Judge won’t block federal troop deployment to Chicago — for now
[October 07, 2025]
By Hannah Meisel and Brenden Moore
A federal judge on Monday declined to immediately block the Trump
administration from sending National Guard troops to Chicago, but she
strongly urged federal officials to hold off deploying guardsmen until
Thursday, when she will hear arguments in the case.
Hours earlier, the state of Illinois and city of Chicago sued the
administration after weekend news that Trump would federalize 300
members of the Illinois National Guard over Gov. JB Pritzker’s
objections, in addition to sending troops from the Texas National Guard.
The White House claims the deployment is necessary to protect federal
immigration agents and facilities after several clashes with protesters
in recent weeks, but Pritzker and other Democratic leaders warn it would
just escalate tensions.
In a brief hearing Monday afternoon, U.S. District Judge April Perry
said she was “very troubled” by the Justice Department’s attorneys’
inability to answer her questions about where the guardsmen would be
deploying and what exactly they’d be doing.
“If I were the federal government, I’d strongly urge holding off until
Thursday,” she said of the plan to activate troops. But she added, it’s
“up to them.”
During the hearing, the DOJ confirmed that members of the Texas National
Guard were scheduled to board a plane for Chicago at 4 p.m. But,
attorney Jean Lin said, those out-of-state guardsmen would not be “in
position to perform their federal protective mission” until Tuesday at
the earliest. Members of the Illinois National Guard would similarly not
be mobilized until later this week, pending pre-mission trainings, Lin
said.
Christopher Wells of the Illinois attorney general’s office pleaded with
Perry to grant “some form of interim relief” before Thursday’s hearing.
He pointed to the “level of disregard the administration has shown” to a
federal judge in Oregon who over the weekend ruled Trump’s deployment of
the National Guard to Portland exceeded his authority. Despite two
rulings from the Trump-appointed judge, the feds have mobilized
guardsmen anyway from California and Texas to the west coast city.
“This is all part of a concerted effort to target disfavored
jurisdictions that the president doesn’t like,” Wells said, urging a
temporary restraining order before the federal government “hostilely
deploys troops from another state to a sister and equally sovereign
state.”
Though she denied his request, Perry sided with Wells’ contention that
the Trump administration’s request for an entire week to respond to the
lawsuit was “ridiculous” given “they have been planning this for
months.”
But since neither Perry nor the DOJ lawyers had been able to read all
500 pages of the state and city’s legal filings, the judge said she
would delay her ruling.
“It’s unclear to me, frankly, whether they’re even going to be deployed
between now and Thursday — and I mean deployed in the nonmilitary
sense,” Perry said. “Whether they will be out on the street and engaging
in activity … I simply don’t know that and neither do you.”
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Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson take
questions about the city’s lawsuit against the federal deployment of
troops to Illinois. (Credit: Illinois.gov)
Before adjourning, the judge told Wells she’s hopeful the state won’t
see any of the “nonsense you’re worried about” between now and Thursday.
But she said filing evidence of any altercations between National Guard
troops and civilians would likely strengthen the state and city’s case.
‘March toward autocracy’
Despite weeks of Trump threats to call in the National Guard, Pritzker
and Attorney General Kwame Raoul said at a news conference Monday
afternoon they could not file a lawsuit until after troops were actually
federalized.
Pritzker, surrounded by state, local and federal elected officials in
Chicago, repeatedly cast the deployment of federalized National Guard
troops as an “invasion” of the nation’s third-largest city.
The governor further said actions by Immigration and Customs Enforcement
agents since the launch of “Operation Midway Blitz” on Sept. 8 have led
to an escalation of violence in a “targeted and intentional and
premeditated” way.
He said this was to create a pretext for Trump to invoke the
Insurrection Act of 1807 — a statutory exception to the Posse Comitatus
Act, the 1878 law banning federal troops from participating in domestic
law enforcement.
“I refuse to let Donald Trump, Kristi Noem and Gregory Bovino continue
on this march toward autocracy,” Pritzker said. “Their plan all along
has been to cause chaos and then they can use that chaos to consolidate
Donald Trump’s power. They think they can fool us all into thinking that
the way to get out of this crisis that they created is to give them free
reign. That plan will only work if we let it.”
Pritzker, who last week urged state residents to record their
interactions with federal agents and to post it on social media, showed
video examples of interactions in recent weeks. They included the
fallout from a raid of an apartment building in Chicago’s South Shore
neighborhood, the handcuffing of Chicago Ald. Jessie Fuentes by
immigration agents and lingering questions over the shooting and killing
of an undocumented Franklin Park man by an on-duty ICE agent.
Pritzker said the state will use “every lever at our disposal to resist
this power grab and get Noem’s thugs the hell out of Chicago.”
“I’m not afraid — I am not afraid, and I won’t back down,” he said.
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