Troops arrive in Chicago as Trump goes after cities led by Democrats

Texas national guard troops arrived in the Chicago area yesterday in an escalation of what the state governor calls “Trump’s invasion”.

- Gloria Oladipo Rachel Leingang

The latest military intervention comes after April Perry, a US district judge, declined to immediately block troops from entering the city amid a pending lawsuit from the state of Illinois and the city of Chicago against Donald Trump’s administration.

She has set a deadline of midnight tonight for the government to reply.

Trump is also seeking to federalise the Illinois national guard, which would involve moving them from state to federal jurisdiction.

The Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, said the president's officials had not discussed plans to federalise the state’s national guard or to send in troops from other states.

“We must now start calling this what it is: Trump’s invasion,” he said in a statement. “It started with federal agents, it will soon include deploying federalised members of the Illinois national guard against our wishes and it will now involve sending in another state’s military troops.”

Pritzker said 300 of the state’s guard troops were to be federalised and deployed to Chicago, along with 400 others from Texas.

The Illinois attorney general, Kwame Raoul, filed a lawsuit seeking to stop Trump from calling up the state’s national guard or sending in troops from other states “immediately and permanently” after the president ordered national guard troops to deploy in the state against Pritzker’s wishes.

The lawsuit said: “The American people, regardless of where they reside, should not live under the threat of occupation by the United States military, particularly not simply because their city or state leadership has fallen out of a president’s favour.”

Raoul has argued that efforts to send in guard troops against a state’s will would infringe on state sovereignty and self-governance while leading to unrest and harm for residents.