Ahead of the White House’s planned federalization of the Illinois National Guard, Governor JB Pritzker says his hometown is being turned into a “war zone” by Immigration and Customs Enforcement — not by protesters. If the president does federalize the national guard in Illinois, he could run into legal challenges as he has in other states.

Speaking to CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday morning, Mr. Pritzker said the Trump administration is clueless about using law enforcement in Chicago. He pointed to the recent raid on an apartment complex that saw more than 100 people removed from their homes in the middle of the night — some of them U.S. citizens — as an example of why Mr. Trump needs to de-escalate. 

“They are the ones that are making it a war zone. They need to get out of Chicago if they’re not going to focus on the worst of the worst,” Mr. Pritzker said. He pointed to a ruling out of Portland, Oregon on Saturday which blocked the president from his plan to deploy state national guard troops to that city’s streets. 

“This judge is a Trump-appointed judge,” Mr. Pritzker said of Judge Karin Immergut, who was nominated to the bench by Mr. Trump during his first term. “What the government is doing — what Trump is doing — is untethered from the facts.”

“They’re just making this up, and then what do they do? They fire tear gas and smoke grenades and they make it look like it’s a war zone,” he added. “People on the ground are, frankly, incited to want to do something about it.

“If you were on the ground and were having tear gas pellets fired at you — as they have been doing in Broadview, Illinois — you want to react. You want something to happen,” Mr. Pritzker said. “They’re using every lever at their disposal to keep us from maintaining order.”

Mr. Trump and his top aides have raged against the ruling from Judge Immergut. On Sunday morning, Mr. Trump did not rule out defying that order, telling reporters that he hadn’t “seen” her ruling yet, though he said she should be “ashamed” of herself.

The governor of California, Gavin Newsom, said Sunday he is suing the Trump administration to block its efforts to deploy troops from that state’s National Guard to Portland, Oregon. The “deployment of the California National Guard to Oregon isn’t about crime,” Mr. Newsom said. “It’s about power. He is using our military as political pawns to build up his own ego. It’s appalling. It’s un-American. And it must stop.”

Judge Immergut ruled Saturday that the president will not immediately be permitted to deploy the 200 soldiers training for police actions at Portland because there is no overwhelming disorder in the city. She wrote that recent anti-ICE protests are “nowhere near the type of incidents that cannot be handled by regular law enforcement force.”

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller made clear on Saturday that he does not see the order as legitimate. Only the president, he said, can dictate the actions of the American military — even if it is a state’s national guard. He called the ruling “legal insurrection.”

“The President is the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces, not an Oregon judge,” he wrote on X on Saturday. He described protests against ICE as “an organized terrorist attack on the federal government and its officers.”

In a separate post on Saturday, Mr. Miller said that the Democratic Party has “filled our legal and judicial system with radicals who protect leftwing terrorists.” 

“This is a very real and dire crisis for our Republican form of government,” he wrote. 

That same day, Mr. Pritzker said in a post on X that the Pentagon had told him to either call up his national guard to patrol the streets of Chicago, or they would do it for him. 

“It is absolutely outrageous and un-American to demand a Governor send military troops within our own borders and against our will,” he said Saturday. “For Donald Trump, this has never been about safety. This is about control.”