Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker on Sunday refuted claims that President Donald Trump could force Texas Democrats to return to their state and cooperate with a Republican redistricting effort, insisting FBI agents had no jurisdiction to enforce Texas law in his state.
Three members of the Texas state legislature left the state to dodge warrants for their arrest, a ploy by the state’s Republican governor to force their attendance on a vote to redraw congressional district lines.
Republicans are seeking to redraw lines and gerrymander up to five congressional seats for their party in Congress. The largely unprecedented mid-decade effort threatens to kick off a national redistricting war between Republicans and Democrats with real, tangible consequences for party representation and the kinds of politicians sent to Washington.
By leaving the state and refusing to appear at the legislature, the lawmakers forced a halt to the special legislative session called by Abbott to handle the redistricting process. The governor and his allies have threatened to continue calling those sessions until quorum is reached and the redistricting effort concludes.
“We’re providing them a safe haven, a place for them to visit and stay, breaking quorum, because they’re heroes that are standing up not just for their own constituents and for the people of Texas and their rights but also for the rights of people all across the country,” Pritzker told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday.
In Illinois, Pritzker said his administration is refusing to cooperate with Texas authorities and says that he won’t allow FBI officials to participate in illegal actions.
“Texas law does not apply in the state of Illinois, and there’s no federal law that would allow the FBI to arrest anybody that’s here visiting our state,” said the governor.
He went on to attack both Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas and Trump, whom Pritzker said Abbott was trying to impress with an “illegal” effort to boost GOP numbers in the House of Representatives — where Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” passed in July by only a one-vote margin.
“They know that they’re going to lose in 2026 the Congress, and so they’re trying to steal seats,” Pritzker claimed. “[T]he map that they put together, it violates the Voting Rights Act, and it violates the Constitution.”
“[Trump] knows he’s going to lose the Congress in 2026,” the governor continued. “That’s why he’s going to his allies and hoping that they can save him. And we’ve all got to stand up against this. This is — it’s cheating. Donald Trump is a cheater. He cheats on his wives. He cheats at golf. And now he’s trying to cheat the American people out of their votes.”
While Pritzker would claim that Abbott and Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who is running for re-election in a tight primary against a MAGA-backed opponent, were “grandstanding” he would not rule out harboring his own similar national ambitions in the same interview.
Pressed by Kristen Welker, Pritzker wouldn’t say one way or the other whether he planned to run for president in 2028. The governor, a billionaire, is widely viewed as one of the Democratic Party’s best-positioned candidates to run for the White House given his Midwestern ties, ability to self-finance and growing national profile.
Cornyn told a local radio station in Texas this past week that agents in two Texas FBI offices were assigned to the effort, without giving specifics of their given roles or what orders they were under.
Pritzker did tell Welker that he was focused on his 2026 re-election campaign, but added: “I can’t rule anything out.”
The governor is one of several Democratic state leaders who’ve publicly suggested that they would consider their own redistricting efforts — explicitly to aid Democrats — were Republicans to go forward with their plan in Texas to do the opposite.
Kathy Hochul, in New York, called for the dissolution of her state’s Independent Redistricting Commission (NYIRC) while telling reporters that it would be illegal for Trump to weaponize the FBI against Texas lawmakers.
Hochul also fired back at Cornyn, telling reporters that the FBI did not have the legal authority to “hunt down” the three members of Texas’s state legislature who absconded to break quorum.
“First of all, I have a lot of respect for the FBI, but I guarantee there are far more important pursuits that they should be engaging in, like human trafficking, breaking up drug cartels, stopping terrorist attacks here in New York City,” she told MSNBC.
“So I think this is an abuse of the power of the FBI to direct them to go after duly elected officials in the United States of America,” the governor said.
“If we’ve fallen that far, that makes our fight even more important, that all people stand up and say, ‘we’re not going to let you take away our democracy, and you’re not going to hunt down our elected officials.’”
