Article Summary
- A federal judge has dismissed a case originally filed six months ago in response to the Trump administration’s attempted deployment of 500 National Guard troops in Chicago.
- Aside from a small group of guardsmen, the majority of troops were never mobilized due to a temporary restraining order, which the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed in December.
- Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s Law Department had objected to the case’s dismissal, concerned Trump might attempt to use the old orders to federalize troops again.
- But U.S. District Judge April Perry said she couldn’t legally keep the case alive to allay fears of future “hypothetical unlawful acts.”
This summary was written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
CHICAGO — A federal judge on Monday officially closed the book on a lawsuit filed against the Trump administration last fall when the White House ordered 500 National Guard troops to Chicago as the “Operation Midway Blitz” mass deportation campaign was escalating.
U.S. District Judge April Perry, whose Oct. 9 temporary restraining order restricted any true deployment of the guardsmen to the streets of Chicago, declined to grant the state of Illinois’ and city of Chicago’s joint motion to keep the case alive in order to protect against any future National Guard mobilization orders from the administration.
“The court can no longer provide ongoing protection against hypothetical unlawful acts committed by the federal government,” the judge said Monday, delivering her opinion from the bench after hearing lawyers’ brief oral arguments.
Shortly before Christmas, a 6-3 majority on the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Perry’s order, writing in its decision that the Trump administration had “failed to identify a source of authority that would allow the military to execute the laws in Illinois.” By that point, Operation Midway Blitz had wound down — with the exception of a short mid-December return to Chicago — and the last of the National Guard troops left the area by mid-January.
Read more: Supreme Court rebuffs Trump’s planned National Guard deployment to Chicago
The 300 or so members of the Illinois National Guard that the Trump administration federalized via a pair of orders on Oct. 4 remained under the Trump administration’s control until then. The roughly 200 members of the Texas National Guard, mobilized via an Oct. 5 order from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, were sent back to their state at the same time U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents left the Chicago area in November.
Perry on Monday said she found all three of those orders had expired, even taking into account Hegseth’s Dec. 22 extension of the Illinois National Guard takeover until April 15.
Lawyers from Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul’s office and those representing Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s Law Department worried that without those orders being officially rescinded, the Trump administration might try to reuse them after the case was dismissed.
Christopher Wells, a top lawyer in the attorney general’s office, pointed Perry to a Dec. 31 post from Trump on his Truth Social account that promised Chicago “we will come back, perhaps in a much different and stronger form, when crime begins to soar again — only a matter of time!”
But Stephen Tagert, an attorney with the Department of Justice, told Perry the orders “are no longer operative” and that the case had to be dismissed as moot after the Supreme Court’s Dec. 23 decision. Perry agreed, telling Wells that “issuing an injunction against future unlawful federalization in Illinois … would be inappropriate.”
“I honestly don’t know what to make of those particular social media messages,” the judge said of Trump’s posts, noting that the Dec. 31 message was “about crime control, which was not at all what this deployment was supposed to be about.”
‘Things in Chicago are calm’
When leaving Chicago in November, then-Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino also threatened to return to Chicago in March with many more agents than the 200 on the ground in the fall. But Bovino and his boss, former U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, were both removed from their posts earlier this year following a chaotic deployment in Minneapolis that resulted in the deaths of two U.S. citizens.
“Things in Chicago are calm,” Perry said Monday. “They have been calm for many, many months. While that could change at any time, there’s no imminent thread of it happening soon.”
Of the 500 National Guard troops deployed to the Chicago area in early October, only a small portion of guardsmen were active for a single day before Perry issued her temporary restraining order. The troops were briefly stationed at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing facility in Broadview, a near-west suburb of Chicago that had become the epicenter of protests against the Trump administration in the weeks since Operation Midway Blitz began in September.
Read more: Judge’s block on deploying National Guard extended indefinitely as Supreme Court weighs case | Judge calls feds ‘unreliable,’ temporarily blocks National Guard deployment to Illinois
Both the Illinois and Texas guardsmen spent their extended stays at the National Guard training site in Marseilles and the U.S. Army Reserve Center near Joliet — 81 and 53 miles southwest of Chicago, respectively — performing training exercises, according to federal officials at the time.
Beyond the “federal protective mission” the National Guard troops were supposed to perform for immigration agents and properties like the Broadview ICE facility, Democratic leaders have warned that deploying guardsmen in American cities was a test or ramp-up to an attempted federal takeover of elections in 2026.
In a statement Monday, Raoul nodded to a potential broader use of the National Guard.
“The American people, regardless of the city or state in which they reside, should not live under threat of military occupation simply because they live in a jurisdiction that has fallen out of a president’s political favor,” he said. “I am pleased that today, the court has declared the Trump administration’s unlawful orders defunct and said it is absolutely clear that the administration cannot use the Illinois orders to federalize or deploy National Guard troops in Illinois.”
Gov. JB Pritzker echoed Raoul in his own statement, saying the case confirmed “Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to occupy our streets was a reckless and illegal abuse of power.”
“I’m grateful to the court for siding with our communities and slowing the erosion of our democratic norms,” he said. “Communities should not have to live in fear of masked federal troops occupying their neighborhoods, and our brave National Guard members should not be used as political props. These are foundational principles of any healthy democracy, and the result in this case validates that belief.
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.
