Judge won’t block federal troop deployment to Chicago — for now

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.”

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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.”

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.

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.

Hannah Meisel

Hannah has been covering Illinois government and politics since 2014, and since then has worked for a variety of outlets from NPR affiliate stations to a startup newsletter. She’s a graduate of both the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the U of I’s Springfield campus, where she received an M.A. through the Public Affairs Reporting program and got her start reporting in the Capitol.

Brenden Moore

Brenden joined CNI in October, 2025 as a Statehouse reporter. Brenden is a 2017 graduate of DePaul University, where he received his bachelor's degree in journalism and political science, and a 2018 graduate of the University of Illinois Springfield, where he received his master's degree in Public Affairs Reporting.