Judge declines to stop Guard troops from deploying in Illinois, for now

An armored vehicle carrying members of a Immigration and Customs Enforcement Special Response Team pulls up by a crowd of protesters outside of a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing facility in Broadview, Ill., on Friday, Oct. 3, 2025. Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois said on Monday that the state would use every lever at its disposal to fight the Trump administration’s deployment of Texas National Guard troops to the Chicago area, which he labeled an “unconstitutional invasion of Illinois” by the federal government. (Jamie Kelter Davis/The New York Times)

By JULIE BOSMAN, SHAWN HUBLER, ANNA GRIFFIN and ERIC SCHMITT

A federal judge Monday declined to block the deployment of National Guard troops to Illinois, a mobilization that the state’s governor, JB Pritzker, labeled an “unconstitutional invasion” by the federal government.

The judge’s ruling, which allows the deployment to move ahead for now, came as a military official said 200 troops from the Texas Guard were headed to Illinois, and lawyers from the Trump administration said they were expected to be deployed by Tuesday or Wednesday. A similar effort to send Texas troops to Portland, Oregon, has been blocked for now.

Officials in Illinois and Oregon fought an intensifying legal battle Monday to block President Donald Trump’s expanding effort to send National Guard troops into U.S. cities, with both sides engaging in an increasingly caustic war of words, including accusation from the Trump administration that protesters were engaging in insurrection.

Illinois sued the president Monday morning to stop the deployment of troops, and Pritzker said that the state would use every lever at its disposal to fight the administration. “Their plan all along has been to cause chaos, and then they can use that chaos to consolidate Donald Trump’s power,” he warned in an afternoon news conference.

Here’s what else to know:

— Oregon appeal: The Trump administration asked an appeals court to let it send troops from California or Texas to Portland, Oregon, despite a federal judge’s order late Sunday blocking deployments from any state to the city. The judge was appointed by Trump.

— Chicago actions: Mayor Brandon Johnson said he would establish “ICE-free zones” to prevent federal agents from staging operations in Chicago without a warrant. And officials in Broadview, Illinois, issued an executive order restricting protests at a federal immigration facility to daytime hours to protect demonstrators from attacks by federal agents.

— “Like a war zone”: Trump on Monday described Chicago as a crime-ridden “war zone.” In a legal filing, his administration depicted Portland as a hotbed of violence and chaos, and described protests as attempts to overthrow the government. Conditions on the ground in both cities do not match those descriptions, though clashes have turned more intense, and sometimes violent, since Trump’s escalation.