JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
The clock is ticking for Chicago and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker. President Trump has deployed the National Guard to the country's third largest city, and he says they will begin operations no later than Wednesday. Pritzker, a Democrat, has called President Trump's efforts a, quote, "invasion." And along with Chicago's Mayor Brandon Johnson, he is fighting the administration's efforts in the courts. Governor JB Pritzker joins me now. Welcome back to the program.
JB PRITZKER: Thank you very much, Juana.
SUMMERS: Thanks for being here. Governor, we're speaking on Tuesday morning, and the Trump administration has said that troops will be on the ground no later than tomorrow. You have filed suit against this move, but the judge declined to block the deployment. There will not be a hearing until Thursday morning. So I just want to start by asking you, how are you preparing for the fact that the National Guard could well be on the streets of Chicago as this lawsuit is playing out?
PRITZKER: Well, let me be clear. The judge is actually deciding this on Thursday and hasn't declined anything. She's literally reading the filings and demanded that the federal government submit something by Wednesday so that she could make a ruling potentially on Thursday. We don't know how she will rule, but certainly, based on the precedent of what occurred down in Oregon, we believe that we'll get the rule that we want.
Remember that we are seeing National Guard troops coming from Texas now. We have our own National Guard that have been federalized, and the Texas National Guard were already federalized, so that's why they were able to move quickly. And they've already started arriving, not in Chicago, but in Joliet, at a federal facility there. The federal judge, though, warned the federal lawyers that it wouldn't be a good idea for them to deploy them until there is a ruling.
SUMMERS: Your state's attorney general has argued that the deployment of the military to Illinois is unlawful, unconstitutional, no matter where these forces come from, but the Trump administration, for its part, says that it is deploying troops to assist federal agents with immigration enforcement. So have officers been able to carry out ICE enforcement duties without support of local law enforcement?
PRITZKER: They have. And they are carrying out those duties. I will say that they are doing them - they're carrying it out in an extremely aggressive fashion that borders on breaking the law - federal law and state law. But ICE agents and Customs and Border Patrol are on the ground, and they have been effectuating their plan. The thing is, they're using literally people's skin color as a way to determine whether they're going to stop people and ask them for their papers. Now, think about that. I don't walk around with papers to prove that I'm a U.S. citizen. I bet you don't either. Most people don't. But they're demanding that, if you happen to have, you know, something other than white skin, you better have something to prove it or you're going to get detained or arrested.
SUMMERS: Governor, President Trump said on Monday that at the moment, he hasn't planned to but that if governors like yourself and the courts do not cooperate with his administration's efforts, that he would consider invoking the Insurrection Act, which would give him broad latitude to use the guard or active-duty troops for law enforcement in Chicago not limited to protecting federal agents. How serious of a threat is that?
PRITZKER: Well, remember, the Insurrection Act has the name insurrection in it for a reason. It's only something that you can effectuate if there is an insurrection, a foreign invasion, a true national emergency. That doesn't exist here, and it doesn't exist in Portland. It didn't exist in Washington, D.C., or in Los Angeles. So I realize that President Trump, who does no reading and doesn't understand anything, you know, uses the words Insurrection Act like he understands it but he doesn't.
SUMMERS: The president might disagree with your characterization there. He has argued that it is emergency. He has described...
PRITZKER: Yeah, but...
SUMMERS: ...That there - it looks like war in some of these cities.
PRITZKER: Yeah, but he's the one that's causing that situation. That is to say, it's ICE and CBP that have been launching grenades with tear gas, that have been pelting people with, you know, plastic or rubber bullets. They're the ones that are creating mayhem on the ground, specifically because they want to claim that there's some sort of emergency. There isn't. This is occurring in a two-block area of a suburb of Chicago, Broadview.
So, you know, yes, they can take their own video of an incident that occurs, you know, in that two-block area and make it seem like that's all of Chicago. That's not even in the city of Chicago. In fact, our crime rate has been dropping and dropping - you know, half the homicide rate that it was a few years ago, double-digit declines each year now. Donald Trump just - he honestly doesn't read. He doesn't understand what's going on in the cities. He just has some notion in his head. There's some sort of dementia going on, and he just keeps repeating things from years gone by.
SUMMERS: Governor, as I listen to you talk about the Insurrection Act or the restraining order that your state has filed, it sounds to me like you're in many ways relying on how things have been in the past. And if there's one thing we've seen, it's that the courts have appeared quite willing to increase the power of the president. Are you concerned about where all of this could be going?
PRITZKER: Sure. And I think we have to rely on the courts and get rulings that are - you know, uphold the Constitution and the law. Unfortunately, we have a system in which the supremacy clause says that the federal government's laws essentially override state laws if they're in direct contravention and also there's immunity for federal agents from the federal government for much of their activity. So we don't do that on the ground. We don't hold everybody immune. Sometimes we do in certain things. But what we can't do is just sit idly by while these things are occurring.
And that's why we've called on people to take action, like creating evidence for our court cases by pulling out their iPhones and their Android phones and filming everything. We wouldn't even know about the alderman who was detained by ICE for simply standing and asking them questions. She was truly docile in the entire matter. It's on film. We wouldn't know about that if someone hadn't pulled out their phone to take video of it. And we need to find ways to hold them responsible - private organizations, private legal organizations, like the ACLU, are doing that now, and to the extent that states and local governments can do so, we are.
SUMMERS: Governor JB Pritzker, Democrat of Illinois, thank you so much for speaking with us.
PRITZKER: Thanks, Juana. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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