Politics
Trump Plans to Send Texas National Guard, ‘Armed Military Personnel’ to Chicago: Pritzker
President Donald Trump is preparing to send members of the Texas National Guard as well as “armed military personnel” to Chicago, Gov. JB Pritzker said Tuesday, once again dismissing the president’s latest pledge to combat crime as cover for an unconstitutional federal overreach.
“Unidentifiable agents in unmarked vehicles with masks are planning to raid Latino communities and say they’re targeting violent criminals, as we saw in Los Angeles,” Pritzker said, adding that the looming deployment was timed to coincide with celebrations of Mexican Independence Day on Sept. 16. “A very, very small percentage of the individuals they will target will be violent criminals.”
Pritzker said federal agents would target Chicagoans based on the color of their skin, and whether they appear to be Latino.
“It breaks my heart to report that we have been told ICE will try to disrupt community picnics and peaceful parades,” Pritzker said. “Let’s be clear — the terror and cruelty is the point, not the safety of anybody living here.”
The Trump administration plans to use Naval Station Great Lakes, nearly 35 miles outside Chicago, to house federal immigration agents or National Guard troops who could be deployed to Chicago, according to federal officials.
While Pritzker said his information came from “unauthorized, patriotic officials” as well as media reports, a source in Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s office told WTTW News that they were “not sure where the governor got his information, but it is not accurate.”
Nearly 52,000 migrants arrived in Chicago starting in 2022, many on buses paid for by Abbott, a Republican, as part of a concerted effort to divide Democratic voters and boost Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.
Shortly before Pritzker addressed the news media from his offices in downtown Chicago, Trump told reporters that he would send National Guard troops to Chicago despite a federal judge ruling that his administration violated a federal law known as the Posse Comitatus Act by using the military to fight crime in Los Angeles.
“We’re going in. I didn’t say when. We’re going in,” Trump said, again calling Chicago a crime-ridden “hellhole.”
“And I would love to have Gov. Pritzker call me, I’d gain respect for him, and say, ‘we do have a problem, and we’d love you to send in the troops,’” Trump said. “We’re going to do it anyway. We have the right to do it because I have an obligation to protect this country.”
Pritzker said he would make no such request of the president.
“When did we become a country where it’s OK for the U.S. president to insist on national television that a state should call him to beg for anything?” Pritzker said. “Especially something we don’t want. Have we truly lost all sense of sanity in this nation that we treat this as normal?”
It would be unprecedented for a governor to send National Guard troops into another state over the objections of that state’s elected officials at the request of the president.
Pritzker promised to challenge any deployment in court.
Flanked by Mayor Brandon Johnson, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, Attorney General Kwame Raoul and Deputy Gov. Juliana Stratton, Pritzker said it would be illegal and unconstitutional for the president to deploy the National Guard to Chicago over his objections.
“He has no idea what’s he’s talking about,” Pritzker said. “There is no emergency that warrants deployment of troops. He is insulting the people of Chicago by calling our home a hellhole, and anyone that takes his word at face value is insulting Chicagoans too.”
Johnson also dismissed the notion that Trump cared about the persistent violence that has plagued Black and Latino residents of the city’s West and South sides.
“There is too much violence in Chicago not because we have too many immigrants but because we have too many guns,” Johnson said, ticking off the officials’ efforts to stop the flow of illegal guns into Chicago from states like Indiana and Louisiana, which are controlled by Republicans.
For the second time in a week, Pritzker warned that Trump’s actions threatened the very heart of American democracy.
“Any rational person who has spent even the most minimal amount of time studying human history has to ask themselves one important question: once they get the citizens of this nation comfortable with the current atrocities committed under the color of law, what comes next?” asked Pritzker, whose grandfather survived the Holocaust.
Both Pritzker and Raoul urged Chicagoans to peacefully protest any deployment.
“Do not take the bait,” Raoul said.
Pritzker encouraged Chicagoans to record immigration enforcement operations when possible, to ensure that as many people as possible know what is being done by the Trump administration.
If Trump makes good on the latest in a long series of threats against Chicago and its leaders, Chicago would join Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and become the third American city to be occupied by federal troops deployed over the objections of local leaders.
All three cities are led by Democratic mayors who are Black and have refused to help carry out Trump’s goal of implementing the “largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”
Chicago and Los Angeles are also self-proclaimed sanctuary cities and have refused demands from federal officials that local law enforcement help federal agents deport undocumented immigrants. Trump ordered the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C., to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers when the federal government took control of the department.
Attempts by the Trump administration to force cities like Chicago and Los Angeles to stop protecting undocumented immigrants by yanking federal funding have been blocked by several federal judges indefinitely.
Contact Heather Cherone: @HeatherCherone | (773) 569-1863 | [email protected]
Related Stories
