In Illinois, California, and Oregon, residents and attorneys general are pushing back against the deployment of federal troops in their cities. So far, it’s working.
Crowds gather at Ida B. Wells Drive and Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago, Illinois, on October 8, 2025, for an emergency rally, waving flags and holding signs to oppose ICE and National Guard presence in Chicago.
(Jacek Boczarski / Anadolu via Getty Images)
Last weekend, ICE agents and state troopers at the Broadview processing facility in the Chicago area previewed Trump’s vision of a United States in which metropolitan areas are under military occupation.
For 24 hours a day, seven days a week, protesters have been on the streets outside the federal building—ICE snipers on the roofs and towers watching over them. Over the last week, those protesters have faced repeated tear-gas, pepper-spray, and rubber-bullet assaults. An ICE agent pepper-sprayed a pastor, David Black, directly in his face; a group of agents seized a rabbi, Michael Ben Yosef, and brutally beat him. According to Adam Dzurko, a 23-year-old protester, ICE “dogpiled on [Yosef] like a football, punched him, threw him around like a rag doll, just tossing him around.” Yosef ended up in the emergency room. So, too, witnesses say, did an octogenarian woman who was simply holding up a protest sign. For that sin, agents pushed her to the ground, and she hit her head on the asphalt, cutting her head and arm. Fellow protesters scooped her up and rushed her to the hospital.
“To target helpless people is so disheartening to me,” Dzurko told me. “It breaks my soul.”
Dzurko suffers from several medical ailments and has a service dog named Bea who has joined him on the protests. He has kitted Bea out with facial protections against tear gas; on at least one occasion, however, agents have forced both Dzurko and Bea out of their car, stripped them of their anti-gas gear, and, Dzurko alleges, forced them to walk unprotected through the toxic haze as punishment for protesting. He said that agents try to goad the protesters to violence everyday, driving their cars through the crowd and shouting out that they are going to hurt the demonstrators. “It’s a whole cat-and-mouse game,” he said. “They chase ’em, tackle ’em very forcefully. Then they do the gas. We’ve just been exercising our First Amendment rights. Nobody’s doing anything else. It’s just like sad. There’s a lot of old people, then there’s kids. They don’t care who’s in the crowd.”
Trump and Hegseth ordered federalized Illinois National Guardsmen into Chicago earlier this week, brought in a handful of California’s federalized Guardsmen as well, and then accepted 400 additional Texas National Guardsmen volunteered up by Gauleiter Greg Abbott. Trump has declared the city to be a war zone beset by crime, gangs, and undocumented immigrants, and on Wednesday, he posted on social media that Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Johnson ought to be arrested and thrown into jail for not cooperating with ICE.
When Judge April Perry, who is presiding over the lawsuit that Governor Pritzker’s administration has filed against the deployment, urged the government to hold off a few days from deploying troops in Chicago until she could study the merits of the case, federal lawyers refused to agree to the postponement.
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In the Pacific Northwest, the courts have given the feds less leeway. While a panel of judges from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals did allow Trump to federalize some members of Oregon’s National Guard, it didn’t overrule the lower court’s temporary block on Trump’s using that federalized Oregon National Guard, or other federalized troops, in Portland. In a scathing opinion, Judge Karin Immergut (a Trump appointee) ruled that conditions on the ground simply didn’t merit such a deployment.
Meanwhile, California’s Justice Department has taken note of the Trump administration’s efforts to relocate hundreds of federalized California Guardsmen to Oregon. Attorneys for the state headed back to court Tuesday to argue that if these troops aren’t needed in Los Angeles and can thus be sent north to Oregon, then the rationale for federalizing them in the first place—that they were urgently required as boots on the ground to quell violent disturbances and attacks on federal agents and properties in Los Angeles—has been undermined. With the feds’ actions this week, as California Attorney General Rob Bonta explained to me, “they’re acknowledging there is no irreparable harm in not having the troops—because they sent them out on their own orders. We think we have a very strong argument. It’s a bombshell development.”
Bonta added, “The president is untethered from the facts on this, and he’s untethered from the law. He doesn’t know what the Constitution is. His is contemptuous of the law; it’s getting in the way of implementing his agenda.”
Bonta said he believes that his state can keep racking up legal wins that hem in the worst impulses of the Trump administration, and to date, he said, the administration is abiding by the court rulings—albeit reluctantly.
In recent days, Trump has raised the possibility of invoking the Insurrection Act to facilitate his movement of troops into Democratic-led cities. For Bonta, this is another red-line moment, and he said that California’s Justice Department would immediately push back. “Insurrection has a definition,” Bonta told me. “There has to be a violent insurrection to overthrow the government. We’re not just waiting; we’re ready to take him to court. He should get slapped down in seconds.”
Back in Chicago, residents aren’t just cooling their heels as they await court rulings to restore democratic norms. As occurred in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, Chicagoans are organizing into self-defense committees and neighborhoods associations that are trying to beat back ICE and against military occupation. There are daily demonstrations at ICE’s Broadview facility and growing protests in the downtown area. The public school system in Chicago has set up a command center to monitor ICE activity in the district. And a growing number of political leaders in the city and state have explicitly called out the troop deployments as fascist.
Next Saturday, October 18, will be round two of the No Kings protests. May millions turn out, in cities large and small, to defend American democracy from those who would use the military to usher in its death.
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