Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois blasted recent federal immigration enforcement efforts in Chicago on Sunday, and dismissed Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s assertions that the city was a “war zone” while blaming federal agents for escalating conflict.
“The secretary doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” the governor said in an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union,” adding that Chicagoans were “booing her on the street.”
Mr. Pritzker singled out a late-night Border Patrol raid last week at an apartment building on Chicago’s South Side, when video taken by bystanders showed residents of the building restrained with zip ties.
Federal agents were “just picking up people who are brown and Black and then checking their credentials,” Mr. Pritzker said. He added: “They are the ones that are making it a war zone. They need to get out of Chicago if they’re not going to focus on the worst of the worst, which is what the president said they were going to do.”
Mr. Pritzker suggested that the Trump administration, which planned to send 300 National Guard troops to Chicago, is intentionally heightening tensions. The administration wants to “create the war zone so they can send in even more troops,” he said.
Mr. Pritzker said he had directed state agencies to investigate what happened at the apartment building, citing reports of “children who were zip tied and held, some of them nearly naked” and “elderly people being thrown into a U-Haul for three hours and detained.” Mr. Pritzker added he believed that some of the people were U.S. citizens.
“What kind of a country are we living in?” he said.
The governor also said he wanted to know more about an episode in Chicago on Saturday when a federal agent shot and wounded a motorist who, according to federal officials, had rammed and boxed-in a law enforcement vehicle.
“It’s really hard to know exactly what the facts are, and they won’t let us access the facts,” he said. “They are just putting out their propaganda. And then we’ve got to later determine what actually happened.”
Sonia A. Rao reports on disability issues as a member of the 2025-26 Times Fellowship class, a program for early-career journalists.
The post Pritzker Says Federal Agents Are Trying to Make Chicago a ‘War Zone’ appeared first on New York Times.
