President Trump will federalize 300 Illinois National Guard troops, Gov. JB Pritzker announced Saturday.
“This morning, the Trump Administration’s Department of War gave me an ultimatum: call up your troops, or we will. It is absolutely outrageous and un-American to demand a Governor send military troops within our own borders and against our will,” Pritzker said.
“In the coming hours, the Trump Administration intends to federalize 300 members of the Illinois National Guard,” he continued. “They will pull hardworking Americans out of their regular jobs and away from their families all to participate in a manufactured performance—not a serious effort to protect public safety. For Donald Trump, this has never been about safety. This is about control. This demand follows unprecedented escalations of aggression against Illinois citizens and residents,” the Democrat governor added.
Trump for weeks has said he was considering deploying members of the Illinois National Guard to Chicago to fight rampant crime there. Last month, after a particularly violent weekend in the Windy City when 11 people were murdered, 28 were shot, and a hundred were shot at the previous weekend, Trump criticized Pritzker for not taking the crime problem in the city seriously.
“That’s what I call dangerous, and Pritzker’s going out and saying, ‘We’ve got crime under control,’” Trump said, noting that additional FBI agents in the city helped but wasn’t enough. “What you really need is our big, strong soldiers to get them into shape. We’re not letting Chicago fail,” Trump said.
But Pritzker maintains Chicago doesn’t need federal help. “Yesterday, Kristi Noem’s and Greg Bovino’s masked agents threw chemical agents near an elementary school, arrested elected officials exercising their First Amendment rights, and raided a Wal-Mart,” Pritzker claimed. “None of it was in pursuit of justice, but all of it was in pursuit of social media videos,” he added.
“I want to be clear: there is no need for military troops on the ground in the State of Illinois. State, county, and local law enforcement have been working together and coordinating to ensure public safety around the Broadview ICE facility, and to protect people’s ability to peacefully exercise their constitutional rights,” Pritzker said.
“I will not call up our National Guard to further Trump’s acts of aggression against our people. In Illinois, we will do everything within our power to look out for our neighbors, uphold the Constitution, and defend the rule of law,” he concluded.
Pritzker’s announcement did not say where the troops will be sent. But Trump has long floated sending troops to Chicago as part of his nationwide crime crackdown. “We’re going in,” he told reporters at the White House in early September. Trump has repeatedly deployed National Guardsmen to cities across America, from Los Angeles to Washington, despite federal law generally prohibiting the use of the military for domestic law enforcement.
And Chicago has been a frequent target of the president’s ire. In early September, Trump posted a meme on his social media platform, Truth Social, with himself cast as a central character in the 1979 film “Apocalypse Now.” “Chipocalypse now,” the meme read. “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of War.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment about its plans in Illinois.