Governor J.B. Pritzker has warned that President Donald Trump is preparing to send the National Guard into Illinois as part of the MAGA administration’s wider campaign against Democratic strongholds.
“This morning, the Trump administration’s Department of War gave me an ultimatum: call up your troops, or we will,” Pritzker wrote on X on Saturday. Trump has unofficially renamed the Department of Defense to its more menacing former title, which it held between 1789 and 1947.
“It is absolutely outrageous and un-American to demand a Governor send military troops within our own borders and against our will,” he added.
While Pritzker did not specify where exactly in Illinois the White House had told him the troops would be deployed, the president has for weeks threatened to federalize the National Guard in Chicago as part of a nationwide crackdown against a perceived immigrant-led crime wave.
The governor also took a swipe at Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and MAGA border patrol official Greg Bovino over some of their alleged tactics amid an ongoing immigration enforcement surge across the city.
“Yesterday, Kristi Noem’s and Greg Bovino’s masked agents threw chemical agents near an elementary school, arrested elected officials exercising their First Amendment rights, and raided a Wal-Mart,” Pritzker wrote. “None of it was in pursuit of justice, but all of it was in pursuit of social media videos.”
Trump—who has already deployed troops to other Blue cities including Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and is now preparing to do the same in Portland—has previously described Chicago as “the most dangerous city in the world” and “a big city with an incompetent governor, stupid governor.”
He told a summit of the U.S. military’s most senior officials earlier this week that the DOD would be well-advised to “use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds” for recruits.
Stats released by the Chicago Mayor’s Office indicate that over the last 12 months there has been a nearly 22 percent reduction in violent crime, including a 32 percent reduction in homicide, a 32 percent reduction in robberies, a 49 percent reduction in vehicular hijackings, and an 18 percent reduction in aggravated assaults. The number of murders recorded in the city is also the lowest since 1965.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment on the reportedly imminent deployment, which Pritzker says has nothing to do with the reality of crime rates in Chicago.
“They will pull hardworking Americans out of their regular jobs and away from their families all to participate in a manufactured performance—not a serious effort to protect public safety,” he said. “For Donald Trump, this has never been about safety. This is about control.”
It’s not the first time Pritzker and Trump have sparred over the president’s bellicose threats against Chicago. Earlier in September, the president posted an AI-generated image of himself as Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore—played by Robert Duvall in Francis Ford Coppola’s classic 1979 Vietnam War film, Apocalypse Now—with helicopters flying over the city and fire raging behind him accompanied by the title, “Chipocalypse Now.”
The image was further accompanied by Trump’s MAGA spin on that character’s immortal line, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” with Trump swapping “napalm” for “deportations.”
Pritzker responded to Trump’s muddled film reference then by lamenting that, if taken at surface value, “the President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city.”
“This is not a joke. This is not normal,” the governor wrote on X. “Donald Trump isn’t a strongman, he’s a scared man. Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator.”
Short of deploying National Guard troops, the president has already made good on his threats against the city with the launch of “Operation Midway Blitz.”
As of early September, the Department of Homeland Security has led an enforcement surge against undocumented migrants in Chicago, with ICE personnel receiving support from multiple other agencies, including the U.S. Marshals Service, ATF, and DEA.
Their operations have included several camera-friendly raids on apartment buildings, featuring U.S. Border Patrol agents rappelling from helicopters, breaking down doors, and making arrests. ICE and other federal agents have meanwhile been accused of using tear gas, pepper balls, and excessive force against protesters outside DHS processing facilities.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has since issued an executive order banning city authorities from participating in the crackdown under any circumstances, as Pritzker warns he’s willing to follow the example set by his Democratic gubernatorial colleagues, Oregon’s Tina Kotek and California’s Gavin Newsom, in suing the MAGA administration if plans for actual deployment go ahead.
“I will not call up our National Guard to further Trump’s acts of aggression against our people,” Pritzker concluded on X. “In Illinois, we will do everything within our power to look out for our neighbors, uphold the Constitution, and defend the rule of law.”
