The Dirksen Federal Courthouse is pictured in Chicago. (Capitol News Illinois photo by Hannah Meisel)

CHICAGO — Illinois and Chicago filed a federal lawsuit Monday to block the Trump administration’s planned deployment of National Guard troops to the state — a move Gov. JB Pritzker called an “invasion.”

Trump pushed forward with the plan to activate hundreds of National Guard soldiers, including some from Texas, despite monthslong opposition from state and local leaders, as well as objections from civic and business groups in the city.

“We must now start calling this what it is: Trump’s Invasion,” Pritzker said in a statement Sunday night. “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.”

Read more: Over Pritzker’s objections, Trump sending 300 National Guardsmen to Chicago, governor says

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem asked President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to deploy troops to Illinois to protect federal immigration officers and facilities. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing center in Broadview, a near-west suburb of Chicago, has been the site of several clashes between ICE agents and demonstrators in recent weeks.

But Pritzker, who said Saturday that he refused the Trump administration’s “ultimatum” to activate the National Guard himself, has insisted there is no emergency necessitating guardsmen on the ground. He also warned that White House officials would use any conflict between immigration agents and civilians as a “pretext” for military occupation.

“It will cause only more unrest, including harming social fabric and community relations and increasing the mistrust of police,” the lawsuit said.

The suit, filed in the Northern District of Illinois, names Trump, Noem and Hegseth as defendants.

Texas National Guard also activated

Illinois filed its lawsuit hours after Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced he will send 400 guardsmen to cities around the country, including Chicago, and after a federal judge in Oregon blocked National Guard deployments to Portland.

The order is “effective immediately for an initial period of 60 days” and subject to extension, according to the memo, signed by Hegseth. It comes a day after Pritzker confirmed Trump’s intention to federalize 300 members of the Illinois National Guard.

“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 reads. “To guard against this, foundational principles of American law limit the president’s authority to involve the military in domestic affairs. Those bedrock principles are in peril.”

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The promised deployment comes as ICE has ramped up activity in Chicago and its suburbs as part of “Operation Midway Blitz,” which has so far resulted in more than 800 arrests according to the Department of Homeland Security.

There have also been two shootings since the clashes began. On Saturday, the governor called the administration’s National Guard activation a “manufactured performance” and not about protecting public safety.

Though the Trump administration insists ICE is targeting undocumented immigrants who have criminal backgrounds, reports have mounted of agents arresting those with no history of illegal activity, detaining children along with their parents and even handcuffing U.S. citizens and children with zip ties. Immigrant and civil rights groups have alleged ICE is arresting people without warrants in violation of a federal consent decree.

The lawsuit also alleges ICE activity in Chicago and its suburbs has already subjected Illinois “to serious and irreparable harm.”

Read more: ‘We are not backing down’: Feds ramp up immigration raids in Chicago area | DHS Secretary Noem defends ICE tactics in second Illinois visit

“It also creates economic harm, depressing business activities and tourism that not only hurt Illinoisians but also hurt Illinois’s tax revenue,” the complaint said.

That argument echoes one made by a group of Chicago business and civic groups over the weekend.

“National Guard troops on our streets, like those reportedly being ordered here by the federal government, have the potential to sow fear and chaos, threatening our businesses’ bottom lines and our reputation,” the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce, Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago and the Civic Federation said in a joint statement Saturday.

Read the lawsuit here.

Order violates states’ rights

Attorney General Kwame Raoul argues the troop deployment violates Illinois’ rights as sovereign state to carry about its own law enforcement, as well as 1878 Posee Comitatus Act that bans the military from participating in domestic law enforcement.

The lawsuit also claims the Trump administration failed to meet any criteria that could allow the president to federalize the National Guard. The president can federalize the National Guard to stop a foreign invasion, when the president can’t execute the laws of the country or to stop a rebellion.

Raoul and state leaders have argued for weeks that Trump would use protests in Broadview as a “flimsy pretext” to claim a rebellion.

Read more: Pritzker says feds seeking Chicago troop deployment. ‘What I have been warning of is now being realized’

Several protestors have been arrested near the facility in recent weeks on charges of assaulting officers. Federal agents have sprayed tear gas and fired nonlethal ammunition into crowds that have gathered there.

