Federal judge blocks Trump from deploying National Guard to Chicago

A federal judge in Chicago on Thursday blocked the Trump administration from deploying National Guard troops to the city and state as part of its ongoing immigration enforcement push, saying she had no faith in the government’s claims of out-of-control violence and that it was federal agents who started it by aggressively targeting protesters with tear gas and militaristic tactics.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge April Perry is the latest setback for President Donald Trump, who has claimed ongoing violence and clashes between protesters and immigration agents in Chicago and other U.S. cities justified sending federalized troops onto the streets as a security force, even as local and state officials accused the president of manufacturing a crisis to justify unnecessary — and unprecedented — force.

The temporary restraining order issued by Perry, which took effect immediately, bars the president from deploying federalized National Guard troops from any state to any location in Illinois. A written ruling would be issued Friday, she said.

Gov. JB Pritzker cheered the ruling in a statement on social media, writing, “”Donald Trump is not a king — and his administration is not above the law.”

Perry’s ruling “confirmed what we all know: there is no credible evidence of a rebellion in the state of Illinois. And no place for the National Guard in the streets of American cities like Chicago,” Pritzker wrote.

A spokesperson for Trump, meanwhile, said the judge got it wrong — and there will be an appeal.

“Amidst ongoing violent riots and lawlessness, that local leaders like Pritzker have refused to step in to quell, President Trump has exercised his lawful authority to protect federal officers and assets,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson wrote in an emailed statement. “President Trump will not turn a blind eye to the lawlessness plaguing American cities and we expect to be vindicated by a higher court.”

It was not immediately clear what would happen with National Guard troops already working at sites around Chicago, including Broadview.

In her oral ruling from the bench, Perry, a Biden appointee, said National Guard troops are “not trained in de-escalation or other extremely important law enforcement functions that would help to quell these problems,” and that allowing troops to come into Chicago “will only add fuel to the fire that the defendants themselves have started.”

The judge also said the Trump administration’s attempts to cast protesters as violent rebels “cannot be aligned” with the view of local officials. Perry said she had no faith in the declarations of federal officials submitted to the court ” due in large part of a growing body of evidence that the Department of Homeland Security’s views are “simply unreliable.”

Perry cited several assault cases that had been dismissed against protesters and other orders from federal judges in Chicago entered against DHS and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“In the last 48 hours in four separate unrelated legal decisions from different neutral parties, they all cast significant doubt on DHS’ assessment of what is happening on the streets of Chicago,” Perry said.

Perry also said a rebellion is defined as “a deliberate organized resistance openly opposing the laws and government as a whole” by means of armed violence. “I have found no credible evidence that there is a danger of rebellion in the state of Illinois.”

Standing in front of a bevy of cameras Thursday evening in the federal court lobby — a building he noted that “doesn’t need the protection of the National Guard right now” — Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul’s voice broke as he praised prosecutors he called “true American heroes.”

The judge’s ruling, Raoul said, “is an important decision not just for the state of Illinois but for the entire country. The question of state sovereignty was addressed in this decision. The question of whether or not the president of the United States should have unfettered authority to militarize our cities was answered today.”

The ruling came down after hours of arguments in court that came to an emotional end Thursday with a lawyer for the Illinois attorney general choking up as he talked about the American tradition of public virtue that puts the common good of the republic ahead of self-interest.

“This case is replete with evidence of bad faith, of an abandonment of public virtue, of a lack of honest devotion to the public interest and a grave risk of usurpation or wanton tyranny,” attorney Christopher Wells said in his closing argument in a shaky and halting voice.

Wells argued that Trump’s plan to put federalized National Guard troops in the Chicago area, ostensibly to protect federal personnel and property during his “Operation Midway Blitz” immigration enforcement push, was a dangerous prelude to his real endgame: a federal takeover of Democrat-led cities like Chicago that have long been among his favorite political targets.

A Trump administration lawyer, meanwhile, argued strenuously that the president was well within his constitutional authority to mobilize troops given the violence perpetrated against federal immigration officers by protesters that he characterized as “rioters” and criminals bent on rebellion.

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“This federalization happened to respond to an urgent and serious ongoing threat to officer safety and to the protection of property,” said Eric Hamilton, a civil litigation attorney for the Department of Justice, citing the boxing in of vehicles, assaults and even an alleged bounty put on a border patrol official’s head by a reputed gang member.

Hamilton said the operation was limited in scope and entirely within the president’s powers to ensure the ability to execute federal laws, and that the state’s motion for an injunction blocking the National Guard deployment “entirely meritless.”

