“We know that there’s a perception that people are not safe in the city of Chicago,” Lopez said. “Residents do not feel safe in the city of Chicago. They’re worried when they drop their kids off at school, when they go to work, when they sit on their front porch admiring the summertime weather. Everyone’s worried that they’re going to be robbed, carjacked, or shot in the city of Chicago.”

“And if the mayor and the governor continue to say crime is down, crime is decreasing, everything’s great, then why don’t we take Donald Trump up on his offer and go even further, decrease the numbers even further, the way that they’ve been decreased in Washington, D.C.,” Lopez said.

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Lopez’s comments come just days after Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson rebuked Trump for potentially sending the National Guard to Chicago. Both claimed there were no imminent crime issues in the city.

“There is not an emergency in the city of Chicago,” Pritzker previously said. 

Johnson echoed similar sentiments, and when he did acknowledge there was crime in the city, he blamed it on President Donald Trump and “red states.”

Both Johnson’s and Pritzker’s comments came before Labor Day weekend in Chicago, when there were 58 people shot and eight murdered. Meanwhile, Johnson continued dancing around the topic of violence in his city and blamed Chicago’s violence on states where most of the voters are Republican, known as “red states.”

“Chicago will continue to have a ‘violence problem’ as long as Red states continue to have a gun problem,” Johnson posted on X on Tuesday evening. “The endless flow of illegal guns into Chicago can be traced to Red states like Mississippi, Indiana, and Louisiana. It is up to the federal government to step up and stop interstate gun trafficking networks.”

Lopez noted and mocked Johnson’s comments, sarcastically asking why the mayor didn’t blame it on other historic phenomena.

“I’m actually quite surprised he didn’t blame the Confederacy, Richard Nixon, or colonialism,” Lopez said.

Lopez also commented on Trump’s recent comments calling Chicago the “murder capital of the world.” He disagreed with that characterization but did acknowledge that violent crime is an issue, and many of the residents in his area are afraid.

“Well. I don’t necessarily agree with the president’s comments that we’re the ‘murder capital of the world,’ but we do have our challenges,” Lopez said. “But at the same time, we do know that many of our residents live in a state of fear, in a state of panic and anxiety about the crime they perceive all around them.”

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“We had two young teenagers shot in my ward on the same day that Gov. Pritzker and Mayor Johnson said we don’t need help,” he told Vargas. “Of course we need help.”

“We need the actual presence of the National Guard to focus on the assets of the city, so that our police can go into the communities and go after those individual gang members, drug dealers, and human traffickers that we know are here, and use the full force of government to go after them,” he added. “That is absolutely something we should be working toward.”