Trump’s Leaked Plan to Deploy the Texas National Guard Against Illinois Will Tear Apart the Union
If it goes forward, it will plunge the country into an unprecedented constitutional crisis
On Tuesday, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker gave an extraordinary press conference. Together with the mayor of Chicago and the president of the Cook County board of commissioners, the governor announced that President Donald Trump is hatching plans for what can only be described as the prospective invasion of his sovereign state. And not just by federal troops, but by units of the Texas National Guard.
The governor’s move was triggered by Trump’s declaration hours earlier that he plans to go into Chicago. “I’m not saying when,” the president said, but “we’re going in.”
On the surface, these plans, whose specifics Pritzker learned through leaks from well-placed sources (more on that below), resemble Trump’s recent actions in Los Angeles and those underway in Washington, D.C. They involve putting troops and agents on the street under the pretext of “fighting crime” and assisting ICE’s mass deportation campaign.
But if these specifics are correct, what Trump is planning in Chicago would represent a dramatic escalation. To be sure, given how erratic this administration is, we do not yet know if what Pritzker described will actually occur. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has issued a denial. It is possible that now that the plan has been exposed, it, or at least its most extreme parts, will be abandoned. On the other hand, at least one aspect of Pritzker’s allegation has been independently confirmed by The Washington Post: the Pentagon has authorized the use of Great Lakes Naval Station as a staging area.
Also, it is hard to believe that Pritzker would ring the alarm bell without a solid basis in fact.
It is not politics as usual when a state’s elected chief executive, charged with protecting his people, takes to the airwaves to warn that another state’s troops may soon be used as an instrument of occupation on his soil.
The Union and Liberty
Using federalized troops to fight crime or round up immigrants is bad enough. But it’s important to fully appreciate just how insidious the potential use of Texas troops would be. If Trump tried to deploy federal troops by either putting Illinois Guard units under federal control or by deploying active duty regular military, he’d run into the Posse Comitatus Act, the famous law which generally forbids using the military to conduct civilian law enforcement: arresting and jailing people, controlling the streets. This is why a federal judge ruled that Trump’s recent deployments of the Marines and a federalized California National Guard in and around Los Angeles was illegal—although the injunction issued in that case only applies in that court’s California district and is currently stayed pending appeal. Those in the administration likely understand that trying to repeat this stunt in Illinois could get slapped down by the courts again.
So Trump’s alternative course of action, as constitutional scholar
explains, might be to invoke 32 U.S.C. § 502(f)(2), enacted in 2006, which would allow him to keep the Texas National Guard under the formal control of the state of Texas while acting at federal behest.That would be a total abuse of the section that pertains to National Guard units participating in training drills and exercises on specialized federal bases. The section, understood properly, is not intended for authorizing active deployments, and certainly not deployments in another state without its consent and over its objection.
But, unfortunately, buried within this otherwise mundane statute about the normal functioning of the National Guard system is a broader catch-all: “Support of operations or missions undertaken by the member’s unit at the request of the President or Secretary of Defense.” Not order, or command, or after going through the process of federalizing them. But merely at the “request” for participation of state troops who remain under state, not federal, command.
Trump invoked this section last time he was in office when he “requested” red states to send their National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., in response to the George Floyd protests despite the objections of the D.C. mayor. However, that deployment was brief and ended before the legality of using this section for purposes of domestic crackdowns could be tested. Still, D.C. is different from Chicago in that its own National Guard, which was also used, is always under presidential command, unlike state forces.
The potential loophole created in the section by the catch-all phrase lends credence to Pritzker’s story because it offers Trump a fig leaf for evading one of the biggest legal hurdles for domestic use of the armed forces. However, it also opens a new can of worms, because Texas troops under Texas command would not actually have any legal authority to conduct law enforcement, or otherwise be actively deployed at all, in Illinois. This would make the exercise, despite the legalistic obfuscation, patently illegal, unprecedented, and unconstitutional. It would be, in a very real and literal way, an outright invasion of one state by another.
As we have seen, when presented with totally novel legal questions, the courts do not always move fast enough to intervene. In California, the district court’s ruling only came after the deployment had already ended. Using out-of-state Guard units in this way would be an assault on state sovereignty—a phrase that happens to appear on the Illinois state flag. That’s not just a quaint anachronism or historical reference. In our federal system, the states really are sovereigns. Limited sovereigns subject to the supremacy of the Constitution, but nevertheless sovereign polities with their own laws and constitutions, the creatures of their own people’s constituent power. Pritzker is, in a rarely appreciated but still very real way, a commander-in-chief in his own right, with both the power and the duty to repel an invasion and defend the state’s control over its own territory.
