National Guard troops have started their mission in Chicago area, official says, as court showdowns over deployments loom

By Andy Rose, Alisha Ebrahimji, Taylor Romine, Hanna Park, CNN

(CNN) — Members of the Texas National Guard have deployed into the greater Chicago area, an official said Wednesday night, as lawyers prepare for critical court hearings on federalized troops 2,000 miles away from each other amid an ongoing battle between President Donald Trump and Democratic-led cities.

The Trump administration is tying planned deployments in Chicago and Portland, Oregon, to increasingly tense protests outside Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities, as well as citing the shooting at an ICE facility in Dallas. Two ICE detainees were killed there. Trump has called it an attack on law enforcement.

The Texas guardsmen are now deployed on their official mission of protecting US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other US Government personnel in the Chicago area, a US Northern Command spokesperson told CNN Wednesday night. The spokesperson was unable to share any additional detail on where exactly the troops were.

The president ramped up his criticism Wednesday of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker, who called the Guard call-up “Trump’s invasion” over the weekend.

“Chicago Mayor should be in jail for failing to protect Ice Officers! Governor Pritzker also!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Both officials responded to Trump’s criticism on X Wednesday morning, and later, the mayor told CNN’s Pamela Brown it is “certainly not the first time that Donald Trump has called for the arresting of a Black man, unjustly.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” he added. “I’m going to stay firm as the mayor of this amazing city.”

Meanwhile, Pritzker wrote on X he doesn’t plan on backing down, saying, “Trump is now calling for the arrest of elected representatives checking his power. What else is left on the path to full-blown authoritarianism?”

“Masked agents already are grabbing people off the street,” the governor said. “Separating children from their parents. Creating fear.”

Trump’s commitment to the military option has been shown not only in courts, but in the frequent air travel by members of his administration. FBI Director Kash Patel and Assistant Attorney General Todd Blanche paid a brief visit to Chicago on Tuesday, at the same time Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem flew to the Portland ICE office.

Noem visited the Chicago ICE facility last week, just after multiple Cabinet officials held a news conference in Memphis, Tennessee, touting the coming Guard deployment there.

If the pending court cases challenging the deployments don’t go Trump’s way, the president has said he may effectively overrule them by invoking the Insurrection Act, which allows the deployment of troops in the US in certain limited situations – it’s the largest statutory exception to the Posse Comitatus Act, which generally prohibits the use of the military inside the US for domestic law enforcement purposes.

“If I had to enact it, I’d do that,” Trump said Monday. “If people were being killed, and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up, sure I do that.”

Before National Guard troops are sent out for their protection mission, members undergo training in de-escalation, crowd control, and the standing rules for use of force, US Northern Command says on its website.

National Guard members are on their missions specifically to help federal functions, personnel and property, which can include “crowd control and establishment of security perimeters,” Northern Command said. Military members will not be arresting protesters as that is a law enforcement activity, it added.

Here is where the National Guard deployments stand now:

Chicago

District Court Judge April Perry – nominated to the bench last year by President Joe Biden – declined earlier this week to make an immediate ruling on a request from the state and the city of Chicago to block the president’s deployments in Chicago and set a hearing on that matter for Thursday.

It came as Trump authorized 300 Illinois National Guard troops for active duty in Chicago, and the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, volunteered another 400 of his state’s guardsmen. Three hundred members of the Illinois National Guard and 200 members of the Texas National Guard were activated under Title 10 and are now in the Chicago area, US Northern Command said in an update Wednesday.

Members of the Texas National Guard were seen at a suburban training center Tuesday. The troops are undergoing training, including in de-escalation and crowd control, Northern Command said.

The Trump administration filed its response late Wednesday to the request to halt the deployment.

In a 59-page filing, the administration defended its decision, citing “ongoing and sustained violence” targeting ICE personnel and federal property in the Chicago area. The filing cites the shooting at an ICE facility in Dallas last month and claims ICE facilities “have come under coordinated assault by violent groups.”

In seeking to block the National Guard deployment, the city and state “ask the Court to second-guess the President’s judgment of the current situation in Illinois and exercise supervisory authority over his deployment of federalized Guardsmen, with the potential of putting federal officers (and others) in harm’s way,” the filing said.

“But responsibility, and accountability, for those decisions should rest with the political branches of the federal government, not this Court. This Court should thus deny Plaintiffs’ motion,” it stated.

