(The Center Square) – President Donald Trump will federalize 300 Illinois National Guard troops, Gov. J.B. Pritzker said in a state Saturday.
“This morning, the Trump Administration’s Department of War gave me an ultimatum: call up your troops, or we will,” Pritzker said. “It is absolutely outrageous and un-American to demand a Governor send military troops within our own borders and against our will.”
Trump for weeks has said he was considering deploying members of the Illinois National Guard to Chicago to fight rampant crime there.
Last month, after a particularly violent weekend in the Windy City when 11 people were murdered, 28 were shot and a hundred were shot at the previous weekend, Trump criticized Pritzker for not taking the crime problem in the city seriously.
“That’s what I call dangerous, and Pritzker’s going out and saying, ‘We’ve got crime under control,’” Trump said, noting that additional FBI agents in the city helped but wasn’t enough.
“What you really need is our big, strong soldiers to get them into shape. We’re not letting Chicago fail,” Trump said.
But Pritzker maintains Chicago doesn’t need federal help.
“In the coming hours, the Trump Administration intends to federalize 300 members of the Illinois National Guard,” the governor said in the statement. “They will pull hardworking Americans out of their regular jobs and away from their families all to participate in a manufactured performance – not a serious effort to protect public safety. For Donald Trump, this has never been about safety. This is about control.”