Chicago’s new lawsuit against imminent National Guard deployment paints a city besieged by disproportionate federal force, its inhabitants angered by the killing of an undocumented resident, pain inflicted gleefully and needlessly by federal law enforcement and the looming specter of further occupation.
Following Los Angeles, Washington D.C. and Portland, the city and state challenged President Trump’s deployment of the Guard to quell what the administration describes as fantastically war-like unrest. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the mobilization of Guard from Illinois and Texas to Chicago and Portland on Sunday. The move prompted an emergency hearing in the Portland case, where a federal judge grilled the Justice Department lawyers for “circumventing” her order blocking the deployment of Oregon Guard.
Chicago’s lawsuit, filed Monday, tells of escalating state violence meant to provoke a response, the better to justify sending in the military.
“Among other things, Trump and Noem have sent a surge of SWAT-tactic trained federal agents to Illinois to use unprecedented, brute force tactics for civil immigration enforcement; federal agents have repeatedly shot chemical munitions at groups that included media and legal observers outside the Broadview facility; and dozens of masked, armed federal agents have paraded through downtown Chicago in a show of force and control,” it said. “The community’s horror at these tactics and their significant consequences have resulted in entirely foreseeable protests.”
It details Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, on a visit to the sole ICE facility near Chicago, choosing to enter and exit through paths congested with protesters, the better to spark a confrontation with law enforcement. It includes photos of heavily armed officers boating down the Chicago River, supposedly securing upscale sections of the city’s downtown. It tells of the killing of longtime resident and father Silverio Villegas González by DHS officers, who initially claimed that they’d acted in self defense (an account quickly disproven).
Similarly to Portland, modest protests at the ICE processing center outside of Chicago have been used as the primary pretext for the military crackdown.
“According to the sworn statement of the Broadview police chief who witnessed this conduct daily, the ‘use of chemical agents by federal agents at the ICE facility in Broadview has often been arbitrary and indiscriminate. At times it is used when the crowd is as small as ten people,’” the lawsuit said, adding from the police chief’s account: “Over the course of my career in law enforcement, the way in which federal agents have indiscriminately used chemical agents in Broadview is unlike anything I have seen before.”
The judge on the case has reportedly scheduled a hearing for Thursday.
Attacking the Judges
Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller unleashed a tirade at Judge Karin Immergut, a Trump appointee, early Monday morning, calling her second order, blocking the deployment of other states’ National Guard to Portland, “one of the most egregious and thunderous violations of constitutional order we have ever seen” and “the latest example of unceasing efforts to nullify the 2024 election by fiat.”
Trump had weighed in against Immergut earlier in the day,