The governor of Illinois, JB Pritzker, said Saturday that the Trump administration informed him that the Defense Department plans to federalize 300 members of the Illinois National Guard and deploy them within their state.
“It is absolutely scandalous and not American to demand that a governor send military troops within our own borders and against our will,” said Pritzker in a statement, and added that the officials of the Department of Defense gave him an ultimatum to “call his troops, or we will.”
“I want to be clear: there is no need for military troops on the ground in the state of Illinois,” Pritzker added. “I will not call our National Guard to promote Trump’s aggression acts against our people.”
The White House and the Department of Defense did not immediately respond to a request for comments on the Declaration of Pritzker or a possible deployment of troops in Illinois, although the president has threatened for weeks to increase the application of the federal law and the troops of the National Guard to Chicago.
The news occurs when the Trump administration and the officials in Portland, Oregon, expect a ruling of a federal judge regarding a separate deployment of national guard troops that the president authorized to protect the immigration and customs’ immigration and compliance facilities in the city on Friday.
This movement activated 200 National Guard troops in Portland as part of the president’s declared agenda to stop crime in US cities.
The state of Oregon and the city of Portland sued the Trump administration, looking for a temporary restriction order in an attempt to prevent the president from sending the National Guard troops there, which supports the president’s claims that the protests were violent or out of control.
The Defense Department announced that it had activated troops to support and protect federal employees and property in the Portland area while waiting for the decision of a federal judge in the case.
The case occurs after Trump said in a publication on social networks last week that he was ordering the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to deploy troops in Portland, claiming that the city was “under siege of the Antifa attack and other national terrorists.”
The president has indicated the protests close to the immigration and customs’ immigration and compliance facilities in Oregon as evidence of his claims.
“Ultimately, we have a problem of perception versus reality,” said Caroline Turkish, lawyer of the attached city of Portland, during an hearing in front of the US district judge Karin J. Immingut on Friday. “The perception is that it is World War II here. The reality is that this is a beautiful city with a sophisticated resource that can handle the situation.”
A federal government lawyer, deputy attorney general Eric Hamilton, told the isolated incidents of protesters who illuminate incendiary devices and throw rocks as evidence that troops are necessary to defend themselves against “cruel radicals that have put the siege” to ice facilities.
Trump has deployed the National Guard troops in two other US cities this year: Los Angeles and Washington, DC in California, Trump’s administration said he sent troops and marines of the National Guard to quell the protests against the ice, while in Washington, the president said that the National Guard troops were deployed to combat the crime.
At the beginning of September, a federal judge ruled that Trump’s deployment of national marines and guards to Los Angeles was illegal. Days after that ruling, lawyers from Washington, DC, also demanded to challenge the deployment of troops in the capital of the nation.
The president has also threatened to deploy national guard troops to other US cities led by Democratic mayors, such as Baltimore and New Orleans.
Trump’s decision to deploy troops in multiple American cities received renewed scrutiny earlier this week after he told the senior military leaders on Monday that “we should use some of these dangerous cities as training fields for our army and the National Guard.”