“There is no possible irreparable injury from 500 members of the National Guard protecting federal property in a state of 13 million people,” Hamilton said.

The extraordinary back-and-forth between the lawyers capped a landmark day at the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse, where Perry’s 17th floor courtroom quickly filled to capacity in advance of the hearing, as did an overflow courtroom three floors below.

The hearing also featured a remarkably detailed question-and-answer session between Perry and Hamilton, with the judge trying to pin him down on everything from what the troops would be doing in Chicago to the president’s own public statements about sending the military to the city to end crime.

Near the end of his remarks, Hamilton said that if the judge was inclined to issue an injunction it should be limited and narrowly tailored. He also asked that she put an administrative stay on any injunction so that it can be appealed quickly to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Arguments got underway shortly after 11 a.m. with the lawyers sparring over what constitutes a “rebellion” that such troops might be sent to quell.

Wells, the attorney for Illinois, said the country’s founders did not use words such as “rebellion, insurrection, or war” lightly.

“The president of the United States believes there is a rebellion brewing in the United States? That is such an audacious claim,” Wells argued. “Who are the rebels? Are the rebels well armed? … There is no rebellion in Illinois.”

“There doesn’t have to be an actual rebeller,” Hamilton said. “It is enough that there is a danger of a rebellion here. Which there is.”

In requesting the emergency restraining order, Kwame Raoul’s office asked the federal court on Monday to find the federalization and deployment of National Guard troops unconstitutional and to block Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth from deploying troops to the state over the objections of Pritzker.

“The Trump administration’s illegal actions already have subjected and are subjecting Illinois to serious and irreparable harm. The deployment of federalized National Guard, including from another state, infringes on Illinois’ sovereignty and right to self-governance,” the AG filing stated.

But Department of Justice lawyers argued in a filing late Wednesday that escalating violence against immigration officials during  “Operation Midway Blitz” justify the deployment of National Guard troops to protect against “a danger of a rebellion against federal authority” that impedes “the ability of federal officials to enforce federal law.

In their 59-page filing, the Justice Department cited the recent protests at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Broadview, charges against people accused of ramming Border Patrol vehicles on the city’s Southwest Side that led to a woman being shot by agents, and a case brought against an alleged Chicago gang member accusing him of putting a $10,000 bounty on the head of Bovino, the Border Patrol boss in charge of the Chicago operation.

The defendant in the Bovino case is scheduled to have a detention hearing Friday — apparently one of the cases that the Trump administration claims the National Guard was called in for.

“The violent actions and threats by large numbers of protesters, directed at those enforcing of federal immigration laws and at federal property, constitute at least a danger of a rebellion against federal authority and significantly impede the ability of federal officials to enforce federal law,” the Justice Department said in the filing.

Controversy was brewing before the hearing began Thursday. The Trump administration’s late-night filing included a declaration from a U.S. Army official claiming the National Guard had been requested to help secure the courthouse for two “high-profile cases” involving Department of Homeland Security personnel on Friday.

But in an apparent response, U.S. District Chief Judge Virginia Kendall said in a letter Thursday morning that the U.S. Marshals Service has jurisdiction over courthouse security.

“At no point did I, nor the Building Security Committee, authorize or request the National Guard’s assistance to secure the Dirksen Courthouse,” Kendall wrote.

During the hearing Thursday, Perry grilled Hamilton, the Justice Department lawyer, about the claim, saying she’d been assured that it was “not an accurate statement.” She told Hamilton to go back to the Army official and either “provide further details for the factual basis” or withdraw it.

Before Perry came back to the bench to issue her ruling, the defense filed an updated declaration from the Army official clarifying that it was Federal Plaza, not the courthouse, that was at issue. “To date, there are no requests from the U.S. Marshals Service, and there are no plans for the National Guard to be at the courthouse,” the declaration read.

Perry spent well over an hour pressing Hamilton for specifics on the administration’s plans for the deployment. Would armed patrols be sent to neighborhood streets, she asked, or inside hospitals and schools? Would troops be able to search people or chase vehicles?

“You’re the ones who are deploying them,” she replied. “What are they being trained and deployed to do?”

Hamilton said it was too early to say exactly what Guard members would be asked to do and where they might be sent. Still, he said the mission would center on protecting federal buildings and federal agents who have been subjected to “very tragic and serious acts of violence,” including what he classified as coordinated attempts to block and ram DHS vehicles and an improvised explosive device described in court documents as “a round, green ball with a wick” found last month outside the ICE detention facility in Broadview.

