Trump Calls for Arrest of Chicago Mayor and Illinois Gov. Pritzker
As Illinois resists the federal immigration blitz, the Trump administration ups the ante on authoritarian rhetoric.
Republican President Donald Trump posted on social media today that Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, both Democrats, should be arrested for refusing to assist federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.
"Chicago Mayor should be in jail for failing to protect Ice Officers! Governor Pritzker also!" Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Firing back on X, Pritzker wrote: "I will not back down. Trump is now calling for the arrest of elected representatives checking his power. What else is left on the path to full-blown authoritarianism?"
Illinois sued the Trump administration on Monday to block the deployment of federalized National Guard troops to Chicago, and Johnson is refusing to allow ICE to operate on city-owned property. Since the beginning of the Trump administration's immigration enforcement blitz in Chicago, ICE and Customs and Border Protection officers have executed mass warrantless searches of apartments, and they have been filmed using excessive force against protesters, clergy, and reporters engaged in protected First Amendment activities.
It's not a great state of affairs when the president is calling for the arrest of his political opponents at the same time he's sending the military into the streets. (Imagine reading the first sentence of this article as if it were another country.) Of course, in 2025 it feels like just another Wednesday in America's long perambulation toward a militarized police state.
As Reason's Matt Welch observed in a June column, shortly after the Trump administration deployed National Guard soldiers and Marines to Los Angeles, it had been roughly five years to the day since The New York Times published an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) calling for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and send the military into cities to quell rioting during the summer of 2020. Trump didn't send in the troops then, and Republicans like Cotton and White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller were left with an unrequited itch to give the hippies a show of force they wouldn't forget.
Miller has been particularly enthusiastic about branding anyone who opposes the Trump administration—Democrats, lawyers, protesters, and judges—as terrorists and insurrectionists, which gives him a rhetorical fig leaf for whatever abuses of power he comes up with next. In a social media post last week, Miller accused a federal judge of "legal insurrection" for blocking Trump's deployment of Oregon National Guard Troops to Portland.
"The President is the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces, not an Oregon judge," Miller continued. "Portland and Oregon law enforcement, at the direction of local leaders, have refused to aid ICE officers facing relentless terrorist assault and threats to life….This is an organized terrorist attack on the federal government and its officers, and the deployment of troops is an absolute necessity to defend our personnel, our laws, our government, public order and the Republic itself."
In a strange CNN interview on Monday, Miller was asked if the Trump administration would abide by the judge's ruling. Miller noted that the president has "plenary authority" before abruptly going silent. (The Wex Legal Dictionary defines "plenary power" as "complete power over a particular area with no limitations.")
"We are almost, if not quite, living in a Tom Cotton universe," Welch warned in June. Unfortunately, we've only gotten closer to the Cotton-verse in the months since then.