The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to allow the Trump administration to deploy National Guard troops in the Chicago area to support its immigration crackdown.
The justices declined the Republican administration’s emergency request to overturn a ruling by U.S. District Judge April Perry that had blocked the deployment of troops. An appeals court also had refused to step in. The Supreme Court took more than two months to act.
Three justices, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, publicly dissented.
The high court order is not a final ruling but it could affect other lawsuits challenging President Donald Trump’s attempts to deploy the military in other Democratic-led cities.
Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul issued a statement following the court’s decision, stating in part that he is “pleased that the streets of Illinois will remain free of armed National Guard members as our litigation continues in the courts.”
“Nearly 250 years ago, the framers of our nation’s Constitution carefully divided responsibility over the country’s militia, today’s U.S. National Guard, between the federal government and the states – believing it impossible that a president would use one state’s militia against another state. The extremely limited circumstances under which the federal government can call up the militia over a state’s objection do not exist in Illinois,” he said in the statement.
The outcome is a rare Supreme Court setback for Trump, who had won repeated victories in emergency appeals since he took office again in January. The conservative-dominated court has allowed Trump to ban transgender people from the military, claw back billions of dollars of congressionally approved federal spending, move aggressively against immigrants and fire the Senate-confirmed leaders of independent federal agencies.
Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker called the court’s order a “big win for Illinois and American democracy” and “an important step in curbing the Trump Administration’s consistent abuse of power and slowing Trump’s march toward authoritarianism,” in a statement Tuesday.
“American cities, suburbs, and communities should not have to faced masked federal agents asking for their papers, judging them for how they look or sound, and living in fear that President can deploy the military to their streets,” Pritzker said in the statement. “The brave men and women of our National Guard should never be used for political theater and deserve to be with their families and communities, especially during the holidays, and ready to serve overseas or at home when called upon during times of immense need.”
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson, on the other hand, said the president had activated the National Guard to protect federal personnel and property from “violent rioters.”
“Nothing in today’s ruling detracts from that core agenda. The Administration will continue working day in and day out to safeguard the American public,” she said.
The administration had initially sought the order to allow the deployment of troops from Illinois and Texas, but the Texas contingent of about 200 National Guard troops was later sent home from Chicago.
The Trump administration has argued that the troops are needed “to protect federal personnel and property from violent resistance against the enforcement of federal immigration laws.”
But Perry wrote that she found no substantial evidence that a “danger of rebellion” is brewing in Illinois and no reason to believe the protests there had gotten in the way of Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Perry had initially blocked the deployment for two weeks. But in October, she extended the order indefinitely while the Supreme Court reviewed the case.
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in the west Chicago suburb of Broadview has been the site of tense protests, where federal agents have previously used tear gas and other chemical agents on protesters and journalists.
Last week, authorities arrested 21 protesters and said four officers were injured outside the Broadview facility. Local authorities made the arrests.
The Illinois case is just one of several legal battles over National Guard deployments.
District of Columbia Attorney General Brian Schwalb is suing to halt the deployments of more than 2,000 guardsmen in the nation’s capital. Forty-five states have entered filings in federal court in that case, with 23 supporting the administration’s actions and 22 supporting the attorney general’s lawsuit.
More than 2,200 troops from several Republican-led states remain in Washington, although the crime emergency Trump declared in August ended a month later.
A federal judge in Oregon has permanently blocked the deployment of National Guard troops there, and all 200 troops from California were being sent home from Oregon, an official said.
A state court in Tennessee ruled in favor of Democratic officials who sued to stop the ongoing Guard deployment in Memphis, which Trump has called a replica of his crackdown on Washington, D.C.
In California, a judge in September said deployment in the Los Angeles area was illegal. By that point, just 300 of the thousands of troops sent there remained, and the judge did not order them to leave.
The Trump administration has appealed the California and Oregon rulings to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
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