Delphine Cherry knows as well as anyone how intractable violent crime is in Chicago. In 1992, her teenage daughter was gunned down in one of the city's toniest neighborhoods — a bystander caught up in a gang shootout. Twenty years later in a suburb just south of the city, it claimed her son.

"You don't think it's going to happen twice in your life," she said.

The nation's third-largest city has braced for weeks for a National Guard deployment, troops President Donald Trump promised would help fight crime in what he described as a "hellhole."

Though Chicago has had one of the highest rates of gun violence of any major American city for some time, city and state leaders overwhelmingly oppose the planned operation, calling it political theater. Even those most directly affected, including

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