State and local officials in Illinois urged the Supreme Court on Monday to leave in place a lower court order blocking the Trump administration from deploying National Guard troops in the Chicago area in a case with implications for the use of state-based military forces in other American cities.
“No protest activity in Illinois has rendered the president unable to execute federal law,” the state’s attorney general, Kwame Raoul, and lawyers for the city of Chicago said in their filing to the court, adding that the “unnecessary deployment of military troops, untrained for local policing, will escalate tensions and undermine the ordinary law enforcement activities of state and local entities.”
The filing came in response to President Trump’s request last week to be allowed to send hundreds of troops to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing center on Chicago’s outskirts that has drawn protesters, while lower courts consider the city and state’s lawsuit challenging the legality of the move.
The president can federalize a state’s National Guard units without the cooperation of a state’s governor only under certain circumstances. A district court judge and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit have rejected the administration’s assertions that protests in Illinois have significantly hindered the ability of federal officers to carry out immigration laws or risen to the level of a rebellion, as would be required to legally justify federalizing Guard units.
The Supreme Court’s response to the request made by the Trump administration last week, which could land as early as this week, would be only a temporary resolution of the matter. But it would likely set the ground rules for the president’s efforts to deploy military forces in other major U.S. cities. In addition to Chicago, the administration has in recent months ordered the National Guard to Washington, Los Angeles and Portland, Ore., also over the objections of state and local leaders.
Monday’s filing in the Chicago case came soon after a different appeals court allowed the Trump administration to deploy National Guard troops in Portland, Ore.
In the filing, the Illinois officials urged the Supreme Court not to grant the Trump administration’s latest request, noting that Judge April M. Perry of the Northern District of Illinois was set to hold a hearing on Wednesday to determine whether to extend the block on the Chicago deployment.
In separate filings to the Supreme Court on Monday, a bipartisan group of more than two dozen former governors and a group of former high-ranking U.S. military leaders expressed deep concerns about the president’s decision to federalize the National Guard over the objection of Illinois’s governor.
The coalition of former governors said such a move “weakens state executives’ authority to maintain intrastate law and order, deprives states of vital emergency response tools, and breaks with a long tradition of cooperation between the federal government and the states on issues of public safety.” Their filing also warned that deploying the National Guard would “only exacerbate tensions in Chicago and thereby increase the risk to civilians and law enforcement officers alike.”
Ann Marimow covers the Supreme Court for The Times from Washington.
The post Illinois Officials Ask Supreme Court to Keep Block on Trump’s Chicago Troop Deployment appeared first on New York Times.
