Just after a federal judge in Oregon blocked the Trump administration’s troop deployment to that state, Illinois officials are seeking relief in their state from what they called the administration’s “patently unlawful” deployment.
“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,” lawyers for Illinois and the city of Chicago wrote in their federal complaint filed Monday. They’re asking a federal judge in Illinois to immediately block the federal deployment, which they called “illegal, dangerous, and unconstitutional.”
Over the weekend in Oregon, U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut, a Trump appointee, issued a temporary restraining order blocking the deployment of federalized members of the National Guard to that state. Immergut wrote that Trump’s statements regarding the Oregon deployment showed that his action wasn’t “conceived in good faith” or “in the face of the emergency and directly related to the quelling of the disorder or the prevention of its continuance,” as required by precedent.
Immergut was assigned to the case after the administration sought the recusal of Obama-appointed Judge Michael Simon; though the judge disagreed that his recusal was legally required, he agreed to step aside so that “the focus of this lawsuit remain on the critically important constitutional and statutory issues presented by the parties.”
In the new Illinois lawsuit, officials there wrote that, to the extent that the administration has offered any basis for deployment, “it is based on a flimsy pretext: protests outside a two-story ICE processing facility in Broadview, a suburb of Chicago with less than 8,000 residents.” The state and city officials wrote that “far from promoting public safety in the Chicago region, [the federal] Defendants’ provocative and arbitrary actions have threatened to undermine public safety by inciting a public outcry.”
That a federal judge in Oregon blocked deployment to that state bodes well for Illinois’ lawsuit but doesn’t guarantee the same result, which depends on how the judge there applies the facts surrounding that deployment to the law as they understand it. In both cases, the appellate courts and eventually the Supreme Court can have the last word on the limits of Trump’s authority. The administration will have a chance to respond before an Illinois judge rules, which could happen as soon as Monday. According to the public court docket, the case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge April Perry, a Biden appointee. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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