As President Donald Trump on Wednesday called for jailing Gov. JB Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson for “failing to protect ICE,” the Democratic governor responded to the threat by urging the president to “come and get me.”
Trump posted on Truth Social: “Chicago Mayor should be in jail for failing to protect Ice Officers! Governor Pritzker also!”
Speaking to reporters at a federal workers rally at Federal Plaza later Wednesday, Pritzker responded to Trump’s threat.
“Look, he’s a coward. He says a lot of things. He likes to pretend to be a tough guy. Come and get me,” Pritzker said.
“What kind of country are we living in where the president of the United States is targeting his political opponents? I mean, that is the world that we’re living in now, where he is calling out — he said he was going to jail Gavin Newsom.
“He says he’s going to jail me. He says he’s going to jail the mayor of the city of Chicago. These are people who stand against him, disagree with him, speak out about it, but literally have done nothing wrong. We are doing the people’s business by standing up for them.”
Pritzker also called Trump “demented” and “literally unhinged.”
“This is somebody who’s so insecure that he lashes out, pretending that he can come arrest people for no reason at all,” Pritzker said. “He can’t. He isn’t going to do it… he always chickens out.”
Earlier Wednesday morning, Pritzker posted on X: “I will not back down. Trump is now calling for the arrest of elected representatives checking his power. What else is left on the path to full-blown authoritarianism?”
Speaking on WBEZ’s “In the Loop” show with Sasha-Ann Simons, Johnson called Trump, “unstable.”
“We know that. He’s a double-minded man, and he is also very simple-minded. And it’s totally not the first time that Trump has called for a Black man to be arrested. That’s not the first time,” Johnson said. “Look, I have a responsibility to defend Chicago, and that’s what I’m going to do.”
The White House on Wednesday morning posted a doctored social media picture of Pritzker and Johnson crying. The administration also posted a video calling Johnson “incompetent” and Pritzker “delusional.”
The president’s threat came as federal prosecutors in Chicago dismissed criminal charges against a Chicago couple found lawfully carrying loaded pistols last month outside the Broadview ICE facility.
Federal prosecutors have also charged two people — including a woman who was shot by federal agents — with ramming a car driven by a border patrol agent in Brighton Park Saturday morning in a heated clash. Body camera video of the agent involved in the shooting recorded an officer saying, “Do something, b—-,” before pulling over and shooting the woman five times, the woman’s attorney said in federal court Monday.
After Illinois and Chicago filed a federal lawsuit challenging Trump’s move to deploy the National Guard here, Pritzker and Johnson blasted Trump’s ICE operations in Chicago Monday, with the governor calling operations a “military-style invasion.”
Pritzker showed reporters Department of Homeland Security videos of controversial raids, including one last week in South Shore in which a U.S. citizen was dragged out in zip ties and children were put in U-Haul vans without clothes on.
During a Minnesota event with Gov. Tim Walz on Tuesday, Pritzker was asked, “Do you both sincerely believe you’ll be arrested?”
As the audience laughed, Pritzker responded, “I’m asking any of you to come visit me in the gulag in El Salvador.”