Illinois asks Supreme Court not to give Trump authority over National Guard

By Brett Rowland
The Center Square

The state of Illinois asked the U.S. Supreme Court not to hear President Donald Trump’s request to deploy the National Guard to Chicago amid a disagreement about plans for immigration enforcement in the state’s most populous city.

Top attorneys for Illinois and Chicago said Trump has overstepped his authority. They were joined by officials from Los Angeles, California, and elsewhere in the legal fight over who controls the troops.

“The Court should decline applicants’ request to unsettle the equitable judgment reflected in the Seventh Circuit’s order and to take the dramatic step of permitting deployment of National Guard troops over Illinois’s objection for the handful of days the [temporary restraining order] currently remains in effect,” Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul’s legal team wrote in a legal filing.

The state and others have challenged Trump’s authority to deploy the National Guard to cities over objection of local leaders. Illinois officials said federal authorities aren’t needed.

“Applicants’ contrary arguments rest on mischaracterizations of the factual record or the lower courts’ views of the legal principles,” the state said in its response. “As the district court found, state and local law enforcement officers have handled isolated protest activities in Illinois, and there is no credible evidence to the contrary.”

America First Policy Institute, a nonprofit group, said Trump should control the orders.

“Plaintiffs have asserted nine claims, each of which is a variation on the same underlying request for the federal courts to second-guess the President’s determination that the conditions for federalizing the National Guard have been satisfied here,” attorneys for the group wrote. “There is no express private cause of action to bring these claims, and for nearly 200 years this Court has recognized that the President’s determination is nonjusticiable.”

Filings in the Illinois case came the same day that a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit overturned a temporary restraining order issued by a federal judge in Portland, Ore., removing a judicial obstruction that prevented Trump from sending Oregon National Guard troops to Portland.

The ruling comes in the wake of Trump deploying National Guard troops to U.S. cities including Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Portland, Memphis and Chicago to protect the work of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Agents have been attacked, hampered by agitators and protested against in U.S. cities.

The legal battle is expected to continue on multiple fronts.

While hundreds of National Guard troops are already in Illinois, U.S. District Judge April Perry stopped their deployment. She said she found federal officials’ assertions about coordinated violence by protestors “unreliable.”