Hundreds of protesters took to Logan Square in Chicago on Thursday to call for defunding the Chicago Police among other things as federal law enforcement officers are set to be deployed by US President Donald Trump to deal with a spike in violence in the city.

On Wednesday, July 22, Trump announced a surge of federal law enforcement into cities ran by Democrats, including Chicago, as part of his “law and order” campaign.

Chicago is experiencing a growing number of gun-related incidents, with the city’s official statistics reporting over 400 murders so far this year, compared to 275 during the same period last year.

Someone fired shots from a car toward a group of people who were attending a funeral, according to Eric Carter, a first deputy superintendent with the Chicago Police Department. Some of the group at the funeral returned fire, he said.

The police recovered 60 shell casings at the scene, and the car was found abandoned not far away.

Victims were being treated at five hospitals but their conditions were not known. The shooting came amid a surge of gun violence in the city. As of early July, at least 336 people had been killed, sending Chicago toward one of its deadliest years since the mid-1990s.

Police officials said they had not determined a motive for the shooting, and that one person was being questioned. It was unclear what the person’s connection to the shooting was. The funeral was being held, a police official said, for a man who had been fatally shot last week along a street less than two miles away.

Trump said this week that he planned to soon deploy about 150 federal law enforcement officials to Chicago, but Mayor Lori Lightfoot voiced concern about the role they might play.

“The deployment of unnamed special secret agents onto our streets to detain people without cause and to effectively take away their civil rights and civil liberties without due process — that is not going to happen in Chicago,” she said in a news conference on Tuesday, The New York Times reported.

Lightfoot appeared to be concerned with how the Trump administration has intervened in demonstrations in Portland, Ore., which have gone on for 54 consecutive nights.

Nationwide protests against systemic racism and police violence after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis have waned in most cities and towns, but tensions in Portland rose as federal agents recently arrived. Agents in military garb have drawn widespread criticism for detaining people in unmarked vans, injuring protesters with projectiles, and striking a Navy veteran.

The Department of Homeland Security has contended it has the authority to deputize agents to protect federal property, including a courthouse in Portland that has been the site of protests.

The Black Lives Matter protests have been largely peaceful demonstrations with some people participating in vandalism and property destruction. Officers have at times responded by using batons and firing tear gas and rubber bullets at crowds.

But Trump, who trails Joseph R. Biden Jr. in the polls for November’s election, has seized on the unrest for what critics say are political purposes. He has described cities as out of control while emphasizing their Democratic leadership, and said he would also consider sending federal agents to New York, Philadelphia and Detroit.

In Chicago on Tuesday evening, Keisha James, who lives around the corner from the funeral home in the Gresham neighborhood, said she heard the gunshots and saw the police chasing someone in the chaotic moments that followed.

The endless nature of the violence weighed on her, she said.

Earlier in the day, she had been to a balloon release in memory of two other shooting victims. And a relative was fatally shot not long ago in another Chicago neighborhood, she said, adding that the level of gun violence had grown sickening. “This is kids shooting people,” she said.

Asked about Trump’s plan to dispatch federal law enforcement agents to Chicago, James said it would not work. “Whether he sends people here or not, this is not over. This has been going on and will continue,” she said, adding: “It’s going to make it worse.”