A Trump administration memo that proposed using the National Guard to round up immigrants is "anti-American" and "they should go shred that piece of paper," a visibly emotional Mayor Rahm Emanuel said Friday.

Speaking at a ceremony to honor Butch O'Hare, the World War II flying ace in whose memory Chicago's international airport is named, Emanuel pointedly said that O'Hare's heroism serves as an example of how Americans today can stand "against tyranny."

Immediately after the speech, he responded to a Department of Homeland Security draft memo obtained by the Associated Press, which the White House has said it had made "no effort" to pursue.

"We're honoring an individual who fought for a set of ideas and values of democracy, light and openness, and our shared humanity during a time of darkness when people were picked on because of their ethnicity — there was a genocide of Jews, Gypsies, gays," the mayor told reporters beside a replica of the small plane O'Hare flew. "Now we're having a moment in which we're even discussing this, that someone wrote a memo to call up the National Guard to round up immigrants?"

Trump administration weighed mobilizing National Guard for immigration roundups: memo Garance Burke

The Trump administration considered a proposal to mobilize as many as 100,000 National Guard troops to round up unauthorized immigrants, including millions living nowhere near the Mexico border, according to a draft memo obtained by The Associated Press.

Staffers in the Department of Homeland Security...

The Trump administration considered a proposal to mobilize as many as 100,000 National Guard troops to round up unauthorized immigrants, including millions living nowhere near the Mexico border, according to a draft memo obtained by The Associated Press.

Staffers in the Department of Homeland Security...

(Garance Burke)

Emanuel, whose family suffered losses in the Holocaust, has in recent weeks been highly critical of President Donald Trump's stance on immigration, including Trump's ban on immigration from seven Muslim-majority nations, which has been temporarily blocked by the courts. But his comments Friday were of a rawer and angrier tenor than any he has yet made.

"This country will never turn its back on people like Butch O'Hare and that moment in time," he said, referring to the generation that won World War II. "The idea that someone would put on a piece of paper a concept of using the U.S. National Guard to round up people in the United States — it's dead on arrival. It's anti-American. ... They should go shred that piece of paper."

Delivered after a 45-minute ceremony, Emanuel's comments stood in contrast to the generally upbeat celebration, attended by 36 descendants of O'Hare who had traveled from as far afield as Alaska for the 75th anniversary of a heroic flight in which O'Hare shot down as many as five Japanese bombers to single-handedly save the USS Lexington.

History buff Ald. Ed. Burke, 14th, who organized the event, described O'Hare as the "greatest aviator of World War II" and said he finds it "sad that millions of people who travel through this airport do not know his story."

O'Hare, who was killed in combat in November 1943, came from St. Louis but had some fascinating Chicago ties. His father, "Easy Eddie" O'Hare, was a lawyer for Al Capone, who turned against the gangster and helped the Feds convict him.

"Easy Eddie" was gunned down in 1939 by Capone's gang, two weeks before Capone got out of prison, likely as a "coming home present" for Capone, Burke said. The alderman added that some historians believe that "Easy Eddie" turned against Capone so that his son, Butch, could secure admission to the Naval Academy at Annapolis. Butch's niece, Patsy Lowry, 76, of Arizona, was one of many family members who told Chicago Inc. how proud they are of the airport and their family history. When she flew in from Phoenix on Thursday night, Lowry said, she nudged the passenger in the seat next to her and told him, "You know, I'm an O'Hare!"

kjanssen@chicagotribune.comTwitter @kimjnews

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