Trump asks U.S. Supreme Court to allow National Guard deployment in Illinois

CHICAGO — The Trump administration on Friday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to allow the immediate deployment of National Guard troops in Illinois, calling the decisions by lower court judges blocking the activation of guardsmen “indefensible” and “micromanaging.”

In a 43-page filing, the administration argued the judicial branch has no right to “second guess” a president’s judgment on national security matters or resulting military actions.

“A federal district court lacks not only the authority but also the competence to wrest control of the military chain of command from the Commander in Chief,” U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer wrote.

President Donald Trump’s Oct. 4 order to federalize, or take control of, 300 members of the Illinois National Guard, along with the deployment of 200 Texas guardsmen and another 16 troops from California, has been blocked since last week. U.S. District Judge April Perry issued a temporary restraining order on Oct. 9 forbidding the Trump administration from deploying the National Guard, ruling there was “no credible evidence that there is a danger of rebellion in the state of Illinois.”

Since then, the 7^th Circuit Court of Appeals refused to stay Perry’s order blocking the National Guard’s deployment, with a three-judge panel writing in an opinion published Thursday that “political opposition is not rebellion.”

But the administration is continuing its insistence that Chicago-area protests against Trump’s immigration enforcement actions are far more violent than the accounts Perry relied upon in issuing her two-week temporary restraining order. The order is set to expire on Thursday, Oct. 23, though Perry has scheduled a hearing the day before on a possible extension.

Sauer wrote that continued delays in deploying guardsmen to protect federal immigration agents and property from “rioters” puts agents’ lives at risk. He cited incidents of slashed tires on vehicles belonging to Customs and Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and alleged protesters have aimed fireworks at agents “and have thrown bottles, rocks, and tear gas at them.”

The filing accused Perry of having “disregarded outright the evidence of violence proffered by federal officials” and “instead accepting the implausibly rosy assessment of state and local officials,” which he called “indefensible.”

Perry was appointed to the bench last year after former President Joe Biden’s previous attempt to appoint her U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois was blocked in the Senate by now-Vice President J.D. Vance.

The judge last week said the DOJ’s arguments — particularly its characterization of the protests she noted had never exceeded 200 people outside the ICE facility in the Chicago suburb of Broadview — seemed to add to “a growing body of evidence that DHS’ version of events are unreliable.” She also gave credence to allegations that agents were often the aggressors in clashes with protesters and predicted that deploying the National Guard “will only add fuel to the fire that the defendants themselves have started.”

But on Friday, Sauer shot back that the judge’s ruling was part of “a disturbing and recurring pattern” that follows similar cases in Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon.

In his telling, protestors in those Democratic strongholds put immigration agents at risk and obstructed their work while local law enforcement offered only “tepid support,” prompting the Trump administration to deploy the National Guard for the protection of agents and federal property. Sauer decried local federal judges’ rulings against the Trump administration after “local political leaders” filed lawsuits.

“The district court then issues an opinion granting injunctive relief against the President’s action that downplays or denies the ongoing threat to the lives and safety of federal agents, substitutes the court’s own judgment for the President’s about the need for military augmentation, and gives little or no weight to the United States’ interest in enforcing federal immigration law,” he wrote.

Sauer also chided the 7^th Circuit panel, which wrote in Thursday’s opinion that “the facts do not justify the President’s actions in Illinois.” The three-judge panel, which included Trump-appointed Judge Amy St. Eve, stayed the portion of Perry’s order blocking the administration from federalizing National Guard troops but backed up the part of her ruling preventing their deployment.

“That result eviscerates the President’s order,” Sauer wrote, saying it “deprives” immigration agents of the protection Trump “sought to give them” by activating the National Guard. “It also places the Seventh Circuit in the untenable position of controlling the military chain of command and judicially micromanaging the exercise of the President’s Commander-in-Chief powers, including the decision about which military forces the President can deploy.”

The high court gave the Illinois Attorney General’s office until 5 p.m. Monday to respond to the filing.

In a social media post Friday afternoon, Gov. JB Pritzker said his administration would “keep defending” Illinois’ sovereignty.

“Militarizing our communities against their will is not only un-American but also leads us down a dangerous path for our democracy,” he said. “What will come next?”

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.