Trump Is Planning an Illegal Military Occupation of Chicago, the Illinois Governor Pritzker Warns

Aug 23, 2025

After deploying the National Guard and the U.S. Marines to Los Angeles, which was found to be illegal by a federal judge, Donald Trump deployed them to Washington, DC, and is now planning to deploy them to Chicago, with no justification and over the objections of the city’s mayor and the governor of Illinois.

The Washington Post reports:

The deployment would come as federal authorities look for new ways to intensify the identification and deportation of undocumented immigrants, including an expansion of ICE and efforts to challenge “sanctuary” policies, as they seek to meet a directive from White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller to make at least 3,000 arrests per day.
“After using Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. as his testing ground for authoritarian overreach, Trump is now openly flirting with the idea of taking over other states and cities,” [Illinois Governor J.B.] Pritzker said. “Trump’s goal is to incite fear in our communities and destabilize existing public safety efforts—all to create a justification to further abuse his power.” …
Pritzker said in a statement Saturday night after this story was published that the state of Illinois had received “no requests or outreach from the federal government asking if we need assistance, and we have made no requests for federal intervention.”
He added that there is “no emergency that warrants the President of the United States federalizing the Illinois National Guard, deploying the National Guard from other states, or sending active duty military within our own borders.”

Some of us warned that Trumps’ “mass deportation” plan would require a militarized police state. It looks more like it is providing him with the excuse to impose such a police state in attempt to pacify big cities that he sees as strongholds of his political opposition.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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