Hundreds of National Guard troops, including 300 from Illinois and more from Texas, are being called into service in the coming days, Illinois Gov. JB Prizker and the White House confirmed Sunday night.
Pritzker said late Sunday he was told 400 troops from Texas will be sent to Illinois, Portland and other cities. He had received word Saturday that 300 troops from Illinois were being mobilized.
Details of the deployments were revealed in memos sent Saturday from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to officials with the Illinois and Texas National Guards and reported on by NPR and Politico.
The troops will be stationed “in places where there are violent demonstrations in the state, or where they’re likely to occur based on current threat assessments,” one memo states.
The memo said planning for the mobilization of troops should begin “immediately” and said the deployment could last for an initial period of 60 days.
An unnamed official told NPR it would take “at least a couple of days” to select the guard units and deploy them in the state.
Pritzker said no one had contacted him as of late Sunday to “discuss or coordinate” the deployment.
“We must now start calling this what it is: Trump’s Invasion,” he said. “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.”
During a White House press briefing Sunday, President Donald Trump said troops were needed after the large number of murders in the city over the last couple of months. (Chicago saw the fewest homicides in 60 years this past summer.)
“I believe the politicians are under threat. Because there’s no way that somebody can say that things are wonderful in Chicago,” he said.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who was in Chicago Friday, went as far as to compare the city to a “war zone.”
What’s more, she said federal immigration agents have been repeatedly attacked while operating in and around Chicago.
Noem, during a “Fox & Friends Weekend” appearance Sunday, said protesters “are shouting hateful things at them, threatening their families, putting hands on them and acts of violence are occurring on a regular basis.”
In an interview with CNN earlier in the day, Pritzker said it was the federal government that was “making it a war zone” with its heavy-handed response to protesters outside an ICE facility in Broadview and again after federal agents shot a woman during an incident Saturday in Brighton Park, in which the feds claimed the woman tried to ram one of their vehicles.
“They’re just making this up. And then what do they do? They fire tear gas and smoke grenades and they make it look like its a war zone,” Pritzker told CNN. “And people on the ground are frankly incited to want to do something about it. Appropriately. If you’re on the ground and you’re having tear gas pellets fired at you, as they have been doing in Broadview, Illinois, you want to react, you want something to happen. And unfortunately, they’re using every lever at their disposal to keep us from maintaining order.”
Pritzker said a better approach if the feds want to help fight crime would be to “allow us to work with FBI, ATF, DEA, who are civilian law enforcement and understand how to target and take out the bad guys” and the “worst of the worst” that Trump claims he’s targeting.
In reality, ICE agents are “raiding neighborhoods where, instead of going after the bad guys, they’re just picking up people who are Brown and Black and then checking their credentials,” Pritzker said. “They need to get out of Chicago.”