By Heather Schlitz and Emily Schmall
CHICAGO (Reuters) -With growing scenes of conflict involving federal immigration agents in Chicago and its suburbs, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker said on Monday that the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump had asked the Pentagon to send 100 troops to the state.
The Illinois National Guard had received word of a memo from the Department of Homeland Security stating the request on Monday, said Pritzker, a Democrat. It was not clear what kind of troops the memo was referring to. The Department of Defense did not reply to a request for comment.
The Trump administration’s stepped up immigration enforcement in Chicago this month, Pritzker said, was a “pretext to deploy military troops against” the Chicago area.
Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson have struck a defiant tone since Trump began threatening to deploy the National Guard to Chicago in August.
“I’m going to continue to make sure that our immigrant and undocumented community knows that they are protected in this city,” Johnson told Reuters in an interview on Monday.
But the appearance of masked federal agents in downtown Chicago on Sunday – flouting Johnson’s recent executive order barring masks – and the hundreds of immigrants that the federal government says it has detained in its sweep, have underscored local leaders’ limitations against presidential authority.
Chicago has become a target of the Trump administration because of a city ordinance that prohibits city employees, including police, from assisting with federal immigration enforcement.
U.S. President Donald Trump, a Republican, aims to deport record numbers of immigrants in the U.S. illegally, actions he says are needed after high levels of illegal border crossings under his Democratic predecessor, Joe Biden.
To achieve such aims, agents are “ripping families apart,” Johnson said, comparing the deportation campaign to the treatment of enslaved Black people. “This president is dangerous,” Johnson said.
OPERATION MIDWAY BLITZ
In its first weeks, Trump’s “Operation Midway Blitz” has led to the odd spectacle of heavily armed U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents patrolling the Chicago River between private yachts and architecture boat tours, and marching past the luxury stores and high-end hotels of Michigan Avenue.
ICE agents have scuffled with protesters daily outside an immigration processing center in the suburb of Broadview, using pepper balls, tear gas and other chemical munitions to try to disperse the small crowds. On Monday, the Department of Justice said that Attorney General Pam Bondi had ordered agents to defend ICE facilities in Chicago and Portland, Oregon.
Daniel Biss, the Democratic mayor of Evanston, Illinois, and a congressional candidate, told Reuters that he received tear gas injuries in a demonstration at the Broadview facility, while a CBS TV reporter said her vehicle was sprayed with pepper balls.
Broadview Police said they expect “full cooperation” from the Department of Homeland Security in their criminal investigation into the attack on the CBS reporter’s vehicle.
The DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
And Pritzker on Monday repeated requests for more transparency from the federal government about an incident earlier this month in which an ICE officer fatally shot Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez minutes after he had dropped off his children at a nearby elementary school and daycare in the suburb of Franklin Park.
The DHS said that the officer, who has not been identified, feared for his life when he fired his weapon. But in police bodycam footage reviewed by Reuters, the officer described the injuries he sustained when Villegas-Gonzalez tried to flee in his car as “nothing major.”
AGENTS PATROL WITH RIFLES
On Sunday, as beautiful weather sent droves of residents out to Chicago’s beaches and parks, Border Patrol agents in military-style fatigues walked around downtown, carrying rifles. The discordant scene quickly became a meme on social media when a man on a bicycle who shouted that he was not a U.S. citizen was pursued by agents, ultimately evading their capture.
Gregory Bovino, a border patrol commander who came to Chicago from Los Angeles, where he had presided over a sweep of the city’s MacArthur Park, told a public radio reporter on Sunday that his agents were taking people into custody who looked different than the reporter, a tall, white man.
ICE has been making a push to increase arrests before the end of the fiscal year on September 30 to show the impact of Trump’s enforcement efforts, according to an internal email reviewed by Reuters and two current ICE officials who requested anonymity to discuss operations.
Increasing numbers of ICE investigative agents have been sent in recent weeks to major cities to supplement ongoing arrest pushes in Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington, the officials said, as well as in Houston, Nashville, Seattle and El Paso, Texas.
(Reporting by Heather Schlitz and Emily Schmall in Chicago; additional reporting by Ted Hesson and Marisa Taylor in Washington; Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)
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