In their filing, federal officials said there had been a sharp rise in violence “against federal law enforcement executing their lawful duties,” with more than 30 officers injured in recent weeks. Documented injuries include a torn ACL, a hyper-extended knee, multiple lacerations, and a beard ripped from an officer’s face, the filing said. Officers have also been hospitalized after being physically tackled by rioters, according to the filing.

It attributed the escalation to a lack of cooperation from local law enforcement, local laws prohibiting collaboration with immigration agents, and what it called “inflamed animosity” from state and city officials toward law enforcement officers – all factors it said “contributed to the need for assistance from the National Guard.”

The state and city, in their lawsuit seeking to halt the deployment, argued that the need for extra protection in response to protests around federal facilities is merely a pretext to deploy the military inside the United States. “The manufactured nature of the crisis is clear,” they said.

A group of 26 former governors across the US submitted a brief Wednesday in support of the temporary restraining order halting the deployment of the National Guard in the area, saying it would “only exacerbate tensions in Chicago.”

“The president’s assertion of authority to deploy military troops on domestic soil based on his unreviewable discretion, and without the cooperation and coordination of state authorities, threatens to upset the delicate balance of state and federal authority that underlies our constitutional order,” the filing says.

A group of former secretaries of the Army and Navy and retired four-star admirals and generals also filed a brief warning that while there are exceptional circumstances that require military intervention, domestic deployments that don’t adhere to “long-established guardrails” come with risks – including politicizing the military, diverting military personnel from their primary missions of training for wars and protecting communities after disasters, and putting troops in situations they aren’t trained for.

Meanwhile, a group of 18 Republican attorneys general filed a brief in support of the Trump administration, saying that not allowing National Guard deployment to help ICE agents “comes at an immense cost to the States.”

The mayor of Chicago said local police trying to maintain order are being put in a difficult position. “The president of the United States of America is literally pitting law enforcement against law enforcement,” Johnson said during a news conference Tuesday.

On Wednesday, he told CNN, “What we are seeing is a full escalation from these federal agents.

“We always knew that sending in the federal agents was a pretext to the National Guard,” Johnson said. “His ultimate goal is to send the military into American cities.”

As the legal fight unfolds, the impacts are being felt throughout the city. A soccer match between Argentina and Puerto Rico, originally scheduled to take place in Chicago next week, has been relocated to Florida as immigration tensions heighten in the city, a person familiar with the decision told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

Portland

The deliberative steps of the Illinois judge contrast with the fast movement on the similar case in Portland.

Judge Karin Immergut – a Trump appointee who once served on the Starr investigation into President Bill Clinton – almost immediately blocked Trump’s call-up of the Oregon National Guard on Saturday.

When the White House responded by deploying federalized California National Guard troops to Portland on Sunday, Immergut responded by expanding her ruling to stop all National Guard deployments in Oregon.

The case is now moving to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is being asked by the White House to suspend Immergut’s order and allow guardsmen to be deployed. The court ruled Wednesday that the Oregon National Guard can be federalized but not deployed during the appeals process.

A Thursday hearing is scheduled for arguments on the restraining order preventing outside states’ National Guard members from coming into Oregon. It will be in front of a three-judge panel – two Trump appointees and a Clinton appointee who was once a justice on the Oregon Supreme Court.

Mirroring a filing in the Chicago case, 20 Republican attorneys general filed a brief in support of a National Guard deployment in Portland, saying the troops are needed to defend against “lawlessness.”

Memphis

While the rollout of the military in Portland has been blocked by a judge, the planned rollout in Memphis is being slowed by more practical concerns.

“The Tennessee National Guard should be coming in the next few days or in the next week or so,” Democratic Mayor Paul Young told CNN affiliate WATN on Tuesday.

The exact role that the Tennessee National Guard, which is being deployed to Memphis by Republican Gov. Bill Lee, will play in the city has not been revealed.

A large group of federal law enforcement agents is already in the city as part of the Memphis Safe Task Force. The group made 386 arrests in just over a week, according to Justice Department figures released Wednesday, with more than 200 being classified as either “warrant pickups” or “administrative.” Two arrests were made in homicide cases.

The mayor’s Democratic political leadership has been at odds with the Trump administration and Republican state leaders over the need for federal involvement, but Young said they are cooperating.

“It was something that the governor and the president decided, and as mayor of the city, it’s my job to make sure it’s coordinated well within our community,” he told WATN.

This story has been updated.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the type of federal troops training for deployment near Chicago. They are National Guard troops.

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CNN’s Haley Britzky contributed to this report.