Illinois leaders on Monday pushed back firmly against President Donald Trump’s threat to bring military troops to fight crime in Chicago, arguing the plan was both unnecessary and an authoritarian attempt to punish the president’s rivals and silence his critics.
“Do not come to Chicago,” Gov. JB Pritzker said during a press conference near the base of a Trump-branded tower in downtown Chicago.
Pritzker, a Democrat, said no one from the Trump administration had been in touch with state or local leaders or law enforcement about the threatened Chicago deployment. He accused the president of carrying out an “authoritarian” shock campaign to “circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities, and end elections.”
“We are being targeted because of what and whom we represent,” added Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson.
Rather than sending the National Guard to stop crime, which has sharply declined this year following a massive pandemic-era spike, Johnson argued the president wanted to wield the state’s National Guard against a large, diverse, Democrat-run city with a substantial immigrant population.
The alarm from Illinois leaders comes after Trump said last week Chicago was likely the “next” city where the administration will send scores of National Guard troops, following highly controversial deployments in Washington this month and Los Angeles earlier this summer.
“We’re going to make our cities very, very safe,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Friday. “Chicago is a mess. You have an incompetent mayor, grossly incompetent, and we’ll straighten that one out, probably next that’ll be our next one after this, and it won’t even be tough.”
The president added that he might be willing to involve the “regular military” in his crime-fighting operations there, a development that would likely violate the Posse Comitatus Act barring the use of federal troops for domestic law enforcement.
The Pentagon is reportedly planning to potentially deploy military personnel into Chicago as soon as September.
The president equivocated on Monday when asked about when a Chicago operation might take place.
“They need help,” Trump told reporters on Monday. “We may wait. We may or may not, we may just go in and do it, which is probably what we should do.”
Pentagon officials have reportedly spent weeks planning the potential operation, a model that could be used to occupy other American cities with thousands of National Guard troops, The Washington Post reported on Saturday, citing officials familiar with the plans.
During their press conference, Illinois officials said the president’s threats matched neither the reality of crime levels on the ground in Chicago nor the best ways protect public safety.
Compared with last year, murders were down 32 percent, shootings were down 37 percent, and robberies were down 34 percent, Pritzker said.
Officials also hammered the White House for failing to coordinate with any state or local law enforcement, and for in April cancelling nearly $1 billion in Justice Department grants to states and locations that went to funding services like assistance to crime victims and abuse survivors.
The Trump administration has withheld the funding from so-called “sanctuary states” that don’t mandate local law enforcement to assist federal immigration agencies.
Last week, a coalition of 20 states and Washington, D.C., including Illinois, sued the administration over the move.
Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul said on Monday during the press conference the state wouldn’t hesitate to sue the administration again if it crossed any legal lines using troops.
Outside of the anti-crime crackdown, the Trump administration is reportedly coordinating with 19 mostly Republican-led states to mobilize up to 1,700 National Guard troops to assist with federal immigration operations across the country.
