Illinois officials and the city of Chicago are suing Donald Trump’s administration to stop the president from imminently deploying National Guard troops to the state, expanding the multi-state legal battle challenging the president’s attempts to send the military into Democratic-led states and cities.
The lawsuit was filed hours after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth threatened to call up hundreds of members of the Texas National Guard to perform “federal protection missions” in Chicago and Portland, Oregon, after a frustrated federal judge blocked the president from ordering any Guard members in any state from deploying to Oregon.
Last week, Oregon officials similarly sued the administration, arguing that the president’s threats to send in the troops are “wholly pretextual” and designed to stir up unrest to justify the military and federal law enforcement occupation of Portland and elsewhere.
“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,” lawyers for Illinois and Chicago wrote Monday.
“To guard against this, foundational principles of American law limit the president’s authority to involve the military in domestic affairs,” they added. “Those bedrock principles are in peril.”
Trump’s latest maneuvers in his long-declared “war” on Chicago are “unlawful and dangerous,” with an “illegal” federalization of state National Guard troops on purely “pretextual and baseless” grounds, the lawsuit states.
The lawsuit argues that Trump’s “flimsy pretext” for boots on the ground includes protests outside a two-story Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in a Chicago suburb, where fewer than 8,000 people live.
Federal law enforcement officers have also “repeatedly shot chemical munitions at groups that included media and legal observers” while “dozens of masked, armed federal agents have paraded through downtown Chicago in a show of force and control,” according to the lawsuit.
“The community’s horror at these tactics and their significant consequences have resulted in entirely foreseeable protests,” lawyers wrote. Sending in more federal troops threatens to “undermine public safety by inciting a public outcry,” they added.
State and local law enforcement are capable of responding to those incidents, and Trump’s federalization of the National Guard from other states “infringes on Illinois’s sovereignty and right to self-governance,” according to the lawsuit.
“It will cause only more unrest, including harming social fabric and community relations and increasing the mistrust of police,” lawyers argued. “It also creates economic harm, depressing business activities and tourism that not only hurt Illinoisians but also hurt Illinois’s tax revenue.”
Trump has similarly surged federal law enforcement into several other Democratic-led states and cities, including Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., while Memphis is also preparing to see troops on the ground.
California sued the administration earlier this year in the wake of Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops and U.S. Marines into Los Angeles in response to protests against large-scale immigration raids and arrests.
Last month, a federal judge determined that the administration illegally deployed military assets into the Los Angeles area in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which prohibits the military from enforcing domestic law.
Trump — whose efforts appeared designed to create “a national police force with the president as its chief” — deployed troops to southern California “ostensibly to quell a rebellion and ensure that federal immigration law was enforced,” according to the ruling from California District Judge Charles Breyer.
But “there was no rebellion, nor was civilian law enforcement unable to respond to the protests and enforce the law,” he added.
The president instead illegally and “systematically used armed soldiers (whose identity was often obscured by protective armor) and military vehicles to set up protective perimeters and traffic blockades, engage in crowd control, and otherwise demonstrate a military presence in and around Los Angeles,” according to the judge’s ruling.
Illinois and Oregon officials are similarly arguing that the president’s deployments to those states are in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, as well as Tenth Amendment protections ensuring that police authority rests with the states, not the federal government.
Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker has rejected claims from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem that Chicago was a “war zone” and criticized federal agents for escalating an already tense environment.
“The secretary doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” he told CNN’s State of the Union Sunday.
He blasted a recent late-night Border Patrol raid in a Chicago apartment building where agents kicked down doors, tossed flash ban grenades and rounded up children and adults, who were arrested and restrained with zip ties as they frog marched outside the building.
Noem shared video of the raid on social media with slow-motion footage set to dramatic music.
Federal agents were “just picking up people who are brown and Black and then checking their credentials,” Pritzker told CNN.
“They are the ones that are making it a war zone,” he added. “They need to get out of Chicago if they’re not going to focus on the worst of the worst, which is what the president said they were going to do.”
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has suggested creating “ICE-free zones that would ban the presence of federal immigration agents on city property and private businesses without a warrant.
“We cannot allow them to rampage through our city with no checks or balances,” he said Monday. “If Congress will not check this administration, then Chicago will.”
