President Trump and Attorney General William Barr on Wednesday announced a surge of "hundreds" of federal law enforcement officers to Chicago, Albuquerque and other cities in an effort to crack down on a recent wave of violent crime.
WASHINGTON, DC - JULY 22: U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during an event about 'Operation ... [+] 
"Today I'm announcing a surge of federal law enforcement into American communities plagued by violent crime," Trump said during a White House event on Thursday.
The surge is an extension of the hundreds of agents deployed to Kansas City, Missouri, as part of Operation Legend, named for 4-year-old LeGend Taliferro, who was shot and killed in the city in June.
Trump specified that the operation would be extended to Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Chicago, a city he has long pointed to as the epitome of poverty and crime and which he compared to Afghanistan earlier this month.
There has been growing resistance among local officials to the Trump administration's interventions in policing; the mayors of Portland, Seattle, D.C., Chicago, Atlanta and Kansas City penned a letter to Barr and Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf expressing "deep concern and objection to the deployment of federal forces in our cities."
Trump condemned local officials who refuse federal intervention as "too proud or too political," adding "they should call, they should want it."
Barr lauded the operation's success in Kansas City and called it "the standard, anti-crime fighting activities that we have been carrying out around the country for decades" and "classic crime-fighting."
200. Barr noted that 200 arrests have been made in Kansas City in the weeks since Operation Legend was rolled out.
The surge comes amid a heated debate about the role of the federal government in local policing. The epicenter of this debate is Portland, Oregon, where local officials have demanded the removal of unmarked federal agents who have allegedly been detaining protesters in unmarked vehicles.
The surge is part of a broader political effort by Trump to cast himself as the tough-on-crime, "law and order" candidate ahead of November, but time is running out for him to turn things around. Former Vice President Joe Biden holds a commanding lead in the polls, and even leads Trump on the issue of law and order in several polls.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot expressed support for the plan on Tuesday, noting that the agents will "plug in to the existing federal agencies that we work with on a regular basis to help manage and suppress violent crime."
But others were critical of the surge, with Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker calling it "a wrongheaded move on the part of Donald Trump, on the part of the Department of Homeland Security."
"We will be adding cities in the weeks ahead," Barr said.
I am a news desk reporter covering politics and the 2020 election. I have previously worked for MSNBC and Chronogram Magazine. I attended Vassar College and the London
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