Federal judge blocks deployment for two weeks, says sending Guard troops would ‘add fuel to the fire’.
A federal judge in Chicago has temporarily blocked United States President Donald Trump’s deployment of hundreds of National Guard soldiers in Illinois.
Chicago has become the latest flashpoint in the Trump administration’s crackdown to deport millions of immigrants, which has prompted allegations of rights abuses and myriad lawsuits.
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US District Judge April Perry on Thursday said that permitting Guard troops in the state would only “add fuel to the fire”. The decision on comes five days after another US judge blocked a similar deployment in Portland, Oregon.
The judge said her full, written order will be made available on Friday.
The lawsuit was filed Monday by Chicago, the third-largest city in the US, and the state of Illinois to stop the deployments of Illinois and Texas Guard members. Some troops were already at an immigration building in the Chicago suburb of Broadview when Perry heard arguments on Thursday.
In delivering her decision on Thursday from the bench, Perry said she was having difficulty lending credence to the government’s claims of violence during protests at the immigration facility in Broadview, Illinois.
She cited a ruling from another Chicago judge, also issued on Thursday, that temporarily limited the ability of federal agents to use force to disperse crowds. Protesters and journalists had filed a separate lawsuit seeking that order, saying federal officers had injured them at the Broadview center.
Perry said the behaviour of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers (ICE) has prompted the protests, and that deploying Guard soldiers to Broadview would “only add fuel to the fire that defendants themselves have started”.
Trump has called this week for the jailing of Democratic officials in Illinois resisting his mass deportation campaign, after armed troops from Texas arrived in the state to bolster the operation.
Separately, a three-judge panel at a federal appeals court in San Francisco on Thursday appeared likely to set aside the ruling blocking Trump’s Portland deployment, which would clear the way for hundreds of soldiers to enter that city.
Trump’s immigration crackdown is aimed at fulfilling a key election pledge to rid the country of what he called waves of foreign “criminals”.
The Trump administration has argued the troops are necessary to protect immigration agents and facilities in Chicago, falsely depicting it as a “war zone”.
The US president says he could invoke the rarely used Insurrection Act to force deployments of troops around the country if courts or local officials are “holding us up”.
The Insurrection Act is a federal law that gives the US president the power to deploy the military or federalise National Guard troops anywhere in the US to restore order during an insurrection.
The last time it was invoked was in 1992, in response to riots in Los Angeles by Republican President George HW Bush.
The riots broke out after four police officers were acquitted in the beating of Rodney King, a Black man. After six days of riots, 2,000 National Guard troops and 1,500 marines were deployed. The violence resulted in 63 deaths and widespread looting, assaults and arson.
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