Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker vowed Sunday to use the power of state government to resist President Donald Trump’s deployment of National Guard resources and federal law enforcement agents like ICE to Chicago, while Vice President JD Vance said the White House may escalate things even further.
Pritzker was on ABC’s This Week, where he challenged Vance over a “tidal wave of lies” about the city of Chicago and other cities run by liberal mayors and leadership. He also responded once again to Trump’s call for his arrest this past week.
“As I’ve said before, come and get me,” said the governor.
Pritzker’s comments come as the White House moved this past week to deploy National Guard troops to Illinois’ largest city using a provision of federal law that allows it to be activated without the consent of the governor. Though Guard troops in the city will not have direct law enforcement powers, they will be able to assist federal law enforcement operatives carrying out immigration enforcement and other activities which fall under the umbrella of crime prevention.
A federal judge then ruled on Thursday in favor of the state, temporarily blocking the deployment.
The Trump administration argues that American cities like Chicago, Portland and Baltimore are “lawless” hellholes where law enforcement and citizens are attacked openly, a false perception fueled by right-wing media like Fox News.
None of his planned or existing federal “takeovers” of U.S. cities have been popular with the residents of the respective areas, especially Washington D.C. where the only vocal supporters of the crackdown have been Republican transplants working in Congress or the broader administration — or the media.
Also on Sunday, Vance warned on NBC’s Meet the Press that the president was not ruling out invoking the Insurrection Act to crush dissent in liberal cities and other areas.
“Are you seriously considering invoking the Insurrection Act?” moderator Kristen Welker asked Vance.
He continued: “The problem here is not the Insurrection Act or whether we actually invoke it or not. The problem is the fact that the entire media in this country, cheered on by a few far left lunatics, have made it OK to tee off on American law enforcement. We cannot accept that in the United States of America.”
Pritzker responded in an interview following Vance on ABC, arguing that there was absolutely no legal justification for invoking a law allowing the president to federalize individual National Guard units and deploy military assets against U.S. citizens, which under the Constitution can only be used to address an “insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination or conspiracy” which prevents law enforcement from taking action normally or where a state government “is unable, fails, or refuses” to protect Americans’ rights.
“If the Constitution means anything, and I guess we all are questioning that right now, the Insurrection Act cannot be invoked,” Pritzker told host George Stephanopolous. “There has to be a rebellion.”
“They just want troops on the ground because they want to militarize especially blue cities in blue states,” the governor added. He argued that Vance and Trump both were contradicting arguments in court made by DOJ attorneys claiming that the militarization of the Illinois Guard was necessary to protect ICE and its related facilities in the state.
He went on to note that Illinois was the “19th safest state in the United States”.
Trump has flirted with invoking the legislation before, such as during the George Floyd protests in 2020 during his first term. The law hasn’t actually been used to suppress political demonstrations in the United States since it was invoked by George H.W. Bush to call in the Guard to quell riots in Los Angeles in 1992.
In Washington D.C., his federalization of the Guard (and, briefly, D.C.’s police force) led to a surge of arrests, with around 40 percent being for immigration-related offences. Over the course of the first three weeks of the White House’s deployment, nearly 1,700 arrests were carried out around the District of Columbia.
A federal judge blocked the administration from deploying troops to Chicago this past week, arguing that it would add “fuel to the fire” and unnecessarily escalate tensions between residents and law enforcement.
The judge wrote in her opinion that she had “seen no credible evidence that there is a danger of a rebellion in the state of Illinois” and derided the DOJ’s explanations as “unreliable”.
Vance, in a separate interview on ABC’s This Week, clashed with Stephanopoulos over reporting that Tom Homan, the White House border czar, had allegedly accepted a $50,000 bribe from an FBI informant.
“And here’s, George, why fewer and fewer people watch your show, and why you’re losing credibility,” he said, before repeating his claim that he didn’t know about a video purporting to show Homan accepting the bribe.
In the same interview, he repeatedly dodged questions about whether he agreed with Trump’s call to jail Pritzker, before claiming that he “certainly” believed that the governor’s supposed failure to uphold his “fundamental oath of office” was “criminal”.
After attacking the show’s ratings, he was cut off by Stephanopoulos, who ended the interview over Vance’s protestations: “You did not answer the question. Thank you for your time.”
