Hundreds of National Guard troops, including 300 from Illinois and 400 from Texas, are being called into service effective “immediately” for an initial period of two months, according to state and national officials and court filings.
Gov. JB Pritzker said late Sunday he was told the troops from Texas will be sent to Illinois, Oregon and other locations. He received word Saturday that 300 troops from Illinois were being mobilized. A White House spokesperson confirmed the deployments but did not respond when asked how many troops from each state would come here.
Details of the deployments were revealed in memos sent Saturday from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to leaders of the National Guard in Illinois and Texas. The order to Texas was included in a court filing in Oregon, in a case in which a judge temporarily halted Trump’s plan to send troops there late Sunday.
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,” the memo states.
The memo said that planning for the mobilization of troops should begin “immediately,” and the deployment could last for an initial period of 60 days and “be subject to extension.” NPR reported Sunday that it had viewed a similar memo about plans for the Illinois National Guard.
Pritzker said no one had contacted him as of late Sunday to “discuss or coordinate” the deployments.
“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.”
He called on Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to “immediately withdraw any support for this decision and refuse to coordinate.”
But Abbott responded in a post on the social media network X that he “fully authorized” the call-up “to ensure safety for federal officials.”
During a White House news briefing Sunday, President Donald Trump said troops were needed after the large number of murders in the city over the last couple of months — despite Chicago having seen the fewest homicides in 60 years this 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, compared the city to a “war zone.”
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 Sunday, 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 it’s 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.”