National guard troops from Texas are heading to Illinois after a federal judge declined to immediately block them in response to a lawsuit from the state against the Trump administration.
Texas national guard members departed the Fort Bliss military installation in El Paso on a US military transport plane on Monday evening.
Kash Patel, the director of the FBI, said he was heading to Chicago as well. “Chicago will be saved, and this FBI will continue to crush violent crime there, and all around the country. Heading to the Windy City now,” he wrote on X on Tuesday.
The US district judge April Perry allowed the federal government to continue the deployment in Chicago while it responds to Illinois’s suit. She set a deadline of midnight on Wednesday for the government to reply. A similar effort to deploy troops to Portland was blocked by a judge in Oregon.
Donald Trump is also seeking to federalize the Illinois national guard, which would involve moving them from state to federal jurisdiction.
The Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, said the Trump administration had not discussed plans to federalize the state’s national guard or to send in troops from other states. “We must now start calling this what it is: Trump’s invasion,” he said in a statement. “It started with federal agents, it will soon include deploying federalized members of the Illinois national guard against our wishes, and it will now involve sending in another state’s military troops.”
Pritzker said 300 of the state’s guard troops were to be federalized and deployed to Chicago, along with 400 others from Texas.
The Illinois attorney general, Kwame Raoul, filed a lawsuit seeking to stop the president from calling up the state’s national guard or sending in troops from other states “immediately and permanently”, after the president ordered national guard troops to deploy in the state against Pritzker’s wishes.
“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 says.
Trump has gone after Democratic-led cities, sending in military to clamp down on protests and aid in his deportation agenda. He has declared war on Chicago, threatening for weeks to send in more troops while immigration agents scoured the city for people to deport, and local residents protested against his crackdown.
In Washington on Tuesday, Democratic senators grilled Pam Bondi, the attorney general, over the use of military in US cities, while Republican senators largely cheered the decision. Dick Durbin, who represents Illinois, asked Bondi to explain the rationale for ordering troops from other states to Chicago. Bondi replied: “I wish you love Chicago as much as you hate president Trump.” She added: “If you’re not going to protect your citizens, president Trump will.”
Raoul argues that these efforts to send in guard troops against a state’s will infringe on the state’s sovereignty and self-governance while leading to unrest and harm for the state’s residents.
“It will cause only more unrest, including harming social fabric and community relations and increasing the mistrust of police. It also creates economic harm, depressing business activities and tourism that not only hurt Illinoisians but also hurt Illinois’s tax revenue,” Raoul wrote.
A Trump-appointed judge in Oregon blocked Trump from sending in troops to Portland. Governor Gavin Newsom of California is also fighting against troops being sent from his state to Oregon. Troops from Texas were going to be sent to Portland and Chicago, with the blessing of Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott.
Trump administration officials have railed against the Oregon ruling, saying a judge cannot prevent the president from moving troops. “Today’s judicial ruling is one of the most egregious and thunderous violations of constitutional order we have ever seen – and is yet the latest example of unceasing efforts to nullify the 2024 election by fiat,” Stephen Miller, an adviser to Trump, wrote on X.
Chicago’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, also signed an executive order to prohibit federal immigration agents from using city-owned property to conduct their operations, which comes after “documented use” of public school parking lots and a city-owned lot as staging sites, Johnson said in a press release.
“We will not tolerate Ice agents violating our residents’ constitutional rights nor will we allow the federal government to disregard our local authority. Ice agents are detaining elected officials, teargassing protesters, children, and Chicago police officers, and abusing Chicago residents. We will not stand for that in our city,” Johnson said in a statement.
At a press briefing on Monday, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said cities such as Chicago were refusing to cooperate with troops because they did not like the president. She claimed Trump wanted to make cities safer.
“You guys are framing this like the president wants to take over the American cities with the military,” she said. “The president wants to help these local leaders who have been completely ineffective in securing their own cities.”