President Donald Trump’s administration has issued an ultimatum to Gov. JB Pritzker: “Call up your troops, or we will,” the governor said Saturday in a statement.
“In the coming hours, the Trump Administration intends to federalize 300 members of the Illinois National Guard,” Pritzker said in the statement.
“It is absolutely outrageous and un-American to demand a Governor send military troops within our own borders and against our will,” Pritzker said.
The request to the Illinois National Guard comes after Pritzker said this week the Department of Homeland Security sought to deploy 100 military troops to Illinois “for the protection of ICE personnel and facilities.”
Trump has threatened to send troops to Chicago for more than a month since launching an aggressive immigration enforcement operation, citing the city’s crime rate — which has seen a decline in both violent crime and its murder rates. But DHS and Attorney General Pam Bondi have amplified their messaging that ICE agents are under attack.
On Saturday morning, a woman was shot by U.S. Border Patrol agents on the city’s South Side, marking the second shooting of a civilian since the start of the administration’s operation.
“I have spent my career working to make communities safer and lead on public safety for our administration,” Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton said in a statement. “Not a single violence-prevention expert I have worked with has ever said the answer is to flood our neighborhoods with federal troops. This move will only serve to spread fear, escalate conflict, and undermine the trust that keeps communities safe.”
In the weeks since the Trump administration’s increase in immigration enforcement, ICE agents have raided an apartment building in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood, pulling men, women and children from their apartments and detaining them for hours overnight. At demonstrations outside ICE’s Broadview facility, protesters have been tear gassed and shot with pepper pellets. Steve Held, a Chicago journalist, was arrested outside of the facility and detained for hours.
Pritzker called the deployment of National Guard troops a “manufactured performance,” not a serious effort to protect public safety.
“For Donald Trump, this has never been about safety,” Pritzker said. “This is about control.”
The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request seeking comment.