“It is absolutely outrageous and un-American to demand a Governor send military troops within our own borders and against our will,” Pritzker replied in a statement, adding that Defense Department officials told him to “call up your troops, or we will.”

This has “never been about safety,” said Pritzker. “This is about control.” Or maybe it’s about optics, and conveying a sense of enough-is-enough when it comes to violence by protesters.

The presence of federal agents has not improved matters. Teports emerged from Chicago over the course of the weekend indicating that federal agents—believed to be from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and/or the Border Patrol—were shooting chemical irritants, stun grenades, and teargas at protesters (and, accidentally, at cops).

The arrival of more feds might not improve matters much. “National Guard members in Illinois would work under Title 10 of federal law,” reports The Washington Post, “prohibiting them from carrying out law enforcement duties. The mission would probably focus more narrowly on protecting federal law enforcement personnel and facilities, the officials said. It was not clear Saturday whether Guard members would carry firearms.”

“Over the past month, the Trump administration has surged federal agents into Chicago to make hundreds of arrests for immigration-related offenses,” adds the Post. “The operations have strained relations with the community and prompted continual protests outside an ICE detention center in Broadview, a Chicago suburb.”

Meanwhile, federal judges are blocking Trump’s attempts to send the National Guard into Portland, where similar skirmishes are playing out.

Scenes from New York: “Once last-resort care for midnight fevers, weekend sports injuries and car-wreck victims, the emergency room has become the doctor’s office for millions of people,” reports The New York Times in a piece covering what might have happened to 20-year-old Sam Terblanche, a Columbia student who visited the Mount Sinai Morningside emergency room twice before being discharged and dying in his dorm room. “Patients come in with stomach pain, chest pain and cough; head injuries, overdoses and nonspecific complaints; depression, hypertension and hunger.”

“The first job of any emergency physician…is to identify and treat patients in need of resuscitation,” an E.R. doctor named Reuben Strayer explained to the Times. “Far more difficult to determine,” the paper adds, “is which patients are in imminent danger. This requires a rigorous, focused and nuanced assessment of every patient who is neither obviously dying nor obviously well. ‘You can take vital signs and if their vitals are reassuring and they look OK, the vast majority of them are OK. But not all of them,’ Strayer told me. The patient who looks well but is in danger is both a physician’s urgent concern and a needle in a haystack—and ‘the more “well” patients who use the E.D. as their primary care, the harder it becomes to find these needles,’ he said.” There is something profoundly broken with our health care system if people are routinely using the emergency room as a means of getting care for non-urgent conditions, which makes it harder for people in true emergencies to get the care they need.

More concisely: