lakemacher, 42, who grew up in Woodstock and now lives in Oak Park. It “can cause great harm, moral injury to those who are in the military by ordering them to do things that are wrong, regardless of legality, that violate people’s conscience of what they know to be right.
“And so it created in me a passion and a commitment to be able to support those who are in uniform in following their conscience in doing what they know to be right, regardless of the legality of an order.”
The veterans also emphasized that National Guard members aren’t trained in city deployments, constitutional law, human rights or provided any training that would be relevant to addressing local law enforcement.
“What are service members trained to do? That is what everyone needs to be asking themselves,” Hughes said, adding that military members are first trained in “how to kill people.”
“What are the unit’s technical proficiencies and how does that relate to anything that these people are talking about? It doesn’t,” Hughes said.
Calls for Pritzker to reject Trump’s order
The veterans also called on Gov. JB Pritzker, as commander in chief of the Illinois National Guard, to formally reject orders from Trump to send National Guard members to Chicago, which the president has described as a “killing field.”
Pritzker, along with Mayor Brandon Johnson and other elected officials, last week called Trump’s plan “unwarranted” and “illegal,” declaring there was no federal emergency that would require a National Guard presence.
“Back up your words with actions by directing the Illinois National Guard not to report. To refuse these orders,” Lakemacher said. “You have so much more power than just words and tweets. Use the resources of the state to support, at the individual level, any guardsperson that refuses.”
Pritzker has also said that he and Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul have been exploring legal options in the event that Trump sends guard members.
Joey Mogul, a lawyer with the People’s Law Office, on Tuesday reiterated comments from other legal experts that “there is no legal, factual or moral justification for President Trump to deploy any military troops or National Guard units here in Chicago.”
She detailed two scenarios in which Trump could send troops to the city — by invoking the federal Insurrection Act or through a federal statute. Both situations would be in response to domestic rebellions that are preventing local governments from enforcing the law, which Mogul said Chicago was “not witnessing.”
Pritzker’s office did not respond to a request for comment about calls for him to formally deny Trump’s order to deploy troops to Chicago.
‘Who’s talking about the guardsmen?’
Hughes, the National Guard veteran, said he would have been more careful about his decision to enlist in the military had he known the full extent of the National Guard’s responsibilities.
He encourages active members to call the National Lawyers Guild Military Law Task Force to learn about their rights or to reach out to the About Face: Veterans Against the War.
When possible, community members should reach out to active guard members in their communities “so they know they’re not alone, because no one’s talking about them. Who’s talking about the guardsmen? It’s just like a political game,” Hughes said.
“This has ramifications for service members, for the people who are actually in uniform on the ground. I feel like we have forgotten about them in this back-and-forth spectacle.”