The war of words between President Donald Trump and Gov. JB Pritzker escalated dramatically this week with the president calling for both the Illinois governor and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson to be jailed — and Pritzker daring him to “come and get me.”

“Trump is now calling for the arrest of elected representatives checking his power,” Pritzker wrote on social media. “What else is left on the path to full-blown authoritarianism?”

Trump took to social media to say Pritzker and Johnson “should be in jail,” accusing them of failing to protect Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers as they’ve embarked on their aggressive enforcement campaign in the Chicago region over the past month.

And it comes just days after Trump authorized the deployment of National Guard troops to Illinois to protect ICE officers and facilities — a move made over the vehement verbal and legal objections of state and local leaders and cast by Pritzker as an “invasion.”

Meanwhile, Pritzker again accused Trump of being motivated by dementia and seeking to undermine the 2026 midterm elections.

The governor appeared Tuesday afternoon in Minneapolis with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on a panel about state leadership in a time of national gridlock. Midway through the 45-minute discussion, Walz, the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2024, quipped that he and Pritzker “got a pool going” on “who gets arrested first, and I don’t know who’s leading.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Pritzker raised his hand indicating that he was at the top of the list. Minutes later, he jokingly told the audience to “come visit me in the gulag in El Salvador,” the site of a notorious prison where deported Venezuelan migrants accused of being gang members were held earlier this year.

Less than a day later, Trump wrote on his social media platform that Pritzker and Johnson “should be in jail for failing to protect Ice Officers.”

Pritzker responded hours later, calling Trump “unhinged” and a “wannabe dictator” in an interview with MSNBC outside the federal courthouse in downtown Chicago.

Then, in a theatrical turn, Pritzker stared directly into the camera and addressed Trump, declaring that “if you come for my people, you come through me” — a line he first used two days following Trump’s 2024 election win. For dramatic effect, he then added the line “so come and get me” while extending his hands as if they were to be cuffed.

Pritzker wrote on X earlier in the day that he “will not back down.”

Johnson, in his own tweet, said that “this is not the first time Trump has tried to have a Black man unjustly arrested” and reiterated that “I’m not going anywhere.”

Texas National Guard in Illinois

The latest exchange came as Texas National Guard troops arrived in Illinois and were stationed at a U.S. Army Reserve training facility in Elwood, near Joliet.

U.S. District Judge April Perry on Monday declined to grant the state’s request for a temporary restraining order that would have prevented the deployment. She gave the Department of Justice until the end of Wednesday to respond to the state’s filing and scheduled her next hearing for Thursday.

Read more: Illinois sues to block Trump’s National Guard deployment to Chicago | Judge won’t block federal troop deployment to Chicago — for now

Attorney General Kwame Raoul argues the deployment violates Illinois’ rights as a sovereign state to carry out its own law enforcement, as well as the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act that bans the military from participating in domestic law enforcement.

Even if Perry blocks the move, Trump has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 — a statutory exception to the Posse Comitatus Act — as a justification for a military occupation of the nation’s third-largest city.

“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 told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday.

The law permits the president to deploy the military and federalized National Guard troops within the homeland to put down “rebellion” that makes it “impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States.”

The Trump Administration has said that troops are necessary to protect ICE facilities and agents. Though, to this point, Trump has not invoked the two-century-old law.

Illinois’ governor accused the president of targeting “blue cities in blue states” with the goal of conditioning residents “to get used to the idea that it’s okay to have military on the streets.”

“Why? Because next year, there’s an election,” Pritzker said, speculating that Trump would dispatch soldiers to “guard” polling places to “intimidate a lot of people who are not Republicans.”

Pritzker said he is “not a conspiracy theory guy,” but suggested that Trump could be preparing to confiscate ballots if the 2026 election does not go Republicans’ way.

He pointed to the administration’s request for states’ voter rolls. The Illinois Board of Elections has declined to hand over the sensitive data to the federal government.

“They haven’t told us why, but we know what they’re looking for is an excuse to say that there is fraud in the election in 2026,” Pritzker said. “That is the real purpose. So put all of those things together. That is what I think is really going on.”

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.