CHICAGO — President Donald Trump set the stage for a surge of immigration enforcement actions in Chicago with a social media post Saturday morning depicting military helicopters flying over the city’s lakefront using the title “Chipocalypse Now.”

“I love the smell of deportations in the morning…” Trump posted on his Truth Social account, altering a famous phrase from the 1979 movie “Apocalypse Now.” In the post, Trump is depicted in U.S. Army fatigues and sunglasses and wearing a Stetson U.S. Cavalry hat like the lieutenant colonel portrayed in the movie by actor Robert Duvall.

“Chicago is about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR,” Trump wrote, a day after signing an executive order to rename the Department of Defense to its pre-1949 title.

The posting was Trump’s latest signal that he may authorize the use of military assets, specifically the National Guard, as part of a stepped-up operation by federal agencies under the Department of Homeland Security, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, anticipated to begin as soon as this weekend.

Trump had no public events scheduled for Saturday, leaving his social media post to speak of his agenda after vacillating for weeks on whether he would deploy the guard in Chicago or in other cities.

Illinois Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker, an ardent Trump foe who has vowed to go to court to fight a presidential deployment of the guard, responded on the social media platform X by stating: “The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city.”

“This is not a joke. This is not normal. Donald Trump isn’t a strongman, he’s a scared man. Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator,” Pritzker wrote.

In his own social media post, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said Trump’s “threats are beneath the honor of our nation, but the reality is that he wants to occupy our city and break our Constitution. We must defend our democracy from this authoritarianism by protecting each other and protecting Chicago from Donald Trump.”

On Friday, Chicago Police Superintendent Larry Snelling said he had not received any information about any sweeping federal deployment.

“The last thing our department needs to be is in the dark,” he told The Chicago Tribune.

The social media storm occurred hours after Pritzker warned that Trump was embarking on a “nefarious plan” using fear and intimidation to normalize military activities in the nation’s largest Democratic-led cities.

But the two-term Democratic chief executive, who is seeking a third term and is a potential 2028 White House aspirant, acknowledged that absent the courts, he was powerless to combat Trump’s efforts to detain immigrants through the work of hundreds of federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers coming to the city.

Pritzker, speaking Friday on MSNBC’s “The Briefing With Jen Psaki,” also placed faith in community residents wielding cellphone cameras to help provide video evidence of legal violations that could occur in Chicago and be used in court by the state, as he continued to urge peaceful protests to prevent giving Trump a pretext for deploying the National Guard.

“It’s, I believe, a nefarious plan,” Pritzker said. “It’s one that’s been repeated over and over again by, well, tyrannical dictatorships across history, where you try to incite the local population into some mayhem by sending in police or other disruptors and then claim that there’s too much mayhem on the ground and, therefore, there must be troops that are sent in. And, that’s how you basically convert a democracy into something other than that.”

Pritzker has said he thinks the timing of a surge in ICE enforcement in Chicago could be tied to parades and celebrations of Mexican Independence Day.

The first major event surrounding the festivities occurred with a major parade on Saturday in Pilsen. With fears that ICE or Border Patrol agents could disrupt the parade, organizers initiated tight security protocols at the 24th annual parade in the heavily-Latino neighborhood.

The parade went off without any immigration enforcement activities taking place. The crowd was considerably smaller than in previous years, but there was also an air of defiance as attendees yelled, “Viva Mexica,” and carried “No ICE” signs.

Trump has repeatedly attacked Chicago as a “hellhole” over crime, despite statistics showing violent crimes have been reduced in recent years.

But using his June deployment of the National Guard and active-duty Marines to Los Angeles after a sporadic outbreak of anti-ICE protests and, more recently, the federalizing of law enforcement in Washington, D.C., Trump has sought for Republicans to claim a law-and-order political advantage against Democrats heading into next year’s midterm elections.

A federal court judge in San Francisco ruled on Tuesday that Trump’s deployment of the military to Los Angeles, over the objections of Gov. Gavin Newsom, was unconstitutional. But an appellate court lifted the order on Thursday, saying it needed more time to rule on the merits of the case.

Pritzker has put his faith in the initial ruling by U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer, younger brother of former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, who was appointed to the nation’s highest court by Democratic President Bill Clinton. Charles Breyer ruled that the National Guard troops were violating the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878.

“That’s all we have, though,” Pritzker said of Breyer’s ruling, which would not cover an Illinois deployment. “Remember, if the courts don’t rule in favor of Posse Comitatus — that’s an act that prevents, supposedly, the federal government from sending troops into a state to do law enforcement — if they don’t enforce that or understand what Trump is doing is unconstitutional, then we’re then at the whims of a fighting force that they’re planning to send here.”

If Trump ultimately does deploy troops to Chicago, his “Chipocalypse Now” social media threat could help the state’s efforts in court, Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul said Saturday in an interview with the Rev. Al Sharpton on MSNBC.

“I think his comments will have an impact on how the courts view this,” Raoul said. “And his childish, un-American, unpresidential post with regards to the Department of War descending upon Chicago, I think that will have (an) impact. It will show that his intent is not a genuine attempt of either immigration enforcement or fighting crime. He’s trying to sow the type of violence and protest that get out of (hand) that might give him an angle at being able to deploy forces into our city.”

To assist any state challenge in the federal courts in Illinois, Pritzker has said he has been “very explicit” to have residents “pull out their iPhone or their Android phone and film what they’re seeing” to provide evidence of the Guard “when they kind of trip the wire, so to speak, and there’s been an incident that allows us” to go to court.

“So this is the challenge. And I think we need the public to be involved in monitoring that,” he said.

“And we’re making sure that we’re also asking the public — because I know they’re going to protest — we’re asking them to be peaceful in that protest, to make sure that they’re making their voices heard, they’re using their megaphones and microphones, but that they stay out of the way of these ICE officials,” he said.

Pritzker said it was “kind of a frightening development in the history of the country that you have a federal government not communicating with state government about something like this.”

“I don’t have a lot to share with the public. Whatever I have heard, I have shared with the public, because I think everybody should know, despite the fact that (the) federal government would like them not to know, apparently,” he said.

(Tribune reporters AD Quig and Dan Petrella contributed.)

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