Over the weekend, a U.S. Border Patrol agent shot a woman on the city’s Southwest Side in a confrontation with protesters. Prosecutors eventually charged the woman and another protestor with attempting to “assault, impede, and interfere with the work of federal agents in Chicago.” According to the Chicago Sun-Times, agents fired “defensive shots” when they saw the woman was allegedly “armed with a semi-automatic weapon,” and she was taken to a nearby hospital for treatment before she was charged.

Further, the lawsuit argues the Trump administration has entirely manufactured any public safety crisis in Illinois that would require military intervention. It cites a 2013 social media post by Trump, two years before he announced his candidacy for president, that suggested the military should be deployed to Chicago. It lists several other derogatory comments Trump made about the city, state and their leaders over the years, including as president.

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Read more: As Trump declares ‘we’re going in,’ Pritzker says ‘terror and cruelty is the point’

The lawsuit argues that animosity culminated last week with Trump claiming during a speech to military generals that there was an “invasion from within” and suggesting cities like Chicago should be used as “training grounds” for the military.

How soldiers will be deployed

The lawsuit includes new details about how federal officials communicated with state leaders and gave Pritzker an ultimatum.

DHS sent a memo to the Illinois National Guard on Sept. 28 stating troops “would integrate with federal law enforcement operations, serving in direct support of federal facility protection, access control, and crowd control.”

On Saturday morning, Illinois National Guard Adjutant General Rodney Boyd received a formal email from the Defense Department National Guard Bureau saying Trump asked for at least 300 soldiers, and if Boyd did not activate them within two hours, Hegseth would federalize them. Boyd responded that Pritzker declined to activate the guard. Defense officials sent a new memo late Saturday saying the guard was federalized.

Illinois National Guard leaders received another memo on Sunday informing them soldiers from Texas would be sent to Chicago beginning Monday.

Read more: As Illinois congressional delegation seeks answers, ICE cancels meeting

Abbott, a Republican and ardent Trump supporter, has been a frequent foil of Pritzker, bussing thousands of asylum-seeking migrants from the border to Chicago in 2023 and 2024 and criticizing the Illinois governor for welcoming Texas Democratic legislators who fled their state this summer amid a partisan redistricting fight. He said in a social media post that Pritzker “can either fully enforce protection for federal employees or get out of the way and let the Texas Guard do it.”

Prior to this year, the last time a president federalized a state’s National Guard without a request from a state’s governor was in 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson sent federal troops to protect civil rights protesters in Alabama without the cooperation of segregationist Gov. George Wallace.

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Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.

This article first appeared on Capitol News Illinois and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

A few dozen protestors and reporters gathered outside an immigration enforcement facility in Broadview on Saturday, Oct. 4. The facility has become a focal point of protest since ICE officials expanded their immigration enforcement in Chicagoland. (Capitol News Illinois photo by Andrew Adams)

CHICAGO — After weeks of threatening to do so, President Donald Trump is taking command of 300 Illinois National Guard troops and sending them to Chicago over Gov. JB Pritzker’s objections, the governor announced Saturday.

“This morning, the Trump Administration’s Department of War gave me an ultimatum: call up your troops, or we will,” Pritzker said in a statement. “It is absolutely outrageous and un-American to demand a Governor send military troops within our own borders and against our will.”

The promised deployment comes as federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, activity has ramped up in Chicago and its suburbs as part of “Operation Midway Blitz,” which has so far resulted in more than 800 arrests according to the Department of Homeland Security.

There have also been two shootings, including one Saturday on the city’s Southwest Side.

Though the Trump administration insists ICE is targeting undocumented immigrants with criminal backgrounds, reports have mounted of agents arresting those with no history of illegal activity, detaining children along with their parents and even handcuffing U.S. citizens. Immigrant and civil rights groups have alleged ICE is arresting people without warrants in violation of a federal consent decree.

The wave of raids and arrests has spurred large protests in recent weeks, especially outside of an ICE processing center in Broadview, a suburb eight miles west of Chicago. The demonstrations have spurred clashes between immigration agents and activists, leading to the arrests of several protestors last weekend on charges of resisting and assaulting officers. Agents have sprayed chemical agents and fired nonlethal rounds into the crowds outside the facility.

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On Monday, Pritzker announced DHS was seeking 100 Illinois National Guard troops to protect ICE facilities and immigration agents in Illinois, warning the Trump administration would use any confrontation resulting from its Chicago-area immigration crackdown as a “pretext” for a military deployment.

On Saturday, the governor called the administration’s National Guard activation a ”manufactured performance” and not about protecting public safety.

