Over 100,000 Chicago residents gang members’—Kash Patel

FBI Director Kash Patel told Fox News there are “110,000 gang members” active in Chicago after a visit to the city on Tuesday.

Speaking to the network, Patel said: “When I was there today…we learned that the Chicago city streets have 110,000 gang members. They had 1,200 shootings this year alone, 360 homicides. When politicians choose to side with those metrics and not with their citizenry – thank God we have President Trump and this Department of Justice and this FBI going in there and crushing violent crime.”

He added: “And President Trump sent us into these cities quietly to set the stage, to setup for the National Guard, to see the success that we saw in Washington D.C., in Memphis, the FBI’s been leading the charge in every single one of these streets because we know how to gather ground level intelligence and we know how to put handcuffs on the bad guys.”

Hundreds of Texas National Guard soldiers have arrived in the Chicago area ahead of a potential deployment to the city.

On Monday, the state of Illinois filed a lawsuit seeking to block the Trump administration’s planned deployment of National Guard troops to Chicago.

This is a developing story and will be updated.