But Perry noted at least some of that violence appeared to be instigated by federal agents. The judge referenced evidence of ICE agents “indiscriminately gassing” peaceful protestors outside the Broadview center as well as several recent cases in which citizens had been charged with assaulting immigration agents only to have a grand jury later find no probable cause that a crime had been committed.

She also pushed Hamilton to reconcile the administration’s legal arguments for the deployment with public statements made by Trump, who in the past has said Guard troops would be asked to tackle Chicago’s endemic crime.

“Frankly,” she said, “there’s a very large disconnect between those two bodies of evidence.”

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As with much of the questioning, Hamilton fell back on the position that the president’s authority to federalize the National Guard is not for a judge to decide. And even when the question has been put to judicial review, the president has been given “great deference”  to determine when the Guard should be deployed.

In this case, he told Perry, Trump has decided the Guard is needed to protect federal property in Illinois and to ensure that DHS agents are able to enforce federal immigration laws.

“I am very much struggling to figure out where this would ever stop,” Perry said. “The plaintiffs really believe it’s not going to stop with that. You haven’t told me it’s going to stop after that.”

Perry later questioned whether the level of violence reportedly faced by federal agents was enough to deter ICE agents from making arrests, which have dramatically spiked this year.

Acts of vandalism — slashed tires and keyed cars — sounded “a bit like a Carrie Underwood song,” she joked, eliciting a brief chuckle in a packed court room that, until that moment, had been silently tense. “I struggle to say you can’t execute laws because you can’t do it as quickly as you’d like,” Perry said.

Ahead of Perry’s expected ruling, Mayor Brandon Johnson appeared outside Funston Elementary School, near the scene of ICE’s tear gas deployment last week, and affirmed that Chicago police will protect protesters’ rights outside the Dirksen Courthouse and citywide.

“It is the local police department’s responsibility to ensure that we keep the peace, and that’s what they’ll do, and that’s what their assignment is,” Johnson told reporters.

He also took a jab at how National Guard members stationed in Washington, D.C., ended up cleaning litter.

“I mean, you saw them in D.C. They were streets and sanitation workers,” Johnson said. “Here’s the thing, that you don’t need a uniform to volunteer to pick up trash.”

Johnson watched much of the hearing in a back pew. He sat quietly, leaning forward as he intently watched Perry question the sparring attorneys.

He left before closing arguments, praising the judge to reporters in the courthouse lobby, but adding concerns that even with an order from her Trump might still break rules.

“This administration has made it very clear that its sole intent is to be an authoritarian government, versus a democracy,” he said. “I believe that we all should be concerned about that.”

The Defense Department has moved in recent days to federalize 300 members of the Illinois National Guard as well as 400 Guard members from Texas. Approximately half of the Guard members from Texas ultimately are expected to be sent to Illinois, with the support of Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott.

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Monday, Trump suggested he could invoke the Insurrection Act if needed to sidestep court orders or uncooperative officials.

“If I had to enact it, I’d do it, if people were being killed and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up,” he said.

A White House spokeswoman repeated that Trump was exercising “his lawful authority to protect federal officers and assets.”

Given Trump’s weekslong flirtation with sending troops to Chicago and his shifting rationale, which at first was ostensibly about combating violent crime in the city but has since turned to protecting immigration enforcement operations amid “Operation Midway Blitz,” “the manufactured nature of the crisis is clear,” the state argued in its filing.

“The American people, regardless of where they reside, should not live under the threat of occupation by the United States military, particularly not simply because their city or state leadership has fallen out of a president’s favor,” the Illinois attorney general’s office wrote.

The state’s filing noted Trump’s long history of “threatening and derogatory statements toward” Illinois and Chicago, as well as city and state leaders, dating to even before he entered the 2016 presidential race.

“The supposed current emergency is belied by the fact that Trump’s Chicago troop deployment threats began more than ten years ago,” the state argued. “In a social media post from 2013 Trump writes ‘we need our troops on the streets of Chicago, not in Syria.’”

The state lawsuit also turned the Trump administration’s braggadocio to undermine its argument that troops are necessary, citing statements touting the successes of recent immigration enforcement activities and a “confident show of force” on Sept. 28, during which “dozens of DHS agents dressed in tactical gear and carrying semi-automatic rifles walked the streets of downtown,” as evidence that no emergency exists that would require the deployment of federalized troops.

In a show of unity, U.S. Sens. Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth, a veteran wounded in combat in Iraq, and all 14 Democratic members of the state’s congressional delegation sent a letter to Trump that urged the president to reverse course.

baiduhai’s Tess Kenny contributed.

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