Court allows Trump’s Texas troops to head to Chicago

What happened

A federal judge in Illinois Monday declined to immediately block President Donald Trump from sending Texas National Guard troops to Chicago over the objections of Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) and local officials. Trump is “using our service members as political props and as pawns in his illegal effort to militarize our nation’s cities,” Pritzker said at a news conference.

Trump told Newsmax Monday evening he was considering invoking the 1792 Insurrection Act “as a way to get around” court rulings stifling his deployments, as a federal judge in Oregon did over the weekend.

Who said what

Trump’s “unconstitutional invasion” of Chicago is aimed at provoking “chaos” he can use as a “flimsy pretext” to invoke the Insurrection Act, Pritzker said. The American people “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 favor,” Illinois said in its lawsuit before U.S. District Judge April Perry.

Pritzker and California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), whose state was the first target of Trump’s military deployments, said in separate letters to the National Governors Association Monday that they would withdraw their states from the 117-year-old organization if its leadership doesn’t condemn what Newsom called Trump’s “unprecedented assault” on the “sovereignty of states as protected by the 10th Amendment.”

Trump’s vision of a “country where armed soldiers patrol U.S. streets” will be weighed in court against the Posse Comitatus Act and “America’s long-standing belief that law enforcement should remain in civilian hands,” The Associated Press said. At stake are “significant questions of constitutional law, federalism and the separation of powers.” Trump’s increasingly “blatant” attempts to “politicize the military” are also testing “one of America’s oldest and most sacred democratic traditions, devised by the founding fathers,” The New York Times said.

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What next?

Perry set a Thursday hearing to consider Illinois’ request to block Trump’s Chicago deployment. Texas National Guard troops were en route to the state Monday night and would begin operating in Chicago later in the week, military officials said.