Texas National Guard headed to Illinois, as Gov. Pritzker calls for end of Trump administration’s ‘authoritarian march’

As members of the Texas National Guard boarded a plane on Monday, state and city leaders in Illinois were holding a news conference asking them to stay away from Chicago.

It was not immediately clear when the guard members would arrive in Chicago. Texas Gov. Abbott on Monday shared a photo on social media showing the state’s “elite” National Guard boarding a plane but he did not say where they were headed.

“Illinois will not let the Trump administration continue on their authoritarian march without resisting,” Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker said. “We will use every lever at our disposal to stop this power grab because military troops should not be used against American communities.”

Earlier in the day, Abbott had replied to Pritzker on social media, saying, “I fully authorized the President to call up 400 members of the Texas National Guard to ensure safety for federal officials.”

During a news conference on Tuesday morning, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said he had not received any information about the whereabouts of the Texas National Guard troops.

“We have not heard directly, of course, from the president or his administration and my expectation is that, regardless of what this administration is doing, I’m going to remain firm and committed to protecting the rights and the civility of our nation and will start right here in Chicago,” Johnson said.

“We do know that much like what we’ve seen in other parts of the country, there is a process that the National Guard goes through before they’re actually released into the streets of Chicago or anywhere,” Johnson added.

Johnson said that what he does know is that the deployment of National Guard troops in Chicago is “illegal, unconstitutional, it’s dangerous, it’s wrong.”

The state of Illinois and city of Chicago filed a lawsuit on Monday seeking to block the federalization and deployment of the National Guard.

The foundational principle separating the military from domestic affairs is “in peril” as Trump seeks to deploy the National Guard to cities across the country, lawyers for Illinois and Chicago wrote in the lawsuit.

“Let me be clear, Donald Trump is using our service members as political props and as pawns in his illegal effort to militarize our nation’s cities,” Pritzker said during a news conference.

To support his point, Pritzker played a video of an ICE raid conducted last week on an apartment complex in the South Shore neighborhood of Chicago, which he claimed was filmed by federal authorities with high-definition cameras for social media purposes. He said it was the same video that Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem posted on social media on Saturday.

“They brought Black Hawk military helicopters and more than 100 agents in full tactical gear,” Pritzker said.

He added, “In the dead of night and seemingly for the cameras, armed federal agents emerged from the Black Hawk helicopters, rappelling onto the roof of that apartment building.”

The governor alleged the Trump administration is following a playbook to “cause chaos, create fear and confusion, make it seem like peaceful protesters are a mob by firing gas pellets and tear gas canisters at them. Why? To create the pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act so that he can send military troops to our city,” Pritzker said.

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Monday afternoon, Trump said he did not yet see the need to use the Insurrection Act, but “if I had to enact it, I’d do it, if people were being killed and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up.”