Illinois and the city of Chicago filed suit against the Trump administration, asking a judge to block the administration from deploying Texas troops to the city.
The nation’s “bedrock principles are in peril,” Monday’s lawsuit claims. On Sunday, President Donald Trump called up hundreds of members of the National Guard to Chicago in what Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker has called an “invasion.”
“The American people, regardless of where they reside, should not live under the threat of occupation by the United States military, particularly not simply because their city or state leadership has fallen out of a president’s favor,” the lawsuit said.
The move marks the latest defensive tactic against the escalatory maneuvers from Trump, who has attempted to move the military into liberal U.S. cities including Washington, D.C., Portland, Oregon and Los Angeles.
The lawsuit comes just a day after a Portland federal judge — for the second time in a single weekend — halted the White House from making a similar military incursion into Oregon against the will of state officials there. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth initially sought to deploy Oregon’s National Guard troops, was blocked, then moved to deploy Texas troops instead, and was blocked again by U.S. Judge Karin Immergut late Sunday.
The ahistorical presidential deployment of soldiers as a police force to bolster an immigration and crime crackdown against governors’ wishes has ushered in a new chapter for the Trump presidency, sparking multiple court battles. Last month in California, a federal judge found that Trump and top officials “willfully” violated the Posse Comitatus law that limits the military’s involvement in domestic law enforcement, a conclusion that followed a three-day trial that revealed how soldiers coordinated with FBI agents in what the judge warned could become a “national police force.”
The lawsuits come as there is increasingly vocal public dissent over Trump’s use of masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to conduct raids targeting immigrant communities, as they did last week in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood. The Department of Homeland Security later featured in a sizzle reel what it called “Operation Midway Blitz,” showing ICE forces flooding into a residential apartment building, clearing hallways with assault rifles and flying a Black Hawk helicopter overhead. Days earlier, a federal judge in Boston criticized such raids in an opinion where he noted, “In all our history we have never tolerated an armed masked secret police. Carrying on in this fashion, ICE brings indelible obloquy to this administration and everyone who works in it.”
Hegseth has made clear he wants U.S. troops to guard ICE agents on these missions, which is what led him over the weekend to issue two memos invoking a law that allows the president to federalize state National Guard troops if there is “danger of a rebellion against the authority of the government of the United States” or if “regular forces” cannot “execute the laws” on their own. On Saturday, Hegseth federalized “up to 300” members of the Illinois National Guard against Pritzker’s wishes.
On Sunday, Hegseth went further by federalizing “up to 400” National Guard Troops from Texas with the consent of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who boasted about the “training, skill, and expertise” of his military force and warned Democrats that “you can either fully enforce protection for federal employees or get out of the way and let Texas Guard do it.”
But Hegseth has opened the door to legal challenges — a turn that caused California Gov. Gavin Newsom to warn that “America is on the brink of martial law.”
Pritzker’s lawsuit on Monday noted that this fight over troops comes just days after Trump and Hegseth delivered speeches to U.S. military generals about what the president called “a war from within” that could employ American cities as “training grounds” for soldiers.
“These advances in President Trump’s long-declared ‘War’ on Chicago and Illinois are unlawful and dangerous,” Monday’s lawsuit stated, arguing that the president’s troop deployment plan “reflects an unconstitutional attempt to infringe on Illinois’s power.”
According to court records, the case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge April Perry, a relatively new jurist who was a federal prosecutor before she was appointed to the bench by the Biden administration last year.