“I want to be clear: there is no need for military troops on the ground in the State of Illinois,“ Pritzker said, pointing to the Illinois State Police’s announcement this week that it had joined forces with Broadview Police and the Cook County Sheriff’s Office to form a “Unified Command” to coordinate law enforcement activity outside the ICE facility.

One of ISP’s first acts in Broadview was designating demonstration areas, also known as “free speech zones.” Pritzker on Saturday said the combined efforts of state and local law enforcement protected “people’s ability to peacefully exercise their constitutional rights.”

The Unified Command reported the arrests of at least five protesters on Friday, and five more on Saturday night, as of 8 p.m. The area was quiet Saturday afternoon with only about a dozen protesters gathered, at times outnumbered by members of the media.

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“I will not call up our National Guard to further Trump’s acts of aggression against our people,” the governor said in his statement.

But shortly before Pritzker’s announcement about the National Guard deployment Saturday, a U.S. Border Patrol agent shot a woman in an altercation between immigration agents and protesters on Chicago’s Southwest Side.

According to reporting from the Chicago Sun-Times, the woman was alleged to have been driving one of 10 cars that “rammed” and “boxed in” nearly three dozen immigration agents in the city’s Brighton Park neighborhood. Agents fired “defensive shots” when they saw the woman was allegedly “armed with a semi-automatic weapon,” according to the paper. She was taken to a nearby hospital for treatment. The woman was one of two people charged by federal prosecutors in the Northern District of Illinois with using their vehicles to “assault, impede, and interfere with the work of federal agents in Chicago.”

Trump and Pritzker have spent weeks trading barbs over the president’s threats to deploy National Guard troops to Chicago, with the governor alleging Trump’s apparent backing off from the idea last month was a sign of dementia.

The governor has already vowed legal action against the Trump administration if and when the president activated the National Guard. After the president sent 1,400 National Guard troops to Los Angeles this summer — the first time since the 1960s that the feds deployed the National Guard without a governor’s consent — a federal judge last month ruled the move violated the Posse Comitatus Act, which limits the power of the federal government to use military force for domestic matters. But the ruling only applies to California.

The National Guard’s presence in Los Angeles has dwindled to roughly 250, but there are still a couple thousand troops on assignment in Washington, D.C., where the federal government has more power over law enforcement. Since their August deployment to the nation’s capital, guardsmen have been reportedly picking up garbage, as they are only authorized to assist with arrests if asked by local law enforcement.

Trump has also threatened to federalize the National Guard in Portland, Oregon, though troops had not yet been sent as of Saturday evening. Tennessee’s Republican governor has welcomed the president’s recent suggestion that he’d deploy guardsmen to Memphis, but that has also yet to happen.

Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland, Washington, D.C. and Shelby County, Tennessee, where Memphis is situated, have all adopted so-called “sanctuary city” policies wherein local law enforcement are barred from assisting in federal immigration enforcement. Trump has targeted cities and states that have adopted such laws, and last week a federal judge in Rhode Island ruled the administration cannot withhold emergency funding from Illinois and other states based on those states’ refusal to participate in immigration enforcement.

But this week, Attorney General Kwame Raoul said he learned of another attempt by the White House to divert disaster relief funding from Illinois with four days remaining in the fiscal year “without any notice or explanation.”

Meanwhile, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem visited Illinois again on Friday. Noem has traveled to the Chicago area and Springfield several times this year, including last month when she oversaw an early morning raid in Elgin, where at least one U.S. citizen was arrested.

“Secretary Noem should no longer be able to step foot inside the State of Illinois without any form of public accountability,” Pritzker said in a statement.

On Friday, Noem appeared with Gregory Bovino, commander-at-large of the U.S. Border Patrol, at the Broadview ICE facility with a camera crew, according to Chicago’s ABC 7.

Late Friday, Pritzker also said he’s making state resources available to people affected by a Sept. 30 raid on a South Shore apartment building.

In Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood, masked federal agents deployed a chemical irritant outside of a grocery store as people and cars lined up to block their advancement, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

State Rep. Eva-Dina Delgado, D-Chicago, condemned the action, which happened around the corner from an elementary school in her district. Chicago Ald. Jessie Fuentes also alleges she was handcuffed by immigration agents while questioning them at a Humboldt Park medical center.

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.

This article first appeared on Capitol News Illinois and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.