President Trump is set to deliver a speech next week to a group of police chiefs in Chicago, marking his first visit to the city since he became president and setting the stage for likely protests.
The White House confirmed Tuesday that Trump will deliver remarks at the International Association of Chiefs of Police’s annual conference, where he is expected to discuss his support for law enforcement and criminal justice reform during his remarks.
The president is also expected to attend a fundraiser for his reelection campaign while he is in town. Todd Ricketts, the finance chairman of the Republican National Committee, is a co-owner of the Chicago Cubs.
{mosads}The president, whose family owns a building along the Chicago River, has not visited Chicago since becoming president. He canceled a rally in the city in March 2016 amid massive protests.
City leadership has taken an adversarial approach to Trump’s administration, branding itself a sanctuary city for immigrants and speaking out against the president’s policies.
Trump has been an outspoken critic of Chicago and its gun violence issues, and he is likely to be greeted with protests upon arriving in the Windy City on Monday.
The president also attended last year’s conference in Orlando, where he faulted Chicago’s leadership for the city’s gun violence problems and suggested that police be allowed to implement the legally dubious practice of “stop and frisk.”
“It works, and it was meant for problems like Chicago,” Trump said of the policy, which was deemed unconstitutional in 2013 after New York police were found to have targeted minorities with the practice.
In the same 2018 speech, Trump said he’d like Chicago officials to change a 2016 deal between the police department and the American Civil Liberties Union that required city police to document every street stop they made in an effort to curb racial profiling. The president suggested that law enforcement had their hands tied by the agreement.
Chicago has been racked by tensions between residents and its police force, highlighted by a few recent high-profile incidents.
Most notably, a city police officer was convicted of second-degree murder last October in the 2014 shooting of teenager Laquan McDonald. Multiple officers have since been fired or investigated for allegedly attempting to cover up the circumstances of McDonald’s death.
–This report was updated at 11:21 a.m.