(AFP) – President Donald Trump threatened Monday to use emergency powers against rebellion to deploy more troops into Democratic-led US cities, intensifying his rhetoric as his attempts to mobilize the military face legal challenges. The Republican leader openly mulled use of the Insurrection Act after a federal judge in Oregon temporarily halted a National Guard deployment in Portland, while another judge in Illinois allowed a similar move to proceed for now in Chicago. Both cities have seen surges of federal agents as part of Trump’s mass deportation drive, prompting protests outside immigration processing facilities.
“We have an Insurrection Act for a reason. If I had to enact it I would do that,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “If people were being killed and courts were holding us up or governors or mayors were holding us up, sure I would do that.” Illinois officials had filed suit seeking to block the deployment in Chicago, but Judge April Perry, an appointee of Trump’s Democratic predecessor Joe Biden, declined to issue an immediate temporary restraining order. She scheduled a full hearing on the matter for Thursday and asked the government to inform the court to provide more information.
The debate mushroomed after it became known that Republican-led Texas was planning to send 200 of its federalized National Guard troops to Illinois, a move that infuriated Democratic Governor JB Pritzker. “They should stay the hell out of Illinois,” said Pritzker. He also accused federal immigration agents conducting raids in Chicago of “thuggery,” using “excessive force,” and illegally detaining US citizens.
– ‘Fear and confusion’ – Trump’s comments about the centuries-old Insurrection Act came just minutes after Pritzker warned that Trump was creating a pre-meditated “escalation of violence” as a pretext to invoke the emergency powers. “The Trump administration is following a playbook: cause chaos, create fear and confusion, make it seem like peaceful protesters are a mob by firing gas pellets and tear gas canisters at them,” Pritzker told a press conference. “Why? To create the pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act so that he can send the military to our city.”
Trump over the weekend authorized deployment of 700 National Guard members to Chicago despite the opposition of elected Democratic leaders including Pritzker and the city’s mayor. In their lawsuit, the state Attorney General Kwame Raoul and counsel for Chicago accused Trump of using US troops “to punish his political enemies.” “The American people, regardless of where they reside, should not live under the threat of occupation by the United States military, particularly not simply because their city or state leadership has fallen out of a president’s favor,” they said.
In the press conference with Pritzker, Raoul described such planned deployments to Illinois as “unlawful and unconstitutional, no matter where these forces come from.” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has defended the plan to send troops to Chicago, claiming that the third-largest US city is “a war zone.” Trump has similarly called Portland “war-ravaged,” but District Judge Karin Immergut issued a temporary block on the Oregon troop deployment, saying “the president’s determination was simply untethered to the facts.” “This is a nation of Constitutional law, not martial law,” wrote Immergut, a Trump appointee. The Trump administration is appealing the ruling, the White House said.
A CBS poll released Sunday found that 58 percent of Americans oppose deploying the National Guard to US cities. Illinois and Oregon are not the first states to file legal challenges against the Trump administration’s deployment of the National Guard. California filed suit after Trump sent troops to Los Angeles earlier this year to quell protests sparked by a crackdown on undocumented migrants, with the case still working its way through courts.
– Octavio Jones with Chris Lefkow in Washington
© 2024 AFP
