Trump Threatens to Use Emergency Powers to Bypass Courts and Deploy Troops

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/10/06/us/national-guard-trump-oregon-chicago

Trump Threatens to Use Emergency Powers to Bypass Courts and Deploy Troops

The president said he was considering invoking the Insurrection Act to send National Guard units to Chicago and Portland, Ore., over local objections. Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois called the mobilization “an unconstitutional invasion.”

A federal judge on Monday declined to block the deployment of National Guard units to Illinois, a mobilization that the state’s governor, JB Pritzker, labeled an “unconstitutional invasion” by the federal government, as President Trump threatened to assume emergency powers to bypass court battles and send in the troops.

The outcome of the court hearing in Illinois, which allows the Trump-ordered deployment to move ahead for now, came as a military official said 200 troops from the Texas National Guard were set to fly to the Chicago area late Monday. The troops are expected to begin operating on the ground no sooner than Wednesday, the official said. A similar effort to deploy Texas troops in Portland, Ore., has been blocked by a judge for now.

As the legal battles intensified, both sides engaged in an increasingly caustic war of words, with administration officials accusing protesters in Portland of engaging in insurrection, and officials in Chicago accusing federal forces of attacking demonstrators without provocation.

Mr. Trump said on Monday that he was considering invoking the Insurrection Act, which would allow him to deploy troops despite any court orders to the contrary. “We have an Insurrection Act for a reason,” he said, adding, “I’d do that if people were being killed and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up.”

Governor Pritzker said that Illinois officials would use every lever at their disposal to fight the administration. “Their plan all along has been to cause chaos, and then they can use that chaos to consolidate Donald Trump’s power,” he warned in an afternoon news conference.