The state of Illinois sued President Donald Trump on Monday over his effort to deploy National Guard troops to Chicago, expanding the multistate court fight challenging Trump’s authority to send military forces into U.S. cities.
The lawsuit, filed hours after the president ordered hundreds of Texas Guard soldiers to deploy for “federal protection missions” in Chicago and Portland, Oregon, followed a stern ruling by a federal judge blocking Trump from sending guard members from any state to Oregon.
Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois, a Democrat, has objected to the deployment of troops, and in the lawsuit, Chicago and Illinois officials argue that the administration’s “provocative and arbitrary actions have threatened to undermine public safety by inciting a public outcry.” A U.S. military official said Monday morning that the first group from the Texas Guard, about 200 troops, were en route to Chicago.
The torrent of moves by the Trump administration, with consequences for states from California to Illinois, Oregon to Texas, has left courts across the country scrambling to keep pace.
The ruling by the federal judge in Oregon, Karin Immergut, on Sunday night came in response to the Trump administration’s bid to circumvent a restraining order she had issued a day earlier. In it, she had blocked Trump from sending hundreds of California Guard troops to Portland. After Trump moved to replace the California troops with soldiers from Texas, Immergut broadened her order to cover “the relocation, federalization or deployment of members of the National Guard of any state or the District of Columbia in the state or Oregon.”
In Illinois, where Pritzker on Sunday referred to the mustering of federalized troops as “Trump’s Invasion,” the presence of federal immigration agents in the city and its suburbs has heightened tensions. Agents have deployed tear gas on city streets with no warning, raided apartments and zip-tied residents for hours in the middle of the night, and handcuffed a City Council member at a hospital after she asked for a detainee’s arrest warrant.
Mayor Brandon Johnson of Chicago, a Democrat, said Monday morning that he would issue an executive order establishing “ICE-free zones,” which would ban federal immigration agents from setting up staging areas on city property or private businesses without a warrant.
“We cannot allow them to rampage through our city with no checks or balances,” Johnson said. “If Congress will not check this administration, then Chicago will.”