Washington: The Trump administration plans to federalise 300 Illinois National Guard troops, Democratic Governor JB Pritzker said Saturday, marking the latest escalation of the president’s use of federal intervention in US cities.
But the same day, a similar mobilisation of 200 National Guard troops in Oregon was temporarily blocked after a federal judge found President Donald Trump was likely overstepping his legal authority in responding to relatively small protests near a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in Portland.
Trump has characterised both Portland and Chicago as cities rife with crime and unrest, calling the former a “war zone” and suggesting apocalyptic force was needed to quell problems in the latter. Since the start of his second term, he has sent or talked about sending troops to 10 cities, including Baltimore, Maryland; Memphis, Tennessee; the District of Columbia; New Orleans, Louisiana; and the California cities of Oakland, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
But the governors of Illinois and Oregon see the deployments differently.
“This morning, the Trump Administration’s Department of War gave me an ultimatum: call up your troops, or we will,” Pritzker said in a statement. “It is absolutely outrageous and un-American to demand a Governor send military troops within our own borders and against our will.”
Oregon Governor Tina Kotek talked to Trump in late September and said the deployment was unnecessary. She refused to call up any Oregon National Guard troops, so Trump did so himself in an order to Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth. That prompted the lawsuit from city and state officials.
Attorney General Pam Bondi has issued a memo that also directs component agencies within the Justice Department, including the FBI, to help protect US Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities, including in Chicago and Portland.
Here’s a snapshot of where things stand with federal law enforcement activity in Chicago, Portland, and elsewhere
In Chicago, alarms were raised about racial profiling
The sight of armed, camouflaged and masked Border Patrol agents making arrests near famous downtown landmarks has amplified such concerns. Many Chicagoans were already uneasy after an immigration crackdown began earlier this month. Agents have targeted immigrant-heavy and largely Latino areas.
Protesters have frequently rallied near an immigration facility outside the city, and federal officials reported the arrests of 13 protesters Friday near the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing facility in Broadview.
The Department of Homeland Security acknowledged that federal agents shot a woman Saturday morning on the southwest side of Chicago. A statement from the department said it happened after Border Patrol agents patrolling the area “were rammed by vehicles and boxed in by 10 cars.”
“The officers exited their trapped vehicle when a suspect tried to run them over, forcing the officers to fire defensively,” the statement said.
No law enforcement officers were seriously injured, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said.
The woman who was shot was a US citizen and was armed with a semiautomatic weapon, according to McLaughlin. She said the woman drove herself to a hospital for treatment, but a Chicago Fire Department spokesperson told the Chicago Sun-Times that she was found near the scene and taken to a hospital in fair condition.
Immigrants’ rights advocates and residents separately reported that federal agents used tear gas near grocery or hardware stores targeted for enforcement elsewhere in Chicago Friday and detained a city council member as she questioned the attempted arrest of a man.
Deployment in Portland blocked by a judge
US District Court Judge Karin J. Immergut issued the ruling temporarily blocking the deployment Saturday afternoon, saying the relatively small protests the city has seen did not justify the use of federalised forces and allowing the deployment could harm Oregon’s state sovereignty.
“This country has a longstanding and foundational tradition of resistance to government overreach, especially in the form of military intrusion into civil affairs,” Immergut wrote. She later said, “This historical tradition boils down to a simple proposition: this is a nation of constitutional law, not martial law.”
Trump has called Portland “war-ravaged” and suggested the city is “burning down.” But local officials have said many of his claims and media posts appear to rely on images from 2020, when demonstrations and unrest gripped the city following the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.
Saturday, before the judge’s ruling was released, about 400 protesters marched from a park to the Portland Immigration and Customs Enforcement Detention facility. The group included people of all ages and races, families with children and retirees with walkers, the Oregonian reported. Federal agents used chemical crowd control munitions, including tear gas canisters and less-lethal guns that sprayed pepper balls, and arrested at least six people as the group reached the ICE facility.
By 4 pm, the crowd had thinned significantly.
A federal crime force in Memphis
Wednesday, Hegseth, Bondi and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller rallied members of a federal law enforcement task force that began operating in Memphis as part of Trump’s crime-fighting plan. Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, a Republican, has supported the effort.
Bondi said via social media that the task force made more than 50 arrests over a two-day period. More than 200 officers were deputised, including personnel from immigration and drug enforcement. They were serving criminal arrest warrants and teaming with state agencies on traffic stops.
Some residents, including Latinos, have expressed concerns that agents will detain people regardless of immigration status.
Louisiana’s governor asks for National Guard
September 30, Republican Governor Jeff Landry asked for a guard deployment to New Orleans and other cities to help fight crime.
In a letter to Hegseth, Landry also praised the president’s decision to send troops to Washington and Memphis.
He said there has been “elevated violent crime rates” in Shreveport, Baton Rouge and New Orleans, as well as shortages in local law enforcement.
But crime in some of the state’s biggest cities has actually decreased recently, with New Orleans seeing a particularly steep drop in 2025 that has it on pace for the lowest number of killings in over five decades.
Appellate court weighs California deployment
Trump deployed guard soldiers and active duty Marines in Los Angeles during the summer over the objections of Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, who sued and won a temporary block after a federal judge found the president’s use of the guard was likely unlawful.
The Trump administration appealed, and the block was put on hold by a three-judge panel of the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals. The appellate case is still underway, but the panel has indicated that it believes the administration is likely to prevail.
AP