Pritzker described this action as Trump “tearing this country apart.” But more specifically, this would be an assault on the Union itself. It would represent the literal use of military force by one state against another. The seriousness of this cannot be overstated. If the Union means anything, it means our states are bound in a mutual pledge to not do this to each other. It is the most essential guarantee the Constitution makes to the states.
Crossing the Rubicon
As we have seen, any notion of fighting crime or targeting only violent criminals is a manifest lie. Even though Trump has seized on incidents over the Labor Day weekend in Chicago as his pretext, crime in the city has actually been plummeting, currently at its lowest point in decades, and the city is safer than many in red states.
Illinois, of course, has its own National Guard for use in genuine civil emergencies, the state-federal hybrid force which exists in every state, under state control unless and until called into federal service. Rather than using this in-state force, as was done in California, albeit under transparently false pretenses, the use of specifically red-state forces would be making the military into an overtly partisan weapon, turning the National Guard into red states versus blue states, using a compliant Republican governor against a Democratic state on its own turf.
It is also worth emphasizing how, according to Pritzker, he came to hear about Trump’s plans. As he put it, not just “well-sourced reporters” but also “patriotic Americans within the administration and the military” tipped him off. This, in and of itself, is extraordinary. It means not just civilian agencies but people in uniform, actual members of the armed forces or at least within the Department of Defense, are whistleblowing about planned deployments by leaking the information to a governor, risking their careers or worse. That alone represents an astonishing breakdown of civil-military norms and chain of command. This will likely become more common when service members are forced to choose between their loyalty to the Constitution versus a Constitution-busting commander-in-chief.
Another reason Abbott’s insistence that there’s no truth in Pritzker’s claims is hard to believe is he has a record of aggressively deploying the National Guard for immigration enforcement in his own state. Moreover, as noted earlier, several other Republican states already previously obliged Trump and eagerly sent troops to participate in the similar chaos-inducing and economically destructive occupation of the nation’s capital.
What happens next remains to be seen. Pritzker warned, amazingly, that the administration intends to use these troops to raid Hispanic communities and particularly to target the annual celebrations of Mexican Independence Day on Sept. 16. Imagine a comparable parallel: the use of armed troops to terrorize Irish Americans on St. Patrick’s Day. As he explained, in tones usually reserved for warning citizens of an imminent natural disaster, these actions would likely include masked agents hauling away parents, traumatizing children, disappearing people off the streets. It might, as it did in California, result in people being killed as chaos ensues or in reckless shooting.
In America, both by law and more fundamentally by sacred principle, our soldiers are not our cops. “We the People” are not the enemy of our own military, the objects against which it is to be used, to have the tools we have provided for our own defense turned against us. As it was once put in the charge sheet against another despot:
“He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.”
“He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.”
“He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws.”
“For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us.”
Statutory interpretation and constitutional law theories might seem a bit abstract and technical. But the principle at stake is not hard to grasp. It is deeply ingrained. It is part of what every schoolchild learns the Revolution was fought over. It shows up in our popular culture. It’s part of what makes the United States special: A nation, not by blood and soil, but because: “We hold these truths to be self-evident …”
In his conclusion, speaking for the nation’s sixth-largest state and third-largest city, Pritzker put it in the starkest possible terms. “Any rational person, who has spent even the most minimal amount of time studying human history, has to ask themselves one important question: once they get the citizens of this nation comfortable with the current atrocities committed under color of law, what comes next?”
© The UnPopulist, 2025
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Chicago resident here. I live in downtown Chicago where city residents are bracing for a siege by the trump regime. Fencing has been installed around the federal building and civic organizations are preparing to protest. “Hands off Chicago” is our protest cry. Chicago has a long history of non violent protest (Vietnam protests turned violent only after police provocation). We know the federal agencies and troops will try and provoke a physical confrontation so the Governor, Mayor and the Police Superintendent are urging everyone to stay calm while protesting.
Trump has already won since multiple Mexican American organizations have canceled their Mexican Independence Day celebrations for fear of ICE using them as a means of mass incarceration.
Many will resist it, but if this happens, it is time to start arresting people and responding to force with force as needed. Immunity extends only to legitimate government activity, and Texas has no legitimate activity to carry out in Illinois (anticipating, that is, the state use described). They can raise any affirmative defense they want at trial.