Illinois political leaders and Chicago municipal officials are raising alarms over President Donald Trump’s threat to deploy National Guard troops to the city, insisting that sending in soldiers would be baseless and a clear case of federal overreach.
Flanked by political, business and religious leaders, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker on Monday blasted the president’s suggestion that federal soldiers were needed in the city and emphasized what he said was a significant reduction in homicides, vehicle thefts and other crimes in recent years.
“There is no emergency in Chicago that calls for armed military intervention,” he said during a news conference. “There is no insurrection.”
“Donald Trump wants to use the military to occupy a U.S. city, punish his dissidents and score political points,” Pritzker said. “If this were happening in any other country, we would have no trouble calling it what it is — a dangerous power grab.”
The number of homicides in Chicago has fallen 32% from last year, Pritzker said, while vehicle thefts and burglaries are both down by more than 20%.
But as National Guard soldiers fanned out across Washington, D.C., to tackle what Trump has framed as an epidemic of “crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse,” the president said that Chicago and New York City are next on his list.
The Washington Post, citing officials familiar with the matter, reported Saturday that the Pentagon has spent weeks planning a military deployment to Chicago.
The plans reportedly involved several options, including dispatching a few thousand members of the Guard to Chicago as soon as September. NBC News has not independently confirmed that report.
Pritzker, a second-term Democrat, said he has heard nothing about those plans from the White House or the Department of Defense.
"We only read about it in The Washington Post," he said during a media availability earlier Monday.
Pritzker said such a deployment would be unconstitutional because the federal government is barred from deploying military troops to an American city for crime-fighting purposes. If the administration moves forward with the plan, Pritzker said, "the first thing we're going to do is take him to court."
Speaking to reporters Monday, Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul said he does anticipate filing a pre-emptive lawsuit.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, a first-term Democrat, struck a similar chord as Pritzker in an interview with NBC News.
“The guard is not needed,” Johnson said. “This is not the role of our military. The brave men and women who signed up to serve our country did not sign up to occupy American cities."
Traditionally, the federal government deploys enlisted National Guard members to respond to major domestic crises such as national disasters, the Covid pandemic and civil unrest.
Trump, speaking to reporters from the Oval Office on Monday morning, blasted Illinois political leaders and called Chicago a “disaster.” Trump called Johnson “incompetent” and labeled Pritzker “corrupt.”
He signed an executive order that creates National Guard units focused on “public order issues.”
Earlier this year, Trump deployed the National Guard to Los Angeles to respond to protests over his administration’s immigration raids and deportations. The president did so over the vocal objections of California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.
Illinois' two senators, Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth, both Democrats, excoriated Trump’s talk of troop deployments.
Durbin dismissed Trump’s threats as “purely political theater” and “nothing more than a power grab.” The fifth-term U.S. senator, who is not seeking re-election in 2026, urged political leaders to instead focus on “proven bipartisan solutions to continue to reduce violent crime.”
Duckworth, a U.S. Army combat veteran and retired Army National Guard lieutenant colonel, slammed Trump’s threat as “deeply disturbing” and “un-American.”
“It’s yet another unwarranted, unwanted and unjust move straight out of the authoritarian’s playbook that will only undermine our military’s readiness and ultimately weaken our national security,” Duckworth said in a statement.
